The Unfair City of Dublin

‘In Dublin’s fair city’, runs the first line of the Irish folk song Molly Malone, ‘where the girls are so pretty’. Dublin lives up to that description, or at least it did. Since its prime, however, and victim as it now is to a nationwide political program in which its famously friendly people had no say, the city is evolving along darker lines, and the pace of change received an accelerant last week. At least one Dublin girl is unlikely to be as pretty as she was.

Events on Thursday, November 23 were depressingly familiar for two reasons. That afternoon, a man knifed three children and a woman outside a Dublin school. Rumors quickly spread that the attacker was Algerian which, in keeping with the modern world, was both true and not true.

A man arrested in connection with the attack was described by the authorities as ‘an Irish citizen who had been in the country 20 years’, which is the passport-and-paperwork definition. He is also originally from Algeria, which was the definition many ordinary Irish people were more interested in. At the time of writing, a five-year-old girl and a teacher are still in serious condition in hospital. The little girl had her throat cut, among other wounds. Had the man still been in his native Algeria, one assumes the little girl would not now be fighting for life.

Context is required. While this event would probably be unexceptional in some American cities, and not even that rare in London, this is Dublin, almost a byword for conviviality, easy relations even between strangers, and a popular tourist destination for those very reasons. I have visited three times (although not for many years) and could have vouched for an interpersonal warmth that is a come-hither tourist brochure all its own. However, the Dublin Tourist Board will have an increasingly tough task to entice visitors after last week.

Later that same evening, the unprovoked and bloody stranger attacks were the catalyst for rioting which, although modest by BLM standards in the USA, was shocking seen on the streets of Dublin. Police cars, a tram and a bus were burned out, fireworks were shot at the Garda (the Irish police force), and shops were looted. A migrant center was also torched, an action seized on by the media as evidence of something far more to be feared than a mere maniac with a knife: Nationalism.

With the terrible synchronicity often incorrectly called irony, the epicenter of the rioting was on Parnell Street, named for nineteenth-century Irish nationalist politician Charles Parnell. The stabbings themselves took place on Parnell Square East. Nationalism was a main undercurrent of these disturbances, although in a way that would have puzzled Parnell.

The response to the rioting from the politico-media complex was as immediate and forceful as any of the famous Irish popular uprisings. What is now commonly referred to as ‘the narrative’ – a word with its classical roots in ‘story-telling’ – was assembled rapidly even by media standards, and a televised speech was quickly and solemnly made by Ireland’s premier, and to say it implicitly but aggressively defended untrammeled immigration would be under-statement not natural to those affectionately known as Paddy. The Irish premier is called the Taoiseach (pronounced tea-schock) and the incumbent, Leo Varadkar, is half-caste, his father having been a Bombay-born Indian, his mother a white Dubliner.

This may seem incidental, but could also be a factor when it comes to organizing political priorities concerning immigration, and is certainly not rare for the British Isles. Britain’s Prime Minister is a Hindu, Scotland’s First Minister and the Mayor of London are both Muslims. Varadkar’s immigrant lineage instantiates a problem hard-wired into politicians from familial backgrounds outside their adopted nations. They believe that their own success proves incontrovertibly that immigration is good in itself. It must be, they think. Just look at me! Affirmative action, for many of the duskier members of the British political class, is just something that happens to other people.

Varadkar’s speech was shockingly skewed. In passing, he referred to the attack on a little girl then in intensive care, and the care assistant who bravely defended her, for 42 seconds compared with the 4min 20 he took denouncing the ‘far right’ that he held responsible for the subsequent rioting. One attack, he said, took place ‘on innocent children’, the other on ‘our society and the rule of law’. The ‘far right’ became the media trope immediately connected with the riotous evening, punctuating most headlines. I wrote here at The Occidental Observer about the chimera of the British far right. If it doesn’t exist, however, politicians are finding it expedient to invent it and act as though they wish ordinary folk to believe it does.

As always, the media echo ran to form, taking its lead from globalist mob-bosses. The ‘far-right’ were the main concern here, not a psychotic Algerian who had notably failed to integrate (integration being the Holy Grail of open-borders promoters, and equally mythical) after two decades. Many headlines featured the phrase ‘far-right’, without even the precautionary scare quotes, and a pre-fabricated narrative was simply flown in like a theater set, as Times Radio exemplifies. And stateside, whereas the US media portrayed the anarchistic fire dances of the BLM riots as though they were a provincial bar fight, the Dublin rioting was portrayed by CNN as though it were Dresden after the RAF bombed it in World War II. And this, the Irish were told, was the direct result of what Dublin Police Commissioner Drew Harris claimed as ‘far-right ideology’. His parroting of the official line, however, brought an interesting voice into play, one from which the media commissars were not expecting to hear.

Ireland — or Éire, to give its original Gaelic name — is known for its nationalistic heroes, both mythological and very real, and perhaps Conor McGregor sees himself in that legendary role. McGregor is a successful boxer and Mixed Martial Arts fighter much respected in Ireland, particularly among its fighting-age men, and his response to the Dublin riots on social media caused the Left to hit the canvas, floored by Tweets stating, as an example, that ‘Ireland is at war’, alongside criticism of the police commissioner noted above. There has been talk of McGregor running for office after he came out of his social media corner throwing punches. There is also a lot of chatter – or ‘blarney’, as the Irish call it – indicating that the police may be investigating McGregor for ‘hate speech’, of which more later.

Conor McGregor: We Are Not Losing Any More Women & Children to Twisted People Who Should Not Be in Ireland https://t.co/P56hN6THA1

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 24, 2023

The riotous response to the Dublin knife attack was not spontaneous combustion. This was a light touched to flammable material already piled high by two other recent crimes in Ireland. The murder of 23-year-old teacher Ashling Murphy last year, and the murder and beheading of two gay men also in 2022. Both committed by immigrants, these killings had already sickened a nation always grateful to have (mostly) avoided the violent horrors of Northern Ireland during The Troubles.

