by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Saturday’s protests for and against immigration perfectly captured the tensions of our time.
On one side there were thousands of working-class people waving the Irish tricolour and belting out the Irish national anthem. On the other there was a gaggle of Trinity thin kids and sun-starved lefties, the kind of people who put the soy into socialism. One was a witch (she / they) who was there to ‘protest against Nazi cunts’. They chanted about ‘revolution’ yet it looked like a strong gust of wind might take them out. ‘32 counties, 69 genders’, said one banner, which I think means they want a United Ireland in which people with cocks get to cosplay as lesbians. Ah, just as Pádraic Pearse envisioned.
This was Dublin on Saturday. There was a huge protest against the government’s immigration policy, and a counter-protest of self-styled radicals chanting ‘Refugees welcome here’. And it was about the most perfect distillation of the ‘culture war’ I’ve ever seen. Crowds of working people rallying behind the national flag as the virtuous of Dublin 4 flipped a collective middle finger at them and branded them fascist scum. There it was, in glorious technicolor, the great clash of our time: that between ordinary people worried about mass immigration, and an elevated class of high-status opinion-havers for whom borders are so 20th century.
The main protest was against the immigration policy overseen by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent years. Immigration is the hottest topic in Ireland right now. Swarms of Irish people are both bemused and troubled that Ireland’s foreign-born population is heading towards a fifth of the whole population. They’ve watched as sleepy green towns have become 35 per cent foreign-born almost overnight. No, they’re not racist, just curious: curious to know how this happened, why it happened, and whether they get a say in it.