Ireland Election Outcome: plus ça change…

The Irish general election took place on November 29th, yet government formation talks have only recently concluded whereby the new government will be a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael coalition supported by some independents. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are so close to a majority that they can rely on like-minded independents and will not be reliant on nationalist or conservative independents. Such would have been the only good outcome for nationalists.

The new government will be made up of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but even if Sinn Féin was in government instead, policy would be largely the same. As mentioned in the preview of the Irish election, most parties are woke. Ireland is a one-ideology State in which a change of government is not meaningfully possible.

Wokeism: Post-modern Fascism

While it is said that Ireland is governed by “the liberal centre” or that it has never had a far-right government, these claims are not true. While Ireland has never had a dictatorship, its nationalism of the 1930s was not dissimilar from fascism, while its current wokeism could be said to be derived from fascism.

Both fascists and wokeists deny that there is a transcendent source of truth and believe that truth is a social construct. Freedom of speech is denied in a fascist regime, while under wokeism it is denied more subtly through speech codes and political correctness. In general, both fascists and wokeists stress the supremacy of group identity and oppose the dignity of the individual, deny the transcendental Judeo-Christian God, and favour natural and New Age religions, and support environmentalism.

Ireland now has three main political parties: Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Sinn Féin. It is worth considering how these parties represent the duality of fascism and wokeism by comparing their policies of the 1930s with the present.

Fianna Fáil were initially led by Éamonn de Valera, with the main policies of his Fianna Fáil governments between 1932 and 1948 being the banning of contraception, extending the marriage bar of women in employment, starting a trade war with Britain, and introducing a constitution which banned divorce, recognised a woman’s place in the home, and made irredentist claims on Northern Ireland. De Valera sent condolences to Germany on the death of Hitler.

Fine Gael was founded as a merger between Cumann na nGaedheal, the Blueshirts, and the National Centre Party. The Blueshirts were founded by Eoin O’Duffy, who was also the first leader of Fine Gael. He attended the Montreux fascist conference of 1934, sought a corporatist state that would replace democracy, and led a volunteer brigade in support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was then led by Seán Russell, who collaborated with Nazi Germany, was trained by the Abwehr in Germany, and was to land in Ireland as part of Operation Dove, before which he died of a burst stomach ulcer on a U-boat and was buried at sea. He had a statue erected at Fairview Park in Dublin at which modern Sinn Fein leaders attend commemorations.

Nationalised parties, media, NGOs

In the 1930s there was a general uniformity between the parties which was nationalist, conservative, and corporatist. They are nowadays uniform, just woke and globalist. Parties are in favour of, and are branches of, a neo-corporatist State. There now pertains nationalised political parties which are predominantly State-funded with extreme limits on private funding; recent laws made the continuation of State-funding to parties (and therefore viability) based on running at least 40% women candidates.

There also pertains a plethora of Government-Organised Non-Governmental Organisations (GONGOs), which have supplanted civil society. These include various feminist, gay, and transgender activist groups such as the National Womens’ Council of Ireland, the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, and Trans Equality Network Ireland. These GONGOs operate as quasi-official advisory groups, and were instrumental in introducing same-sex marriage, abortion, and gender self-identification laws.

The extent of State influence in media can be seen in the dominant size of Raidío Telifís Éireann (RTÉ) which is a State-owned company. Figures for 2023 show that it recorded total revenues of €344.0 million; of this, €193.3 million was raised from the television licence fee, which is a flat tax levied on owning a television, while commercial revenue was €150.7 million. This compares to the revenues of commercial media such as The Irish Times (€115 million), Mediahuis – the owner of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent- (€51.94million); Virgin Media Television (€59.2 million). The Business Post Group had revenues in 2022 of €20.33 million.

These figures demonstrate that the Irish media is dominated by the State-funded RTÉ. Furthermore, it was recently revealed that a government scheme tasked with giving grants to independent required such outlets to cover certain favoured topics.

A development over the last fifteen years has seen legislation sometimes outsourced to “Citizens’ Assemblies” – constitutionally unstipulated, government-created, GONGO-influenced pseudo-consultative bodies; these assemblies invariably recommend woke changes to the law even if such proposals are not supported by the general population. RTÉ plays a critical role in propagandising for these policies which are then supported by the main parties.

It is therefore clear that different State-funded parties, media, and GONGOs are branches of the same woke, corporatist structure. The pertinence of Irish political conformity has not changed, merely the nature of the conformity has changed from nationalism to wokeism.