Submitted by johnh on January 31, 2007 - 20:12.

What he said.

You have only to spend a few moments on Politics.ie or PROC or certain parts of Boards before reading the considered thoughts of some knuckle-dragger culchie on the topic of keeping Ireland Irish-only. Sometimes it's straightforward neo-Nazism. Often it's the slipping tongues of Sinn Fein voters -- half a lifetime's Fridays spent in pubs on the Holloway Road gives a person insight into the way it's all Irish Freedom until the second pint causes the mask to fall and uncover nothing more noble than venal sectarianism, 'wog'-hating and misogyny.

The relatively shocking part, as Conn says, is the way these troglodytes don't even bother to keep it among themselves. In the UK and (most of) the US this racism is almost as deep but its adherents do at least shut up about it in company. Here, it's socially acceptable.

[Minor detour - at a much lower level this insularism is applied to me, too, including by some of the supposedly-enlightened crowd who read this. I claimed my Irish passport eleven years ago, finally moved over a year and a half back. Sadly I sound wrong. "You're not Irish and you never will be," said one of the attendees to me at BarCamp SouthEast the other week. It's not easy to determine, meanwhile, whether any of this is related to our total isolation here or not: when you subtract events like BarCamps and the Blog Awards, we've been out of the house to meet one or more people exactly once in 18 months.]

There's an obvious logic, obviously, to describe the fuckwittedness of the anti-immigration fools. But since when did these morons ever respond to logic?

I'm slightly more interested in considering the era of Ireland which people like me would call the dark ages and most supporters of the current government consider to be the good old days. After the revolution was strangled in infancy and replaced by a cabal of fundamentalist Christians, what was an economic disaster area continued to get worse. The census shows how this bizarre mixture -- of "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" and a farm fetish not seen before or since except in Maoist China -- resulted in people leaving in ever larger numbers. Or in other words, the victims of this medieval tosh rarely got the opportunity to fight back.

I'm strongly of the opinion that Ireland doesn't have overseas voting at least partly because Dev and Company were seeking to avoid getting bitchslapped by all the people they effectively expelled from the country by starving them out.

When I see a nation where even the people who want change never pick up the baton "because you can't change anything" and "sure all the politicians are the same", I wonder how many of them ever had anyone in their upbringing who both a) disagreed and b) didn't emigrate. Natural selection would suggest that emigration bred hopelessness, inertia and a fearsome conservatism which will take much more than the last 15 years to fix.

delicious | digg | reddit