Such is the standard of opinion writing in the Irish Times, these days.

Let’s talk a little about immigration, and empathy. But first, a working definition of the word: Empathy is the notion that one is able, though not experiencing it oneself, to feel what somebody else feels. To put yourself in their shoes. To understand the world from their point of view, and comprehend their pain and their struggles.

Empathy is also what Mullally’s own column lacks, entirely. For one thing, she has no understanding whatever of tribalism, which is itself a very specific form of empathy.

When an elderly person dies, it is commonly expected that in their last will and testament, they will bequeath their property and riches – or whatever they have – to their children and grandchildren, or maybe to brothers and sisters. If an occasional bequest is made to charity or a good neighbour or a close friend, that is understood.

What is considered remarkable and unusual are those occasions when a dead person cuts their own family out entirely: Leaving it all to a dog’s home, for example. Doing so is commonly understood as shorthand for something broadly seen as tragedy – a family feud, or a falling out.

You look after your own is not a controversial principle in everyday life. People get it. When other people do not look after their own, we note it and disapprove of it. This is normal. Nobody approves of the parent who abandons or neglects their children but does lots of charity work on the side. That is disordered, and we all recognise it as such.

That we have concentric circles of responsibility - family first, then friends, neighbours, and other people - is commonly understood. That does not mean that one is cruel to the stranger. But it does mean that one looks after one’s own people first. That is as true of states as it is of any of us.

When Una Mullally says “it is hard to build empathy” in the context of immigration she is, on one level, correct. The problem is that she is not talking about empathy at all – we all of us have that already.

What she is talking about is a sort of fundamental re-ordering of human instinct. Something that she calls empathy but is actually more of a paraphilia: A bizarre and persistent fetishistic urge for something unnatural or unusual.

And that is, to be sure, hard to build.

It’s one of the reasons that annoyance at immigration is more freely expressed in working class areas. It is not because people nearer the bottom of the economic ladder have different instincts to the rest of us – it is because when you are poorer, empathy matters more. People become more reliant on social ties and family aid and the help of a good neighbour. When you can’t afford a full-time carer when old and sick, you need your family and your community. The sense of “us” is much more important in an estate than it is in a gated community where everyone has a housekeeper.

And it is therefore often much easier for people in working-class communities to recognise when empathy is being subverted: When the Government is no longer supporting the people who it should be.

Speaking of empathy, here is how Una finishes her column:

“I suppose it’s easier to meddle with processes that look “tough” than take responsibility for the fundamental meanness in our society.”

“The fundamental meanness in our society” is quite a claim, is it not? She is not talking about the meanness of Government, or of bureaucracy, but of society as a whole. She looks at public discordance over immigration, and concludes that the problem is that we are not nice enough.

So who, Una, lacks empathy here? If the Irish Times’ prized columnist talks about empathy on the one hand, but dismisses everyone she disagrees with as “mean” on the other, then who is it, truly, who lacks the ability to put herself in somebody else’s shoes?

Note well, by the way, how Una measures empathy:

“in October 2024, the European Commission sent a letter of formal notice to Ireland about transposing into Irish law a Council framework decision on combating racism and xenophobia in relation to criminal offences. What ultimately happened was that Ireland separated out hate crime from hate speech, which was an act of political cowardice. In May 2025, the European Commission escalated the case by issuing Ireland with a reasoned opinion, saying Ireland had two months to implement the framework decision on racism and xenophobia. The Irish Government wrote back, saying the laws on hate crimes “are effectively transposed”.

For Una, “empathy” appears to be when the Government does what the EU tells it, and ignores its own “mean” citizens. Her vision of a nicer society is one with more laws against being not nice, and more punishments for people who say bad things.

This is, for the avoidance of doubt, the politics of the toddler: Make the bad man go away.

It is also the dominant strain of politics in this republic. And then, they have the gall, these people, to accuse the rest of us of lacking empathy.

You could bear it, almost, if these people didn’t also consider themselves some kind of intellectual elite. God almighty.

JMG

This week, Sinn Fein attempted the latter: We’ve listened to the punters on immigration, declared Mary Lou, and….. well. There was no “and”, so we don’t know exactly what she meant, beyond the probability that a few SF councillors here and there will be permitted to say fruitier than normal things about foreigners on facebook.

More interesting news: The election in Germany last weekend, for better or worse, will have shocked European politics to the core. And so, this week we ask: Is there any chance of a similar outcome here in Ireland? Two parties are obvious candidates, namely Aontu and Independent Ireland. But do they have what it takes? We discuss that.

There’s some mandatory budget chat this week, but also time taken near the end to reflect on 9/11 - where we were; how it changed the world; and whether everything has gone to hell since then. Have we a point, or are we just engaged in middle-aged nostalgia about how everything was better in our day…..?

It’s a fun hour. We enjoyed making it - and we hope you enjoy listening.

See you Monday.

She is a migrant child, who had arrived in Ceuta in the last days of July. She was one of tens of thousands of people who crossed the border over the course of two days, and one of over a thousand children now living there, while someone tries to figure out where to put them.

Ceuta’s chief prosecutor, Silvia Rojas, has said the enclave has recorded twenty-three sexual assaults since the influx, nine of them against children. As the BBC notes, by September 1st, that is close to a rate of one a day. The victims are both migrants and local Cueta women.

The scale of this crisis for Cueta and its residents is extreme. More than seventy thousand Africans illegally crossed into Ceuta on 30 and 31 July, which effectively doubled the population. At least a hundred died in the attempt. Around five thousand illegal migrants remain. Locals are afraid to walk the streets day or night.

Had the report not been released by the BBC, or had the claim of child rape been false, you can just imagine that all the right-thinking smug folk who live to lecture us would have discounted this rape spree as fake news and subjected us to lessons on the dangers of believing fake news. But this was the BBC. And so, I have waited patiently to see what they would say, these people in the NGOs and the media and lefty politics. Can you guess?

Yes you can. To paraphrase myself, they’ve said nuttin.

But why haven’t the arch feminists in the Dail been hopping mad, you ask? Where are the press releases from the National Women’s Council? Where are the marches of enraged blue haired students and the catchy hashtags on social media? Are we not to #believewomen in Cueta?

Let’s talk about something I call the grievance ladder: In order for politicians and NGOs and their allied media to report and comment on certain crimes, the victim and perpetrator have to be assessed by their position on this ladder. The victim has to be correctly a victim, and the perpetrator must be from a villainous class. Were White Middle Class men raping child migrants, we know what would be said, and by whom. We would, rightly, hear of little else.

This is because we all occupy our little spot on the victim/oppressor grievance ladder before we do, or have anything done to us at all. Roughly speaking, migrants are at the bottom, travellers above them, women above them, and white men at the very top.

Thus if a traveller attacks a migrant, it is more notable and newsy than the reverse. If a white woman is rude to a traveller, that is a crime worth chatting about, but a middle class woman raped by a migrant is simply a misfortune. Could happen to anyone.

Think of it like a secular Original Sin. That means, that regardless of the actual facts of the case, the individuals must be assigned to rungs on the Grievance Ladder before you even start talking about the unfortunate ‘incident’. Are they white or ‘of colour’? Gay, straight? Cis or non binary? Migrant or indigenous?

It must all seem quite mad to someone who is unaware that the Grievance Ladder exists. And of course it is mad, but it is a very serious and real thing to some of our politicians, NGOs and their media pals. So, ultimately, it doesn’t matter if some women are being raped by illegal migrants, or indeed murdered by them- 8 out of 9 women murdered in Ireland this year were killed by men not born in Ireland.

But I digress: the women of Cueta are sadly on lower rungs of the Grievance Ladder, so their rapists can’t be condemned. See? Its really very simple and oh, so just. Socially Just.

If this sounds like a conspiracy theory, you will note that in the UK, this is now an official finding. Baroness Casey’s national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation (The Rape Gang Report) concluded that the Pakistani muslim ethnicity of the perpetrators had been, in her words, shied away from — by police forces, by local authorities, by people whose job it was to protect the children in question. That reluctance was not a rumour circulated online. It was documented, in a government-commissioned audit, after decades of girls being disbelieved because the girls were white, or on the wrong rung, you see.

And so, ten year old migrant girls raped in Ceuta - by other migrants - get about as much attention as the girls in Rotherham did. They had the wrong kind of attackers for them to get anything else.

SR

Not, however, if you are Fintan O’Toole. Fintan can get away with three or four stinkers a year.