With these slayings in recent memory, the butchery of small children outside a school was just a little too rich for Irish blood, with results that the media reported along ideological lines becoming all too familiar. Initial speculation also showed another cardinal rule of media narration: If a foreigner commits a violent crime, it’s likely mental health issues. If an indigenous person commits a violent crime, it’s definitely far-right ideology.

People who are fearful for their communities and say as much are branded as far right, immigrants of whatever stripe enter as victims and saints as soon as they set foot on the Emerald Isle. And if an immigrant saint were needed for the narrative, surely the media could find one.

And it did!

The story had a twist the media were overjoyed to use. The knifeman was tackled by a number of passers-by, but the man who became a hero to the press overnight was a Brazilian immigrant working for a food-delivery company. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from him, as he stopped his bike when he saw the carnage unfolding, battered the attacker with his crash-helmet, and is obviously a brave man. But others were involved, already forgotten, and it is curious that an appeal set up for the Brazilian via Go Fund Me has so far raised more than one set up for the critically injured. The message is uncomplicated. Even if one immigrant tries to kill children with a large knife, the presence of another who helps stop that is worth more. Write that down, children.

Speaking of the knife attacks in Dublin and the resultant evening of anarchy, the president of political party Sinn Féin (forever linked inextricably with the IRA, or Irish Republican Army) said something so irresistibly Irish it was comic even amid the tragedy. “This the last thing you would expect to happen in Dublin on a Thursday afternoon”, she said, implying that it would have been just so Dublin on a Wednesday or a Friday, or possibly after Sunday mass. But the surprise element of the attacks has been put to good use by the Irish political class, a franchise of globalism as they so clearly are.

The Irish version of the deep state seems to have been instructed to use the Dublin attacks as an urgent catalyst for legislation which has in fact been coming for some time. This is validation for the hate-speech laws for which Ireland seems to have been chosen by the EU to road-test. Dublin incident even provided one of those. As PM Varadkar happily noted, “The bill would give the government more power to prosecute individuals who post “reckless” comments or memes that “incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons.”

The political imperative never to let a good crisis go to waste has been variously attributed, but the political class today may as well have it tattooed on their arms. Within 24 hours of the knifing of children in broad daylight outside a school in a peaceable city, the attendant political advantage had been picked up and booted like a rugby ball. Ireland’s Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill 2022 is the harshest in Europe, and there is a sense that Ireland is being used, as scientists used to write in Latin, in laboratorio, just to test how things proceed, given the theory. But the bill has been easing its way through the Irish political process for a while, slinking by and trying not to attract attention. As with many of these Orwellian additions to legal systems that worked perfectly well before, there is a sense that the political class would like to hurry things along.

This is what is being proposed:

“Racism and xenophobia are direct violations of the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, principles upon which the European Union is founded and which are common to the Member States.”

One of the punishable crimes relating to “xenophobia” is merely “the commission of an act referred to in point (a) by public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material,” which can roughly apply to political pamphlets criticizing the influx of immigrants and refugees in Ireland.

But don’t worry. It’s for your own good: In June, Irish Green Party Sen. Pauline O’Reilly was panned for a speech defending the bill in which she admitted, “We are restricting freedom, but we’re doing it for the common good.”

Now there have even been suggestions that such legislation might be applied retrospectively. I had to have a second look at that. If I were a cartoon character, I would have rubbed my eyes. This is what it means:

You performed action x in 2014, when action x was not illegal.

A law has just been passed in 2023 making action x illegal.

You are under arrest for action x performed in 2014.

Is there not something tremendously wrong in this warping of the law to defy time itself? It is obvious who this archeologically applied legislation will be applied to, and they will include those on Parnell Street protesting the slaughter of innocents.

So, then. From Dublin’s fair city to a very unfair city indeed, at the risk of sounding childish. Everyone has heard a child complain – and may even have been that child — that a parental decision which has not gone their way is ‘not fair’. We recognize the charge of ‘unfairness’ as a childish response to minor disappointment, and we smile. What has happened to Dublin, however, is not fair in a far deeper sense than the small concerns of children, or ‘childer’, as the unreconstructed accent of older Irish people would say it.

It is not fair to the White Irish, who planted a beautiful, historical seed of a city through their own communitarian instincts and watched it blossom into one of the most popular tourist magnets in Europe, and at one time a beautiful place to live, vibrant with creativity rather than sullen Muslims and blacks. It is not fair to the very old and the very young, who are now just that little bit more frightened to walk familiar streets than they were. Even the Sky News’ report includes vox pop saying that Dublin city center is not now safe to walk at night. And it is certainly not fair to combined notions of race, nationhood, and sovereignty, which are not yesterday’s focus-group wheeze, but have grown by accretion and patriotic attention for centuries.

In what used to be called ‘olden times’, if a country was invaded, it not only had the right to defend itself and repel invaders, its men were commanded to do so by the monarch. Now, those voices of command issue from castles in different countries from that being invaded, and with different instructions. The enemy does not stand outside the gates now, but is active inside, voted in as they were by a populace they successfully duped. ‘Better a thousand enemies outside the house’, runs an Arab proverb, ‘than one inside’.

Legend has it that there are no snakes in Ireland due to their expulsion by St. Patrick in the fifth century, an early example of pest-control, perhaps. The Irish — the real Irish, not arrivistes granted Irish passports — are beginning to approve of his methods. But that apparent absence of venomous serpents on the Emerald Isle very much depends on where you look for them. I suggest starting with the nest of vipers which is the Irish political class.