Una Mullally, Empathy, and the Immigration Fetish

When Columnists do not understand the words they use

“It’s easy to look tough on immigration”, Una Mullally tells us this morning in the Irish Times. “It’s much harder”, she goes on to warn us, “to build empathy”.

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