Here he is, this week, with an all-timer. In it, he lays blame for 9/11, essentially, at the feet of Donald Trump. Or at least, Trumpism:

“Before we face into the 25th anniversary of the al-Qaeda atrocities of September 11th, 2001, it is worth asking where they came from. And answering: from the manosphere. The deep roots of this barbaric assault on Americans lie in the same hatred of women that is now embedded in American reactionary politics….

…The terrible irony of the anniversary of the 9/11 crimes is that it will be marked under a US president who fought the most openly misogynistic presidential campaign in the country’s history. Standing beside him will be an avowed Christian jihadist, Pete Hegseth. Both appeal to men who share the most fundamental impulse of the jihadis: the desire to create a society in which women are under male control.”

There’s a lot more in his column – I don’t want to disrespect the blessed Irish Times paywall – but those two paragraphs are essentially the thrust of it: “Jihadi types hated women and want to control them, so in my (Fintan’s) view does Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Tommy Robinson, and that’s all you need to know, Jack.”

The problem with this stuff is not that it’s cheap. We can all do cheap – it would be relatively easy for me to write a column, for example, drawing some obscure but real ideological line from Stalin and Mao to Ivana Bacik and the Irish Labour Party. See? They’re commies.

No; the problem is that Fintan believes it. Deeply and sincerely.

Fintan is, as I understand it – he can correct me – some class of an atheist or an agnostic. Nothing wrong with that. But he has a particular view of religion shared by a particular kind of Irish atheist or agnostic: In essence, that all the religions, the Abrahamic ones at least, are the same or at the very least share the same original sin and pathology, which is that they don’t much care for sex.

His instinct is that all of them share the same anti-freedom, anti-woman, anti-sex instincts, and that all are equally oppressive. This means that Fintan, and a great many Irish people who share his views, genuinely see very little difference between a Salafist Imam telling the men to burn the infidel and beat their women in Cairo, and some televangelist selling purity rings for 12-year-old girls on a local TV station in Oklahoma.

This in turn explains Ireland’s deep rooted, though often denied, anti-Americanism: America is, for all its charming weirdness, the most christianised major western nation left standing in the world. It is also, inconveniently, powerful. And it is the last truly powerful nation in which it might be accurately said that the christian voting bloc often determines elections. Strip away everything else from Fintan’s column, and that is what you are left with: The religious types and their dislike of sex.

Don’t take it from me: Here’s another bonus sentence from his column:

“There is nothing uniquely Islamic about the fanatical desire to control women’s bodies. Little versions of Qutb could have been found in 1950s Ireland too, foaming at the mouth about dirty dancing”

For the record, he means Priests.

Fintan, of course, cannot just write “radical Islam and Christianity are the same”, since that would get him laughed out of town amongst most sensible people, and so instead he chooses a proxy for Christianity: Trump.

That Donald Trump is not a particular north star for yours truly is well known, but there are occasions nevertheless when one is moved to defend him: The notion that Trump, for all that he certainly is a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to the women, is comparable in any way, shape or form to Al Quaed a on the question is almost comically offensive and nonsensical.

We’ve got our vices, we western men: Trump may be a particularly boorish example but it’s not as if he’s the only man to appreciate a pair of breasts or to let his gaze linger on a backside when he thinks he won’t be caught. But to compare his supposed 1950s sexism to an ideology that wants to cover women from head to foot in black and denies girl children an education is not just offensive. It is monstrously stupid.

But it is, in fact, what Fintan believes. He’s written it himself. One of the most pre-eminent newspaper columnists in this land thinks that it is worth expending a thousand of his precious, carefully crafted words, expressing the view that the average American Social Conservative is just like a f*cking Jihadi.

The trick here is to identify one ugly human instinct shared across vastly different movements, and then pretend that the shared instinct renders the movements themselves morally comparable. By that standard, practically every political ideology in human history can be made equivalent to practically every other one.

Donald Trump may be sexist. And it may be the case that some Islamist lunatic who hated women helped provide the intellectual architecture for 9/11. If you cannot see an important distinction between those two things because both contain men with objectionable views about women, the problem isn’t Trump. It’s your brain.

His editors should have laughed him out the door.

JMG

For years, Fine Gaelers have been unjustly and unfairly maligned on this topic.

Its opponents, first in Fianna Fáil and latterly in Sinn Fein, like to present the Fine Gaeler in his true form as a deeply Hiberno-hostile West Brit™, much more comfortable doffing his expensive cap to Dukes and Marquesses than he is at a game of hurling. For years, the accusation has been that Fine Gael does not want a United Ireland at all, or if it does, it would probably be one under the crown, and only then if Cromwell’s corpse could not be reanimated.

This has always been very unfair. In actual fact, hardly any party wants a United Ireland more than Fine Gael – with the unspoken proviso that it, and only it, should be the one to deliver it.

In this cause, Neale Richmond is, per the Irish Times, to give a speech somewhere at some stage this week reminding us all that Fine Gael’s largely forgotten secondary name is “The United Ireland Party”:

“In an address, to be delivered at a meeting on the theme of unity, he is expected to say the 1998 Belfast Agreement “explicitly” offers the possibility “one day” of a unification referendum being held.

“By the very nature of our political ethos [in Fine Gael], we have the responsibility to properly plan, prepare and articulate what a united Ireland, a unified island, a New Ireland, means to us and could mean to everyone on this island,” according to a draft speech seen by The Irish Times.

However, he notes that Fine Gael has responsibility to “carve out” a more nuanced, less emotive and balanced vision of unity that moves “away from the slogans, flag-waving and arbitrary timelines”.”

That’s the pure, distilled Fine Gael psyche right there: A better class of unity, from a better class of Party.

It should be, you might think, entirely impossible to have a United Ireland without slogans and flag-waving, those two things being entirely central to any nationalist project. As for arbitrary deadlines, the date of any border poll will definitionally be arbitrary – there could be one tomorrow if the UK Government wished it.

But the point is this: for Fine Gael, Irish Unity is not a nationalist project at all. Never has been. And the point of it is not really unity at all, but the final vindication of Fine Gael’s view of the world. That its approach, as distinct from that of Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil, was both morally and strategically superior.

We can sum up the two versions of unity as they might be imagined in the Fine Gael mind crudely: In one – the bad version - a United Ireland is greeted by The Wolfe Tones blasting “A Nation Once Again” on loudspeakers to a sea of flying tricolours at a concert on the now vacated Shankill Road, the former residents having peaceably decided to move back to the other island in sullen defeat.

In the other, a Fine Gael Taoiseach cuts a ceremonial ribbon at the border while the ladies of the Church of Ireland Women’s Baking Institute politely applaud and two chaps in bowler hats and sashes reach across the border to shake hands for the world’s cameras with Fintan O’Toole and Miriam O’Callaghan, ahead of the all-Ireland Orange Parade through Dublin.

A better class of unity, from a better class of party. Irish Unity, but for the grown-ups.

Or perhaps more accurate again: A United Ireland, achieved free of nationalism.

This is the inherent problem for Fine Gael: It is a party that has, for most of its modern history, disdained flag-waving nationalism in all its forms, much preferring to be the movement that leads Ireland to its rightful place in the “international community”. It is – it says itself – the “party of Europe”.

Indeed, this is one of the reasons the party took Brexit so hard and why Leo Varadkar in particular appeared to be driven to the brink of madness by it: While Britain was in the EU, Irish Unity free of nationalism had functionally been achieved: Sure, weren’t we all part of the one union, anyway? One day, Britain would adopt the Euro, and all difference and distinction on the island would have been abolished, and the same flag would fly in Belfast and Dublin. Blue for Fine Gael and Europe, stars abounding.

That dream having rather abruptly died, the Fine Gael project now has required a reset on the unity question. You can trace the “greening” of the party directly to its reaction to Brexit: Irish Unity not so much as a boon for us, but as a justified consequence of and punishment for the nefarious British turning their backs on the EU project. Peaceably, the thinking goes, the populace of Northern Ireland will slowly turn away from Brexit Britain and embrace unity not out of nationalist sentiment, but out of a love for Europe which can only be requited by Dublin.

And so, we have Neale Richmond out this week: Wanting to move away from the slogans, and the flag waving, and the arbitrary deadlines, and towards a world where the rejected peoples of Northern Ireland will find love again, in the civilised arms of Fine Gael and the EU.

Irish Unity? Certainly. But none of that nationalism, thank you very much.

