Ireland, unlike its Anglophone peers, is largely untouched by the conservative backlash to progressive overreach.
O utsiders have trouble understanding Irish politics. Because Ireland is an Anglophone country with large diasporas located in the United Kingdom and the United States, it is assumed that politics should behave a little bit like the two nations who pump so much influence back into it through the mass media produced in London, New York, and Hollywood.
But it’s not like its Anglophone peers at all. And in the process, Ireland has largely missed “the vibe shift” that is happening in first-world politics, where progressive overreach that stretched to its limit during Covid is giving in to conservative backlash and revisionism.
In a tentative column, the Irish Times’ Hugh Linehan pointed out that Ireland is now something of an outlier on the trans issue. The United States and the United Kingdom had seen the pendulum swing back in debates about gender ideology. The New York Times had even seemingly given permission to respectable progressive opinion to reorient away from its former dogmatism. The Tavistock clinic in the U.K. closed, and the U.K. supreme court dismissed the idea that there was a definition of woman that could be disconnected from biological sex. Meanwhile, the people who had challenged gender ideology in Ireland remained effectively blacklisted as a result of having “views that challenge the prevailing orthodoxy on gender identity” that “are seen as beyond the pale.” Why wasn’t Irish journalism up to challenging this orthodoxy?
Linehan answers:
The truth may be simpler and more uncomfortable. Irish journalism, like Irish society, is small. The circles are tight. The cost of stepping on the wrong third rail — socially, professionally, reputationally — is high. Better, perhaps, to look away.
This is part of it. I happen to think conformism of Irish public life is subtly undermined by an unacknowledged culture of private conversation and debate that is wildly anarchic and iconoclastic. American taboos, when they hold, reach into private life. Irish taboos exist only in public. One bit of evidence that Irish writers are conscious of this anarchy of the mind around them is the very stridency and simple-mindedness of progressive catechetical lessons.
But to get a taste of how powerful the progressive mind is, consider the recent fate of one of its leaders, another Irish Times journalist, Kitty Holland.
A few years ago, Ireland was temporarily transfixed by the grisly murder of a young woman named Ashling Murphy. Her murder was actively being turned by the media into one of its object lessons, this time on Irish misogyny. A typical column about the murder and the public reaction would note the fact that schools in Ireland are still largely Catholic and would bring up the legacy of the Magdalene laundries. Ireland had so much left to learn.
And then it turned out the perpetrator was a Slovak Romani immigrant who had sponged off the Irish state ever since he first arrived as an adult. Murphy’s bereaved boyfriend, Ryan Casey, was allowed to make a victim statement in the course of the trial. Casey’s statement alluded to the truth that Irish media was loathe to report:
It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years — over 10 years — never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form [and] can commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence on such a beautiful, loving and talented person who in fact, worked for the State, educating the next generation and represented everything that is good about Irish society.
I feel like this country is no longer the country that Ashling and I grew up in and has officially lost its innocence when a crime of this magnitude can be perpetrated in broad daylight.
The Irish media largely avoided printing this section of his victim statement. In a BBC show broadcast out of Northern Ireland, Holland defended the decision not to publish the statement. She argued that the real social issue of the murder was not immigration but misogyny and that reporters should look at other cases of Irish men beating up Irish and immigrant women. She said Murphy’s statement was being applauded by “the far right” and that it amounted to “an incitement to hatred.” In other words, Holland said the statement was arguably a criminal act in itself. For saying this the BBC was, this week, forced to pay out a judgment for defamation.
What struck me about Holland’s intervention wasn’t the part that led to the judgment against the broadcaster that hosted her. What struck me most of all was that she also said Casey’s statement was “unhelpful.” Holland said it in a way that seemed natural and unselfconscious, which made it stand out all the more.
The bereaved boyfriend of a mutilated and murdered young woman had a duty to be “helpful” in his victim impact statement. Helpful to whom? To what? Well, it’s obvious on reflection if you understand the progressive meta-narrative. Casey isn’t simply the victim. In any drama in which he’s cast alongside an immigrant, he’s a native. Therefore, more important than his admittedly regrettable personal circumstances, he has a higher political calling to be welcoming and to appreciate the contributions of immigrants generally and at all times, even when he is witness in a murder trial against one. Otherwise, he might commit one of many sins against the eighth commandment — I mean, against humanity — he might commit the sin of spreading misinformation. Which, even if true, is harmful. Or unhelpful.
Modern Ireland’s story of its escape from Catholicism is filled with faked-up dates on which the power of the clergy started to run out. An overreach by Archbishop McQuaid here. Or later, the revelations about Bishop Casey’s secret family in the 1990s. His sex positivity had once been linked to his liberalism. (Nobody correlated his laxity with his later-revealed bad record on child abuse.) But at a certain point, the thing reaches a momentum, and every story becomes the same story of disaffection.
Most news reports on the BBC settlement have avoided mentioning Holland’s name if possible. Having played a major historical role in disseminating the story of Savita Halappanavar’s death by sepsis, reporting that contributed to the decriminalization of abortion in Ireland last decade, Holland is the person everyone is duty-bound to protect. Not protecting her would please the “far right,” and after all, we wouldn’t want anyone to be scandalized by the behavior of the clerical class. It wouldn’t be helpful. Ireland is different today for the same reason it has been different since the 19th century, because it is ruled by priests. Just no longer the ones who sing like Bing Crosby. This clerical class still believes unhesitatingly in its right to rule.