Here’s an idea for a St Patrick’s Day drinking game. Every time Ireland’s president, Catherine Connolly, spouts some soulless globalist claptrap, take a drink of your Guinness. ‘Global citizens’ – swig. ‘Vibrant and inclusive’ – quaff. ‘Fostering awareness’ – chug. Honestly, you’ll be pissed before you know it, courtesy of the Hallmark Card pieties of the most vapid person ever to inhabit Áras an Uachtaráin.
The men of 1916 will have been spinning in their graves upon hearing Connolly’s St Patrick’s Day address. ‘We died for this?’ It was as if someone had pulled the string on a life-sized animatronic that had been fed every shit Guardian column ever written. St Patrick’s Day is more than a Mick knees-up, it’s a ‘vibrant and inclusive global celebration’ that reminds us of ‘our shared responsibilities as global citizens’, Connolly said. Glug.
Way to drain the joy from Ireland’s national day. There’s the Irish people waiting to clock off from work and hit the pub, and in swoops fun-sponge Connolly to remind them of their ‘responsibilities’ as ‘global citizens’. Rarely has the nagging tendency of the technocratic elites been on such stark display. Nothing embarrasses Ireland’s cossetted rulers more than the excesses of the plebs on St Patrick’s Day. It reminds them of the Old Ireland – drink, craic, tricolours – that they’ve spent years trying to replace with the globo-slop ideology of those sober suits of the EU. So they sidle up to the fella about to take a hearty gulp of the black stuff and say: ‘Have you considered your responsibilities to the postwar global order?’
Connolly seems to want to make St Patrick woke. She reimagines this austere 5th-century man of the cloth as some kind of NGO ponce. She recounts the famous tale of when this Romano-Brit was seized by Irish pirates and taken to Ireland to work as a sheep-herder. He was ‘trafficked across the Irish Sea’, she says, and subsequently devoted himself to ‘fostering… awareness of the consequences of slavery’. You’d think he was an overpaid project manager at Amnesty International rather than a holy man of the Dark Ages.
Reinventing St Patrick as a social-justice warrior in a smock is wild. He wasn’t some Comic Relief celeb crying over injustice – he was a devotee of Christ who believed that every mortal who failed to embrace the gospels would suffer eternal conscious torment in that lake of fire called Hell. Connolly’s vision of him as some Dublin 4 knob ‘fostering awareness’ about ‘trafficking, forced labour and displacement’ is simultaneously quaint and psychotic.
Unforgivably, Connolly marshals St Patrick as a propagandist for Ireland’s broken immigration system. She uses the Apostle of Ireland as a ventriloquist’s dummy to spout her own high-status, mid-wit beliefs about the benefits of mass immigration. His life, she says, ‘serves as a reminder of the resilience and courage of migrants, [and] the invaluable contributions that they have made, and continue to make, to the countries they now call home’.
This is such thin moral gruel. It’s ahistoricism of the most crazed kind. To speak of St Patrick’s return to Ireland as a Christian missionary in the same breath as the flow of people into Ireland today is to fully take leave of the realm of reason. Yes, many recent migrants to Ireland have played a positive role in the country. But others have not, and that’s what is worrying many Irish people. Comparing the holy liberator of the Irish from the prison of paganism with recent arrivals who while away their hours vaping in country hotels at the taxpayers’ expense is bonkers. If I was religiously inclined, I might even call it blasphemous.
Let’s be frank – Connolly is playing Ireland’s national saint as a trump card in the immigration debate. She’s essentially telling those culchies who are worried about out-of-control immigration that St Patrick was an immigrant too, so shut up. He also found himself in ‘vulnerable and dangerous circumstances’, she says. His ‘trafficking’ story ‘invites us to respond with hospitality and kindness to those suffering the consequences of war and displacement’, she cries. So that’s what she means by your ‘responsibility’ as a ‘global citizen’: it’s to zip your lip, park your concerns about porous borders, and bow down to the neo-religion of the St Patrick exploiters in Dublin’s leafiest quarters. St Patrick converted Ireland to Christianity – this godless new mob wants to convert it to the spiritless creed of managerialism.
But the Irish people are well within their rights to be concerned about mass immigration. Almost one in four people in Ireland were born elsewhere. This is well above the EU average. It’s a staggering state of affairs. Ireland is a small, not very rich country – that it has a significantly higher proportion of foreign-born residents than European powerhouses like Germany, France and Spain is mindblowing. And wholly deserving of frank debate. Many Irish people feel there has been a social and economic fraying of the nation as a result of the elites’ sacrifice of sovereign integrity to the gods of Brussels. It’s not ‘far right’ for them to think this. It’s not a snub to St Patrick either, as Connolly slyly implies.
She is trying to turn Patrick into the patron saint of globalism. She used the word ‘global’ three times in her address, and the word ‘national’ only once. Her leaden speech is a testament to the terrible goal of globalism – to negate nationhood itself. We see this across the liberal establishments of the Western world – that urge to ‘move on’ from the old dream of independent nations that are in control of their borders and their destinies, towards a new ‘utopia’ of ‘shared governance’. It’s a far cry from Éamon de Valera’s St Patrick’s Day speech of 1943, in which he extolled Ireland’s virtues as ‘an island of saints and scholars’, a ‘happy, vigorous, spiritual’ nation where ‘patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty’. Now that’s worth raising a pint to.
Connolly’s address confirmed that Ireland is in grave danger of becoming the nag of world affairs. As a ‘post-colonial society’ whose history is one of ‘famine and forced migration’, we are ‘uniquely placed’, she said, ‘to offer a valuable perspective on the challenges facing our world’. Oh give it a rest. You and Kneecap and Sally Rooney and all those preening Irish pricks on that Gaza-bound flotilla – just stop. The last thing the world needs is more sad-eyed, self-obsessed victims-turned-moralisers. Let Ireland be happy and vigorous again.