JMG

There are many explanations for the AfD’s triumph, few of them particularly controversial: First, that there would be no AfD without immigration levels as they have been in Germany and Europe over the last decade. Second, massive pressures on the cost of living, driven in large part by Germany’s decision to prioritise climate compliance over economic growth. Third, and perhaps a bit banal, the fact that East Germany retains a large Russian-sympathising and eastern-oriented population, dating in part to East Germany’s time as perhaps the crown jewel of the Soviet satellite states, making the AfD much more of an East German than West German phenomenon.

Indeed, the political divisions between East and West Germany should be clearly understandable to an Irish person: Explaining why the AfD’s pro-Russian, anti-immigration views are stronger in Sachsen-Anhalt than in Frankfurt or Bavaria is like explaining why the DUP is stronger in North Antrim than it is in West Cork. Demographics and history and partition matter.

In any case, there’s a lot for academics and political scientists to get their teeth into, from the weekend’s result. This is what academics are paid to do: To enhance our understanding of the world, and what has just happened in it. Which brings us to one of Ireland’s most prominent academics, Professor John O’Brennan of Maynooth. I am taking the liberty of posting his reaction to the AfD’s triumph here, and his response to a person who criticised him for it:

O’Brennan is not an ordinary academic. His seniority is denoted by the fact that he holds the prestigious, EU-backed Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration at Maynooth. He is charged with moulding the next generation of young minds, and producing the people who will provide the intellectual underpinnings of Irish society long after you and I, dear reader, are in our dotage.

And yet there is a basic problem: He says inordinately stupid things, all the time.

In general, it is important not to get personal when you write about others. Yet there are times when some things must be stated clearly, and this is one such case: O’Brennan is engaged here, nominally, in academia. His authority to speak comes from his supposed expertise.

Yet this intervention displays neither the intellectual curiosity nor the temperament required to analyse information objectively. His public utterances, of which the above is merely the latest, show us an intemperate, silly man without the capacity to respond to even mild challenge in any kind of persuasive way.

Let’s break it down: First, his immediate instinct in response to a democratic election is to reach not for any of the more obvious explanations, but to go straight to a “failure to regulate the information landscape”. Not, you’ll note, any of the factors listed above: Not migration. Not the cost of living. Not even “eastern Germany has a historically much more Russia-sympathetic political culture”, which would be simplistic but at least relevant.

No, the contribution O’Brennan chooses to make is: The information landscape was not regulated.

This is less an observation, of course, than it is an admission: O’Brennan does not believe that the AfD – or other European Parties like them – can be defeated in a fair fight. Instead, he demands that the news landscape be highly regulated in order to suppress rather than to amplify their message.

One might note, incidentally, that this has already been tried, obsessively, by European regulators. The EU has funded “fact-checkers” for years, and put extreme pressure on Facebook and other platforms for years after Brexit to ensure that nothing like it could ever happen again. Even now, the Digital Services Act already provides precisely the kind of extensive regulation of the online information landscape for which O’Brennan is calling. It hasn’t worked.

Second, there is what it says about O’Brennan’s mind: The genuinely interested academic and political scientist might look beyond an immediate partisan reaction to an election result to try and figure out what has just happened – but not the good Professor. In his mind, the first question to be asked is not “why did this happen?” but “how can we ensure it never happens again?”

Ironically, “why did this happen?” is exactly the question he should be asking, if he wants to answer the second.

And third, we come to his response to a perfectly legitimate response: A reader tells him that there may be other factors behind the election result, and O’Brennan says “I have no doubt who you would have been voting for in Germany in 1933.”

In other words: Disagree with me, and I will suggest that you would have voted Nazi in 1933.

This buffoon – for that is what he is – has no place in any academic institution. He lacks any curiosity, let alone decorum.

I will not say here that Irish academia is full of such people. That would be unfair, because the whole point of this piece is that there are few, if any, worse than O’Brennan. But we can say this: Irish academia is full of people who tolerate the O’Brennans of this world, and who say nothing of public conduct like this.

It is full of people, in fact, who celebrate it. The depressing suspicion invited by interventions like this is that, in some corners of academia, holding the approved opinions may matter rather more than displaying the intellectual curiosity supposedly required to interrogate them.

For this service to the production of endless establishment guff, he occupies a publicly funded professorship at Maynooth. The university’s current professorial salary scales begin comfortably above €100,000. And here he is, responding to mild disagreement by suggesting that his critic would have voted Nazi in 1933.

He’s paid, is John O’Brennan, for his brain. The Government gives him a very good salary for it. I wouldn’t give tuppence.

JMG

There’s a serious point here, jokes aside: This week there was a proper culture war bunfight about whether the HSE should be funding conferences that encourage men to take chemicals allowing them to produce breast milk - either for children or for their own sexual pleasure (“check their hard drives”, says Sarah).

And then in the wider culture, there’s the bigger question of whether “boobs are back”, as Sarah wrote earlier this week, or whether we must all pretend to be oblivious to our own natures.

In less prurient content, the Government announced bumper revenues this week, and bumper spending - but even that spending is not enough for Una Mullally in the Irish Times who wants Government to give us more “nice things”, or for the Labour Party which wants to give us all a hundred quid a month to help with shopping.

Oh, and the EU wants to regulate AI. And Reddit. And something called Roblox.

All of that, this week, and the bigger question for you listeners: What do you want us to do with this podcast moving forwards? We’re always hesitant to ask for money, but we’re also blown away by the response to our show and eager to grow it and do some good for the country if we can. You can find our polls on that question on Youtube, or Spotify. Or, if you have ideas, just leave them in the comments.

J&S

What is interesting for culture war observers like me is that there is a huge change within the ad, or perhaps more aptly, a return to days gone by. And yet if you had not looked up at billboards or ads for the last ten years, or perhaps awoken from a coma, you’d think nothing had changed at all.

For the first time in a long time, the model is slim and female. Ads showing overweight gender neutral models in underwear have suddenly disappeared. The brave and progressive new world of diabetes and heart attacks being the manner in which Calvin Klein elected to sell underwear seems to have ended. Did someone come to their senses? Did a doctor give advice? Or was this progressive virtue signalling just what it took to sell jeans at the time, and ever since Sydney Sweeney proved concept with her boobs out in the American eagle Jeans ad, companies are realising it might be safe to dip their toe back into the skinny white girl water, and are diving in.

Because the truth is, that for the better part of the last ten years, most companies were terrified to photograph anyone without very clearly explaining why that person was being photographed, what it meant, and of course, what liking the photo said about you. Every ad was a position. Companies weren’t just selling us clothes, they were wearing clothes- political clothes- and assigning moral attributes to them. And wearing their clothes proved you adopted those attributes, and of course, boycotting those clothes was a demonstration too. But in the end, we now see that it was all theatre. As Sydney Sweeney put it well herself; ‘they’re just jeans’.

But denim and underwear weren’t the only things we had to endure at the altar of performative corporate progressivism, and what did the decade of moral earnestness actually deliver? Apple and Facebook offered in 2014 to pay women to freeze their eggs, not to build a crèche, but to postpone a woman’s biology so she could keep working. International Women’s Day arrived every March with a panel, a pink cupcake and silence on childcare, or maternity leave, or anything useful. On International Women’s Day 2024 this State asked Irish women what it could do for them and came back with a proposal to change the wording of the Constitution — to strive to support care — and Irish women rejected it by seventy-four per cent to twenty-six.

The common feature of all of this, is that in truth it is not, and never was an ideology. It’s just disingenuous corporate connivance and actually a moral cowardice. These companies were staffed by executives who had concluded that this was what one was now supposed to say in order to market things, and who were frightened of being the last ones to say it. That is why the gestures were always the cheap, or the ludicrous — you do not spend real money on a position you do not hold. A cupcake costs nothing. A constitutional amendment costs a lot less than childcare, real changes all cost money. It seems they were all just doing what NGOs told the board was expected, at the lowest price the CFO could stomach.

If the Calvin Klein ad was the only evidence, this would be wishful thinking. It is not. Since 2025, Amazon, Meta, IBM, Disney and others quietly buried the diversity commitments they had spent five years advertising because of the results of an election.

What collapsed in 2025 was a marketing position that stopped testing well, discontinued exactly as fast as any other underperforming campaign. It was never a moral awakening, and instead of admitting that. They’ve just quietly slotted the skinny white girl back into the Calvin Kleins.

Nothing has been learned and nobody has grown a backbone, we just don’t have to pretend that obesity is beautiful for a while. What is ending is not an ideology or a cultural revolution. It was a fashion, and fashions change.

