A lot of listeners have specifically asked me to write about the alleged – thus it remains – gang rape of a woman in Galway last month that was carried out, per the state’s case, by two asylum seekers of Arabic extraction.
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.
“…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…”
This is a very perceptive point. If you think the recent problems Ireland has encountered will shock the establishment out of their complacency, you only have to look at the English experience to be disappointed. England has endured terrorist bombings, grooming scandals, a knife-crime epidemic, ethnic enclaves, sectarian politics, and more, all of which precipitated a generational electoral revolt in the form of Brexit, yet still they increased immigration! It’s actually mind-boggling.
Is the establishment’s intransigence because they fear validating the critique of the far right? Partly. But I highly doubt Britian would have changed course in the absence of a far-right. In Ireland, the establishment even had to invent one! I think it’s that once you import multiculturalism, there’s simply no going back. For one, you now have immigrants in the conversation arguing against a reversal, but it also just becomes untenable when a large minority of your population is of foreign extraction to insist on the values of the former monoculture. Your society will be badly destabilised by an alienated and angry immigrant population, as well as an army of sympathetic lefties.
Multiculturalism is the awkward guest at the party whom everyone has to accommodate. And it’s for that reason I would be dubious of McGuirk’s reassurances about Gaelic culture. I’ve no particular affection for it myself, but if, for whatever reason, it is found to be incompatible with multiculturalism, then it will be forced to give way.