So, I for one am happy with the new jeans ad. Not because a thin girl in denim is a triumph, but because nobody attached a moral position to it. Nobody is marveling at how brave, or progressive it is. Nobody is taking a political position by liking it. Calvin Klein are doing what I want most large companies to do; say nothing, sell the clothes, and if you want to do something for women, pay them properly and fund the things women actually need. The frozen eggs are still out there in some nitrogen flask, but the rest was always for them, not really for us.

SR

One of the side effects of that activity is that you become more attuned to just how absurdly violent Irish society has become. A quick scan of today’s Irish Independent, for example, turns up the breaking stories “Man dies from ‘catastrophic’ injuries after being struck in head with shovel in Dublin business park brawl” and “Man (21) jailed for life for murder of Cork postman who was beaten to death with golf club”. There’s a new one of those most days, sometimes two or three, like today.

Not all of them are foreigners, either. Today’s split of senseless murder victims is a one-all draw between the natives and the newcomers.

What the stories have in common, however, is a particularly senseless level of violence. It’s easy to romanticise the past, but it certainly seems to me as if there was an era, not that long ago, when both of the victims in those two cases might have been alive because the weapons used in brawls or assaults were fists. Not shovels, golf clubs, and increasingly, knives.

There’s a danger in writing about this stuff that one descends into a state of priestly preaching about the new culture of violence in Ireland and nonsense pieties about a kinder past. In fact, per capita, we have fewer murders in Ireland today than we had at the turn of the millennium. It’s just that the ones we do have often seem particularly senseless.

What’s more, it’s that they seem routine. Perhaps it is just me, but what I think has changed significantly in Ireland is not how often we encounter serious crimes against the person, but our attitude to it when we do. It’s as if getting bashed to death with a shovel or a golf club is now roughly on a par, in the news agenda, with tax cuts in the budget (not that there are ever many of those).

There was an era, of course, in this country, of censorship. I do not romanticise it, but one of the theories behind it was that if the poor innocent people of Ireland were exposed to things like sex or violence, they would shift their attitudes in favour of sex and of violence. That in essence, if they saw someone on the telly getting their brains bashed in, it would become less shocking and stigmatised when someone in the country actually did get their brains bashed in. Or that if they saw some harlot having it off with three different men, being such a harlot (or more commonly, the male equivalent) would become more accepted.

I think that was right, broadly. You might not defend censorship, but there was a logic to it that seems to me broadly unimpeachable. There’s a reason that regimes like North Korea make sure no news from outside gets in: That reason is that what you see can give you notions.

I recall once, as a young and stupid twenty something, deciding that courage and respect for life I must watch one of those snuff videos – you know the ones – produced by some cohort of Osama Bin Laden wannabes demonstrating how little they respected western non-Muslim life. I got sick shortly thereafter. But I think if you watched a hundred of those videos, you would very quickly become accustomed to them. You would find it less shocking.

This phenomenon, of course, is widely already recognised with porn. The more of it people watch, the more extreme their sexual tastes become. Younger women in surveys increasingly report the consequences of that trend, with some horrific percentage of them now reporting being strangled or otherwise hurt by their young boyfriends or partners.

On balance, then, is there a case for censorship? Is there a world in which it actually makes sense simply not to show people certain things? To let violence be implied and horrifying, rather than an increasingly comic-book orgy of blood and guts that’s supposed to shock us, but actually does not?

I don’t know, but part of writing is thinking out loud. And I just don’t think that in 1960’s Ireland, bad as it reportedly was, that you would get those two headlines this morning in a newspaper without some sense of national outrage, rather than boredom.

Then I suppose most of us have no reason to care. After all, the chances of ever having your own brain bashed in with a golf club or a shovel remain comfortingly low. If it doesn’t really affect us, and it’s none of our business, why should we care? That sentence, really, sums up modern society. It has some good consequences. And also some bad ones – just like the old regime.

Apparently, some oddball men take such drugs and choose to produce something approximating breastmilk for sexual pleasure. That is at least just some freaky-deaky sexual weirdness from America, which is the world’s foremost exporter of freaky-deaky sexual weirdness.

Much more concerningly, apparently some of these men actually make themselves lactate to feed children. Actual real human children.

That I – and you (sorry) – are now aware of this information is of course thanks to the HSE, which we all fund with our taxes. As the story goes, the HSE was due to fund a conference on Breastfeeding, and decided to invite a chap called Jacob Englesman, one of whose specialities, it seems, is “inducing lactation for kinksters”, which in practical terms means giving men drugs so that they produce something that they then call milk, from their nipples.

Englesmann was due to speak on the topic of “lactation support for gender diverse families”, where presumably this skill of his would come in handy – the obvious and correct implication being that he was going to teach men how to produce milk from their manboobs for the consumption of actual human children. Because equality, and because progressive. And because anything about equality and progressive is good and wise.

That this produced outrage is not shocking. That the conference is now reportedly paused is not shocking either. What will follow will be the usual god-that’s-shocking-it’s-right-it-was-stopped from the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers who venture a comment on the matter. But what will be missing is any analysis or admission as to why the invitation was issued in the first place.

We must begin as ever with the underlying mindset in Ireland which is that having children is a right to which there must be equal access, regardless of one’s own choices. Or in plain terms, that gay and lesbian people must have the right to have children despite the rather obvious fact that their sexual preferences are an inherent biological bar to reproduction. It used to be that to become a biological parent, one was required to engage in activities of a sinful nature with a member of the opposite sex. This was not optional. Now it is, as it must be because were it otherwise, then gays and straights would not be equal.

But what follows from that is obvious too: If one has the right to become a parent, then one must surely have the right to the full range of experiences of parenthood. It’s the same mindset as marriage equality, where the notion was that even fully legal and recognized gay relationships would not be on the same level without extending marriage. Well, how can parenting be fully equal if one couple gets to experience breastfeeding, and another does not?

Thus, in the progressive and equal world, there is space for Englesmann, whose job it is to make sure biological men can feed children whatever kind of chemically altered substance that leaks from their man-boobs after his interventions, and call it milk. And this is the kind of thing that the HSE should encourage, because it is a state body and state bodies pursue equality and progressivism, not necessarily children’s welfare (which might fairly be described as an optional extra, desirable but not necessarily the objective).

It’s easy and a bit cheap just to call this “creepy” and “disgusting”. It is those things, of course, but not necessarily in the views of the people who run the HSE and have been to three dozen professional seminars on LGBT equality and so on. I guarantee you that right now in HSE towers, there are some very annoyed people upset at the backwardness of the backlash, and society’s failure to comprehend the emotional struggle of a transwoman who doesn’t feel complete because he can’t breastfeed his child. Will nobody think of the new-fangled “woman” who will simply never experience that bond with “her” child which can only come from, eh, chestfeeding?

It’s not fair. That’s how they think, the people who brought you this conference.

And in a sense, stopping the conference – pausing it – is a very hollow victory indeed. Especially if we still continue to espouse our national obsessions with equality and progressivism, which are what brought us the conference in the first place.

The bigger problem is this: When we decreed that the gays (a great bunch of lads mostly, don’t get me wrong) were entirely equal to the rest of us, what did we mean, exactly? Did we mean that they aren’t allowed to breastfeed, when medicines exist that make it possible? If we answer “no” to that question, why do we do it?

There are two reasons we might give: That “it’s not fair to experiment on children like that” and “yuck it’s icky”. The latter one is at least honest.

The first one has the rather unfortunate side-effect of admitting something broader: If experimenting on children is wrong, then why would we permit the entirely experimental process of letting gays and lesbians (and indeed, for completeness, some straight couples) have biological children without having biologically reproductive sex, at all? Why is there a right to have children in the first place?

There’s an inherent unwillingness often, in Ireland, to concede so-called “slippery slope” arguments, which are basically “once you permit X, you will soon be permitting Y”. But the slippery slope is real. Once you say gay relationships are equal to straight ones, you end up here, saying that gay or trans men have the right to breastfeed or chestfeed because they are equal to women.

And if children don’t like it, well. They can spit it out, I suppose. That’s the mindset. And reversing it means reversing a whole lot more than just one conference.

JMG.

We also find time to talk about a really under-covered story - the CAO points fiasco where kids are losing out in a points battle to students who were marked more leniently than they were - all a legacy of a six year old effort to protect Fianna Fáil from lockdown criticism.

Then there’s the fuel prices - they’re set to go up again as Government unwinds the relief we were all given over the summer. The Government says the cuts were only ever designed to be temporary - but then so was the USC. So, in fact, was income tax. Funny, that.

In other news, an Irishman was arrested in France for anti-semitic hate speech - but is that fair? And Dolly Parton died, may she rest in heaven.

It’s an engaging hour, we hope you enjoy it.

See you Monday. J&S.

What struck her, she said, was how many of her former school and college friends from Ireland were still – at the ages of 25, 26, and 27 – living at home with their parents. Of her own close friend circle, she was the only one who was not. For everyone else, ranging from those with good jobs at the start of lucrative careers in law and accounting, to those working a job in the local Tesco, the idea of living on their own or with a partner simply is not a runner.

Then this week, the CSO’s immigration figures were released.

Confession: I’ve never been a data whizz like Nick Delehanty, or my former colleague Matt Treacy. I’m not able to dig into the numbers and tell you that there are 2,000 more Sri Lankans in Waterford than there were six years ago. You can go elsewhere for that.

But the numbers were stark enough this week that even a fool could read them. Look at the highlighted blue line in the top row, stolen from NWL on twitter:

That number – an official state figure – shows that the population of non-EU nationals living in Ireland has increased by more than double, or about 240,000 people, in six years. The number of Irish citizens, meanwhile, has increased by about 200,000, but this presumably includes about 100,000 people originally from elsewhere who have been handed a passport at one of those “citizenship ceremonies” that the Irish Times finds so heart-warming and pure.

Overall, then, the population has increased by about half a million in six years, of which, per the figures, 338,000 is entirely due to migration.

In that same time, according to CSO data, Ireland’s housing stock has increased by about 180,000.

Consider those figures: If you were to strip out immigration, Ireland would have built about 180,000 homes for – at the upper end – 200,000 new residents. But with immigration, it is 180,000 homes for half a million. And that, in sum, is the blatantly obvious reason why so many young people in their twenties are living at home with mam and dad. The silently homeless, we might call them.

It’s therefore obvious, as it has been for many years now: Ireland’s housing and immigration crises are inextricably linked: In fact, the immigration crisis is the housing crisis – despite opinion pollsters always separating them out as if they were two separate things. When you read, as you will, that “housing is the top issue for voters”, remember that housing really means immigration, but politely.

Another thing should be obvious also: That much of the non-EU immigration is, in fact, perfectly legal and being actively facilitated by policymakers. A great portion of it is, as anybody with eyes can see, from the Indian subcontinent, with work and study visas being handed out like candy to people from that part of the world.

Now, confession: I know quite a few Indians living in Ireland and they are, uniformly, law-abiding and decent people who have a deserved reputation internationally for being “good immigrants”. Aside from the odd case, you don’t tend to find Indians over-represented in the criminal justice system. But that doesn’t change the fact that the country does not have room for them.

One big reason for all the legal immigration is, of course, out of control Government spending. The state is now so reliant on corporate tax hauls from American multinationals that in essence, when it comes to recruiting foreign workers, these companies are being allowed write their own visas (figuratively, not literally) and import as many foreigners as they need. The alternative that politicians fear is that those companies might leave and suddenly the state would need to find an alternative source for the billions it is currently spending.

This is the problem, then: For all that many of us would like to have a Government that would immediately get control of immigration, few of us have embraced the costs – because there would be costs. One of them would be starving the most important part of our economy (in terms of the tax revenue produced) of workers.

That is why we must understand that all of these problems are intrinsically connected and do not stand alone: The state spends too much, in part trying to build houses. So the state needs ever more tax revenues. So the state needs ever more migrant workers. So the state needs more houses… All of it is one big circle. You can’t just solve one part of the circle.

But this entire cycle of enormous government leading to enormous population and spending inflation has a real cost: It is the lives of the twenty-somethings that are on pause, unable to get out from under their parent’s roofs and start their own lives and start their own families.

That, in turn, brings down the birth rate dramatically because these young people cannot have children, or must defer them – which leads to…. More immigration.

This is the immigration doom loop that Ireland is stuck in. It can, should, and must be solved, even though solving it will come with economic pain in the short term and likely international ostracization at EU level. I’ll be frank: it does not, actually, need some massive campaign of “re-migration” and the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands, much as that will annoy some people.

What it needs is the door shut, now, and the slow and gradual and manageable enforcement of repatrations as visas expire. The objective of Irish policy should be to slowly reduce the population by 2-300,000 over the next five or six years. Doing so would be transformative for those currently in need of a home, and those denied opportunities.

It’s that, or a great many people in their 20s will wait for a home until their parents die, and they wrestle it from their siblings in one of those family will dramas that we Irish love so much.

A depressing vista, on foot of a depressing set of figures.

Attention around the case on the political right – and indeed our own attention on the podcast – has focused heavily on the enormous outpouring of support for Clancy from American women, who have raised bucketloads of money to assist her criminal defence, which essentially amounts to the notion that she was not criminally responsible because of a combination of post-partum psychosis and a really bad cocktail of drugs.

To a great many people, including me initially, this seemed obscene: There are lots of things in this world that you can spend your energy and money on, and it instinctively seems a little strange to spend it on the defence of somebody who, by her own admission, killed three toddlers. Your sympathy, I thought, should be with the dead kids who met awful deaths than with the woman who killed them.

But confession time: The more I read about the case, the more I think Sarah and I might have been wrong. Sarah can, of course, can speak for herself.

The first thing here is that Clancy has, evidently, been severely punished for what she did. She will never walk again. She will likely – regardless of the outcome of the trial – not be a free woman until the best years of her life are spent. She will carry the psychological burden of what she did until she dies. There is not much that the state could add to that with a guilty verdict.

The more interesting and pertinent question is whether anyone else deserves punishment. This, I now see, is the point many of the protesters – the saner ones at least – are making.

A few things are not in dispute. First, that before she lost her wits, Lindsay Clancy was a good mother, and a midwife, whose own ex-husband (the father of the murdered children) says needed help and did not get it.

Second, that Clancy’s apparent condition – post partum psychosis (as aside from depression) – is both very real and very rare.

Third, that she had sought extensive treatment for it, suggesting that she knew she had a problem and did not actually wish to harm anyone.

Fourth, that there appear to have been very serious medical failings in her care, up to and including two separate doctors prescribing different medications for the same condition which may have acted to counter each other.

It’s also important, I think, to step back from the culture war noise and look at the facts of a case and a life before a major incident happened: Clancy had never been in trouble before, never had any red flags raised, never displayed any murderous or suicidal intent…. Until she took the drugs.

Without wishing to be flippant, there are a great many people out there on the right who blamed the covid vaccine for just about everything, but who appear now in this case to be overlooking the possible role of medications, or big Pharma entirely. Exhibit A being the American commentator Matt Walsh.

Of course, that this case has become such a culture war bunfight makes talking about it harder. I confess that my instinct, initially, was simply to look at all these mainly left-leaning women cheering for a child killer and to be repulsed at the depravity of it all.

Yet simultaneously, it’s very possible that there are a great many women out there looking at us over on the political right jumping up and down on Lindsay Clancy and seeing a complete lack of compassion for a woman who very genuinely was sick and – quite possibly – was failed by her doctors. Never the twain shall meet, and of course the price of saying “maybe I was wrong” is much higher these days than it should be.

And so, the more I read about it, the more I do think I was wrong on last week’s podcast. A guilty verdict in this case would, I think, be the sub-optimal outcome: It would allow us all to close the book on the matter, declare Clancy the villain, and move on. A verdict that partially – partially – exonerated her of responsibility and put the focus back on the medics and the drug companies, especially those companies that make psychotic medications, might well be more societally useful.

Ultimately though, nothing is going to bring back those poor children. May they rest in peace. This is such a terribly sad case, whatever way you look at it.

JMG

I understand why. And at the same time, I don’t.

There is little that words will accomplish here. Many of us, me included, used words to warn about it. It is blatantly obvious to any student of history or human nature that, when you insert a group of foreign men into a defenceless native population, amid cultural differences in language and communication skills that inhibit them from talking to women normally, things like this will happen. Such has it ever been, and such will it ever be. The male reproductive drive cannot – despite what the UK home office seems to think – be constrained by a leaflet asking chaps nicely not to rape the locals.

At the same time, of course, incidents like this serve a dual negative purpose, in that they radicalise everyone and make a solution even harder to agree on.

If you’ll forgive some admittedly clunky stereotypes, on the one hand, you have the hard men online. You know them. You may even agree with them. These are the fellas who appear on camera, or on the streets, baseball bat in hand, ready to protect our women – by which they mean that given the chance they would beat the snot out of a few shifty looking foreign fellas, guilty or not. These are the “you can’t vote your way out of this” crowd.

On the other hand, you have your local Irish Times reading head-shaker, who worries that this whole business is bad because it might radicalise the for roysh. The angrier the For Roysh gets, the more determined the head-shaker is to thwart them, and what better way to thwart them than to ensure yet more cities have cooped up bands of sexually frustrated people from countries where grabbing a woman on the street and having your way with her is tantamount to a marriage proposal.

The problem with this dynamic is that ultimately it forces people to pick a side. And the further problem is that those who do pick a side disproportionately come down, however reluctantly, on the side of respectable-opinion-that-keeps-you-in-your-job, that being the view of the head-shaker instead of the baseball-bat wielder.

And thus we come to the great Galway Rape paradox: The more crimes that migrants commit, the more committed to migration the establishment becomes. It’s a civilizational doom loop, all in the cause of stymieing the rise of @patrioteire864 and his chums on X.

This is not a uniquely Irish dynamic, which is one of the reasons that I have never been persuaded that Irish nationalism is a solution, any more than French nationalism is a solution in France or Belgian nationalism in Belgian. It is, in fact, part of a wider western civilizational crisis in confidence, playing out across most of the west simultaneously.

I say “crisis in confidence” but actually it is worse than that: It is part of a concerted effort to consign western civilization, all of it, to the dustbin of history. A great many ideas work in concert towards the same end: White Privilege. Anti-Catholicism (or anti-Christianity in Protestant nations). Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Imperialism (those both being western sins). The campaign against Patriarchy (western civilisation having been built, primarily, by men in patriarchal systems). Statues of great men are torn down because they owned slaves, even as they built the society that abolished slavery. Great writers are consigned to be problematic. The industrial revolution is cast as a sin against the planet, and so on, and so endlessly on. The whole point of multiculturalism is to reduce the influence of the dominant culture – and when it is so in every country you might come to realise that your own country’s small variations on western culture are not the target.

They’re not coming for the Irish dancing – you’ll be allowed to keep that because it is quaint and harmless, as are the cupla focail. If this country ever ends up in a place where the population is only 20% ethnically Irish, there’ll still be plenty of state funding for the Gaeltacht and the GAA, don’t you worry. Those are the things you get to keep, just as the Brits will keep cricket and the Royal Family, and France will keep baguettes.

What they’re coming for is Edmund Burke, Magna Carta, Free Speech, Property Owning Democracy, and the rest of it.

That is why, in my view, the nationalist instinct is of limited use. It’s all very well declaring that Padraig Pearse would be turning in his grave if he could see Ireland now; but that misses the point entirely. Nationalism worked to a limited degree, for a while, in Hungary. But eventually even Victor Orban was defeated in large part because his administration could not resist the power of being isolated by every other EU state for embracing nationalist ideas.

No, the broader point was actually the one made by Pope Benedict XVI, who noted presciently that we live in a “dictatorship of relativism”, in which the greatest crime is to assert the superiority of one way of living over another. It is this which must be defeated, in Britain, France, Ireland, Australia, the United States, and any other country of western heritage you care to mention. Because we all share a common cultural and religious heritage, and that heritage is objectively superior to almost anyone else’s.

As for the Galway rapists, assuming they are convicted? They are no longer the problem. What they did cannot be undone. They are not even the enemy. The system will deliver “justice” of a sort for their crimes, and Irish Times head-shaker will point out smugly to you that it did.

No, the enemy is the ideology underpinning all of this, which says that the west is not a superior place to the hell-holes that these people come from. If the baseball bat wielders want to defend Irish women, they would be better clapping them menacingly into their hands in the direction of the sociology department in UCD, rather than at random migrants.

Ireland has spent untold fortunes over the past several decades on promoting and defending traveller culture. The country went so far as to recognise them as their own distinct ethnic group. NGOs like Pavee Point are lavishly funded to defend Travellers against discrimination, and aggressively denounce critics of Traveller culture.

Yet how do many of us actually experience that culture? Crime. Rudeness. Feuding. Call-Out videos. Hassle. There is, whether it is polite to say it or not, a good reason why so many venues would prefer not to host a Traveller wedding or funeral.

And how do Travellers themselves experience it? High rates of incarceration. Cousin Marriage. Teenage Pregnancies. Blood feuds. Poverty. Illiteracy.

The kid-glove approach, in other words, has not worked. It’s time, we thought, to say it.

Also this week: The UK’s ludicrous, Monty Python-esque scheme to ask Migrants very nicely not to rape the womenfolk. Fine Gael advisor John Kelly tells us all what he thinks of us (a bunch of racialists), and over in America, the young women appear to have gone cray-cray again, this time defending a woman who murdered her own children.

It is a fun hour, and we’re glad you could spend it with us.

These individuals exist in every political party, though in my experience they are slightly more common in Fine Gael than in Fianna Fáil. They are distinguished by a fanatical, near religious belief that the party is always right, and more than that, that the party can never fail. It can only ever be failed.

Such people, mercifully, rarely reach the very top of politics (notable exception: Timmy Dooley). There is a good reason for that: To become a leader, you must, generally speaking, have some idea of where your party must change. You must be able to say “this is a new FF” or “this is a new FG”. The devoted party man cannot do this, because he can simply never conceive of the party having been wrong. Fine Gael never needs to change, because Fine Gael is almost perfect. Sub in FF, Labour, Sinn Fein and so on as needed.

Consider the case, today, of John Kelly – the classic devoted party man. Kelly is in the news because he has been revealed to have been something of a Fine Gael fanatic on twitter, while also working for Simon Harris.

Before we get into what he said, note first what his job is. Kelly works in the Department of the Taoiseach as manager of Simon Harris’s constituency operation. He has no policy role – that would require thinking and ideas about what to change – but instead essentially makes sure that Harris gets potholes fixed in a timely manner by writing to the council, and that Harris attends the funerals of other devoted party men, from which his absence would be taken as mortal insult.

For this job he is paid rather well, and nobody would take any notice of him had Mark Tighe not uncovered tweets in which he called teachers lazy layabouts, the public racist, and implied that unvaccinated types during covid should be denied hospital beds. And probably food or water.

Thousands of people, of course, will be outraged. But actually, there is little to be outraged by, because the devoted party man is everywhere in Irish society and Kelly’s tweets are entirely mainstream within that cohort.

To understand his views, you must first realise that for the devoted institutionalist, the institution can never be at fault. It therefore follows that if something goes wrong, the institution (in this case Fine Gael) has been failed rather than having failed by itself. Have Fine Gael allowed too many migrants in? No – it’s the perfect amount, and people would see that if they were not racist. Has the Government lost control in schools? No – it has run the schools brilliantly and people would see that if teachers were not so bone idle.

The Irish Times, of course, chooses to highlight Kelly’s case because it is a juicy political story and they’ll get a few days out of it – tomorrow the opposition will demand he resigns, and so on. There’ll be a degree of outrage, and people will share the yarn in whatsapps. But here’s the truth: Kelly’s views are, broadly speaking, in line with most of the good folks in the Irish Times, almost all of the NGOs, and a great many minor political functionaries.

This would be a grand country, this Ireland of ours, if it wasn’t for the silly stupid lazy racist pig-ignorant people!

In my experience, which is not inconsiderable, the Devoted Party Man has another characteristic, which is absolute moral superiority, usually expressed as a kind of virulent progressive nationalism. By this token, he believes that Ireland (thanks to The Party) is simply the best and cleverest little island in the world, by dint of our clever-clogs trick of lowering corporate taxes. He thinks Ireland is the most compassionate and sensible place on earth too, because Simon Harris told him, and also because he can read Fintan O’Toole and understand most of the words. And he ruthlessly believes that the Americans in particular are stupid, and only marginally less immoral than the British and the Israelis, who are the dual avatars of his hatred.

These beliefs would be harmless in themselves, but they have an important side-effect: They make him particularly despise his fellow citizens, whose views, he fears, might make us more like any one of the unholy trinity of international villains. Mention the EU critically, and he will splutter in your face that it’s Brexit you want, you moron. Express a view on migration, and sure you want us to be like Trump. Say a critical word of the Government’s stance on the middle east, and you’re a Netanyahu-lover.

To the Devoted Party Man, the public are an inconvenience because they keep spoiling the party’s plans. What those plans are is irrelevant: The Devoted Party Man knows only that if Fine Gael does it, it must be good. And if you oppose it, you must be bad.

We are not governed by such people, Timmy Dooley aside. But we are, my friends, infested with them: They fill the middle ranking spots almost everywhere. You’ll find them as school deputy principals. Local Garda Serjeants. Presiding Officials in your local Motor Tax Office. Civil Servants. And, in the Party itself, sitting in the front row at the meeting, nodding approvingly, and keeping a beady eye out for anyone who might not be loyal.

Trust me: You know a few of them yourself.

JMG

All across this country there are women well over the age of 80 who raised families in Ireland, some time ago. In the 70s in Ireland over a third of women had four or more children, but having seven eight or even nine was common. These women likely budgeted a wage that never stretched far enough, kept a kitchen going through winters without most conveniences we take for granted, fixed clothes, and ran households like a logistics operation without a diary, an app, or a day off.

Every bit of food got eaten, every part of an animal got used, meals were always made from scratch. These women, now very elderly, have no idea what a “trad wife” is.

They would however, recognise the job description immediately, because they did it, and in a huge amount of cases would happily tell you that they enjoyed at least some elements of it. They weren’t making a statement. This was raising a family, and this was simply how it was done.

Nobody thought anyone needed to be warned off it, because domestic competence in a woman wasn’t some kind of political statement. Nobody suggests it was all rosy, but there was (albeit mostly amongst women themselves) a quiet respect for the manner in which other women cleverly ran their households, who made the best bread, who was able to have seven children scrubbed and well turned out in a tiny house. I remember my own mother in the eighties marveling at a neighbour who told her she scrubbed her bathrooms every day. Every SINGLE day my mother noted. Where does she get the energy from?

Fast forward two generations, and a young American woman in a nice kitchen films herself doing the same things that used to be part of that same day to day life. Bread, cleaning, a vegetable patch; ultimately a romanticisation of a life we were told to run screaming and roaring away from, and suddenly it isn’t just content. It’s a dangerous gender stereotype. Not a niche interest in an internet awash with hobbies, but something apparently significant enough to require commentary, and a government campaign. The bread hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that someone, somewhere, has decided this particular woman’s choice is the one that needs some good old fashioned irish governmental nose poking.

We’ve watched a similar concept before, and it had a much friendlier reception the first time round. A few years ago an Essex woman with a spray bottle and a nice chatty voice became one of the most followed people doing precisely nothing except cleaning her own house on camera.

Mrs Hinch didn’t invent an ideology, didn’t claim to be reviving anything, didn’t position herself against other woman’s choices. She filmed herself wiping down a hob and talking to her followers like a friend would, and it turned out an enormous number of women found that genuinely soothing to watch — the repetition of it and the sense of a small corner of the world being brought under control, the calmness it gave people, particularly those with mental health difficulties.

They proved it wasn’t a fringe taste with their attention and their wallets: the products she liked sold out within days, entire supermarket aisles were cleared, and an industry of copycat cleaning content sprang up in her wake. Nobody ran a campaign then warning women that watching too much cleaning content might lead them to enjoy cleaning.

We were content to let millions of women watch a stranger over-clean her toilet in peace. And we did that because she was glamourising something that’s required, its not a lifestyle its just the day to day cleaning, she wasn’t potentially disrupting the fabric of society, women would still make the right life choices, they’d just have cleaner sinks. It was a hobby, not a comment on society.

We extend the same courtesy to fitness influencers and wellness influencers every day without comment. Nobody watching a woman post her 5am gym routine assumes she’s issuing a referendum on women who sleep in. We understand instinctively that a woman filming her own personal day to day habits is just that — her own habits, on display, for anyone who finds them useful or interesting or simply pleasant to watch.

We’ve decided, as a culture, that this is fine, right up until the habit on display is a woman enjoying her own home and choosing a different paced, different priority life. When that happens, suddenly the same behaviour that was a lifestyle niche a moment ago becomes, apparently, a threat.

We are constantly reminded, by the same institutions now nervous about homemade stew, that they are unambiguously in favour of choice. Choice is the entire foundation of the modern basis on which us women now live our lives. A woman’s right to decide is now paramount; what her own days look like, her own career, her own household, her own body, free from anyone else’s judgment. Fine by me (to a point) and I think most people can get on board with that, but its fake.

Its only if the choices you make fit the vision someone else has for how a woman should live her life, that’s not progress. That’s just a different flavour of authoritarian bullshit.

What is abundantly clear by the Governments plans to warn us of the dangerous gender stereotypes being displayed by tradwives is this; if I want to grow vegetables in a raised bed I built myself, keep a clean house without shame about liking it clean, iron the sheets because I find it strangely calming after a week in work, and bake bread for my own children because they like it warm, why exactly does that require a public information campaign warning women off it?

What, precisely, is the danger being flagged, and to whom? That I might enjoy it? That other women might watch me enjoying it and think it looks appealing, or worse might try it themselves? If choice is genuinely sacred, then my choice to like domestic order or cooking or ‘making daddy a sandwich’ is exactly as sacred as anyone else’s choice not to, except its not is it?

Its backward and a bit sad, and the attitude is that it is somehow ‘anti progress’ and any woman participating in that type of backward misogynistic lifestyle is obviously not informed enough, and must be patronisingly told why more work, less kids, less time at home and more time away from any kids you do have is the true utopia we must all work towards. Clearly, we have a state body determined to quietly rank one choice above the other while insisting, always, that it isn’t in the business of ranking women’s choices at all.

Why is there no state-funded campaign gently informing the thirty-nine-year-old woman on partnership track that fertility does not negotiate around billable hours, and that “I’ll have a baby at forty-five once I’ve made enough career progress” That is a plan built on a fantasy that the prevailing culture around women, fertility and motherhood has lied to her bare faced about.

That genuinely difficult conversation involving biology, timelines, and years nobody gets back once they’re spent goes conspicuously unsaid, because it’s uncomfortable, because it risks sounding like it’s telling ambitious women what to do with their bodies and their careers, and because the people who’d need to fund that campaign would rather not have the argument. Fair enough, perhaps it’s a difficult topic, but then have the integrity to stay out of the choices women can make completely, and leave the bread alone too.

Most women, including the ones running practices, sitting on boards, standing in courtrooms, and building companies, have a trad wife somewhere in them, whether they’d ever use the phrase or not. It’s the instinct that finds real, unembarrassed satisfaction in a clean kitchen, or an immaculately organised kitchen cabinet, and really feels entirely content only when the house and family are all happy and content, not because anyone is forcing the issue, not because feminism failed her, but because competence feels good wherever a person finds it, whether that’s managing the company accounts or getting a week’s washing done and folded before anyone else is awake.

That’s why Mrs Hinch was so popular, and why millions of women sit down to watch trad wife content online, its honest preference. It’s the same instinct that makes some women get their charge from a spreadsheet, some from a sales call, and some from a beautifully organised hot press. Pretending that one of those three needs correcting while the other two are celebrated is its own form of condescension — the assumption that a woman filming herself enjoying domestic life surely hasn’t thought it through properly, while a woman filming herself doing A 5AM jog is simply living her best life and needs no further comment.

Your granny didn’t need permission for any of it, and she certainly didn’t need a warning. Nobody sat her down to explain that enjoying a well-kept house might be setting women back. Her life was difficult, and there is no doubt that women’s lives have improved since, but the instinct she had, entirely unremarkable in her own time, is the same one showing up in an expensive apron on your phone now, just better lit and with a following. The bread is the same bread. The only thing that’s actually changed is that the Irish state has decided this particular version of a woman’s choice is the one that the government needs to help us with. The truth is, your granny didn’t need the government to save her, and neither do you.

SR.

Yesterday’s knee-jerk reaction to the great gurrier crisis of August 2026 was, by any measure, classic stuff.

First, the statements were issued. A very stern looking Jim O’Callaghan was replayed, every hour on the hour on Sky News, telling the gurriers that this is the end of the line for them, and that he simply couldn’t understand their gurrier-ness. If you closed your eyes and forgot for a moment everything you have ever known about Ireland, you might even think something of substance was about to be done.

Of course, nothing is.

Consider the Government’s great announcement: It will, it declared, create a new criminal offence of driving the wrong way down the motorway. The thing that was already illegal will now be doubly illegal. And this new law will be enforced just as completely and thoroughly as the existing laws are, which is to say that if the police spot you driving the wrong way down the motorway, they will still not be empowered to intervene.

This is classic Irish do-somethingism. They know it is for show, you know it is for show, and they know that you know, and so on. But it provides the appearance of action, which is all that it is designed to do, while the Government works out a way to transfer blame to some third party.

And in that cause, the machinery of official Ireland is churning according to the well-worn script.

The usual keening is already underway, and by that I do not mean the funerals. I mean instead the media who are already in their own way transferring blame from the perpetrators to the social media companies. The inference, if not the direct argument, is essentially that our five dead gangbangers were innocent little chaps until TikTok made them do it.

Here’s the thing: If these kids were able to post these videos online, and get thousands of views and hup-ya-boy-ya’s from fellow knobheads, then the Gardai were as capable of viewing those videos and acting upon them as anyone else. The story here is not that the great criminal masterminds were posting their videos because of TikTok – it is that Ireland is now such a paradise for your local scrote that he feels perfectly safe posting evidence of his crimes on the internet knowing that the cops will – as Sarah says – do nuttin’.

But anyway, back to our beloved politicians.

There are a few things here that must be said.

First, Minister O’Callaghan, this is your Ireland. This is the country your laws and your policies have created. How many millions of euros have you spent, for example, promoting and defending Traveller “culture” when most of us experience that culture as some blend of crime, rudeness, thuggery, and dependence? Where does that money come from? The rest of us, is the answer, including presumably the family now fighting for a life that – as Laura noted this morning – will never be the same again.

Where is the ownership? Where is the admission or the acknowledgment that these children – the oldest was 18 – grew up in a society entirely built by modern Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The oldest dead crook was born in 2008, under the glorious reign of Brian Cowen. He was melded into what he was in the country built by Enda Kenny, Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin, and Simon Harris. At 18, this is what the country taught him he could do.

Meanwhile, Enoch Burke might not be blameless, but he’s spent more time in a jail than any one of these thugs was ever likely to. That, Minister, is on YOU.

When the Irish state wants to force you to comply, it has all the tools it needs. It can be ruthless. Where is that ruthlessness with the gurriers? Why is it reserved for the slightly batty schoolteacher?

Second, what is actually going to change?

Nothing, is the answer. You know it, dear reader, and I do. And the reason nothing will change is precisely because, as above, changing something would require an admission that what had gone before was wrong. An admission that these children of progressive Ireland are products of progressive Ireland.

That cannot happen.

So we get what we always get: The statements and the finger wagging and the declarations that something must change, while an alternative villain – this time TikTok – is quietly advanced with the connivance of Ireland’s useless media who can, they imagine, use this crisis to extort more taxpayer money for fact-checking and combatting fake news.

As readers of my work over the years will know, I rarely get very angry, and try to view this country as the black comedy show that it has been for many years. But this is different. The reaction here should be different.

And so far, it’s not at all.

One last thing, on how the reaction should be different: A special word here is needed for the Roman Catholic Church and its tolerance for this culture. Let me tell you what should happen, but will not:

These dead thugs, who attacked – accident is not an appropriate word – three sisters and a child with their vehicle, should not be given Catholic funerals, or at least not the funerals we have come to expect from that section of society. A Catholic Priest who permits the usual fuckery (that’s the only word that applies) where enormous wreaths are draped across horse-drawn coffins, and weapons and knives are brought forward as “offerings” and the church is turned into a scene from The Godfather Part 3, should be turfed out of his job. Daub the coffins with holy water if you must, and toss them in the ground. Sacraments may be necessary, but nothing else is. These five souls died doing something evil. If the Church cannot make a stand on that, what is it for?

JMG

This investigation, to be clear, is mandatory. It is mandatory because the Gardaí had contact with the car driven by the five now-deceased balaclava-wearing thugs who first stole the car that would become their coffins, and then drove it the wrong way down the motorway, head-on into a car containing three innocent adults and one innocent child.

As the Irish Times tells us:

The Irish Times understands the black BMW was driven down the M9 in the wrong direction, speeding into oncoming traffic, in two stints in the early hours of Sunday. Gardaí in a patrol car had earlier requested the vehicle to stop at about 2am in Athy, but the driver sped off.

…. Gardaí believe the BMW was driven on to the wrong side of the M9 because the driver was trying to evade gardaí and likely knew Garda patrol cars in the area would not be allowed to pursue them driving against traffic. It is understood gardaí were not pursuing the BMW at the time of the crash.

We can be sure of a couple of things: First, the Fiosrú investigation will correctly find no wrongdoing on behalf of the Gardaí, who were not near the car when it crashed and had no involvement in the accident.

Second, this certainly would not be the case had Gardaí aggressively pursued the car and attempted to stop it, but the accident had occurred anyway.

We know this because it has happened before, in recent memory. In 2021, three Dublin career criminals, Dean Maguire, 29, Karl Freeman, 26, and Graham Taylor, 31, were evading the Gardaí when they chose to flee down the M7 in the wrong direction. They were followed, in pursuit, by Garda John Francis Ryan. The three crooks crashed their car head-on into a truck and departed to the great criminal rehabilitation centre in the sky.

Garda Ryan, meanwhile, was charged after a Fiosrú investigation and sent forward for trial on charges of dangerous driving and endangerment of life. As far as I know, that case has yet to be resolved.

On this occasion, thankfully, the cops did exactly what the book now says they should: left the crooks to it. At least on this occasion, when the public were severely endangered, no Garda can be prosecuted.

Consider the incentives this creates: If you are a Garda and you try to intervene, you risk criminal sanction. If, by contrast, you stay back and do nothing, your career, reputation and bank balance are protected.

That this should happen mere days after Alison Chawke was released from prison after serving just a few weeks of a two-year sentence for trying to bite a man’s face off is especially illuminating, if not darkly hilarious. Who would be a Garda? It’s like getting paid to piss into the wind, over and over and over again.

If you want to understand how Ireland works these days, just consider what would have happened to the five now-dead scrotes in that car had their lives been saved by police intervention, arrest and charge. How long, do you think, would they have spent in prison? Well, in 2023, a fifteen-year-old arrested and charged after an incident where the car he had stolen repeatedly rammed a Garda car got… eleven months’ detention. He was, no doubt, out in six.

What’s the penalty, by contrast, for a Garda charged with “endangering life” by trying to protect it? We don’t know, but we can reasonably surmise that, in addition to whatever prison sentence is handed down, the penalty will also include loss of your career, reputation and security.

This is the society we now live in: The criminal system is harder on Gardaí than it is on criminals. And the result? Hundreds of young scrotes stealing cars, joyriding around, putting it all on TikTok, safe in the knowledge that the cops cannot pursue them. It is a sick joke, and would be genuinely funny if three innocent women and a child were not fighting for their lives in hospital right now.

The Fiosrú investigation, for my money, sums up the whole rotten edifice. You or I, dear reader, could complete that investigation in two minutes: The cops did nothing wrong, because the cops did nothing, as per policy.

Yet the investigation must be concluded anyway. All the paperwork filled in. The reports written. The witnesses interviewed. The 30-page report on the incident filed. Busywork for a system that loves paperwork far more than it loves people.

Hundreds of thousands of euro will be spent. Best of all, nobody can comment because “an investigation is ongoing”. Thus Fiosrú, set up to improve Garda accountability, manages to prove the rule that all state organisations eventually serve the opposite purpose to the one they are designed for: Instead of improving accountability, Fiosrú becomes the latest version of “lessons will be learned”-ism and provides the perfect shield for NOT answering questions.

The problem in Ireland is very simple: The criminal justice system, from the top down, is on the side of criminals rather than the public. The rhetoric around crime proves it: When crime is discussed, it must ALWAYS be accompanied by platitudes about disadvantage and deprivation, the purpose of which is to remind us that the criminal is ultimately a victim of society’s cruelty. When prison is discussed, it must always be a “last resort” and about rehabilitating the basically misunderstood scrotes who end up inside it. No criminal justice policy is complete without reference to “community policing”, which is, of course, not policing at all but a misguided attempt to imagine that your local scrote will be turned into an upstanding chap if the nice community policewoman is friendly and calls him Anto instead of Anthony.

The best bit is: You voted for all of this, and none of it. It has both been open policy for years and yet never really debated. The people who decide crime policy in Ireland are not really the voters, who remain fixated on potholes and funerals and equaly-tea, but the good folks in the Irish Penal Reform Trust, who get paid to campaign to abolish prisons and blame society for criminals’ misunderstood activities.

There should be rage in Ireland over this state of affairs. Utter rage.

But there won’t be. Because there’s an investigation underway, and it is too early to draw any conclusions.

Spare me.

JMG