Soft Power and Lessons from the Irish Left

The proliferation of the Left’s various non-governmental bodies is something we on the right regularly make refrain towards, as an explanation in how they have successfully subverted the social and cultural life of the country.

Whether it has been through the trade unions, academia, the media, or agitation groups, there are dozens upon dozens of them. They are varying in size and clout, but all pushing the broader left-wing narrative.

As of this moment, there exists a bare and weak imitation of such, on the right. While we do what we can at the Burkean, we are a student publication and, though we like to believe we do our part in ideologically priming and preparing the next generation of activists of the Right, only the delusional would think we are but a drop in the ocean. Our meeting with the Department of Justice a number of months ago on their hate speech consultation appeared little more than them doing their best to seem unbiased. As we believed at the time, our submissions and reservations were by-and-large pushed aside.

It should be said that I am of the opinion our submissions were minutely successful, as during our meeting with officials from the Department we were informed that there were several possibilities such as a stand-alone act (instead it is likely to be an amendment to existing legislation); that one could be punished for grievances inferred by those not party to situation (that if A and B had a disagreement, C could complain it was racially motivated and this would be taken into consideration); and that there will be certain protections for “political” speech. 

I am not saying the legislation is good  – I believe it to be catastrophically stupid, but I am saying that it is not as bad as it could have been – in much the same way a cancer diagnosis could be worse if they told you it was fatal, rather than being treatable.

Though back to my original point – Gript has broken ground in establishing an overtly socially conservative media outlet, professional and reasonably successful, though some of its published articles would benefit from a higher degree of quality scrutiny and I personally disagree with some of their editorial stances.

That said, its readership is by and large miniscule compared to what the Left has at its disposal – some estimates of web traffic would place their readership at 300,000 per month. A very successful feat for a publication so young, yet to compare it to the likes of the Irish Times (with an estimate of twenty million visits per month) highlights the scale of the challenge before us.

This challenge is not posed solely to media either – while there are some encouraging signs in other spheres, such as the establishment of the Irish Council for Human Rights by Tracey O’Mahoney (not to be confused with the “Irish Centre for Human Rights,” the “Irish Centre for Civil Liberties,” or the “Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission,”). The Irish Council for Human Rights has raised at the time of writing nearly €90k in crowdfunding and has a rather impressive roster on its advisory board.

It is again, however, rather small in scope – focused on challenging lockdown restrictions, and anticipated attempts to make vaccination necessary to maintain any quality of life regarding work or worship (that is, that the Government will make going unvaccinated so burdensome and unwieldy that one’s quality of life would suffer greatly) and a similar organisation, the Immigration Control Platform, is essentially defunct.

Our work now, in having drawn quality activists into the nationalist-right, is to funnel those energies into building a machine which can sustain itself long-term. Not simply a political vehicle but creating the social and cultural institutions which can begin the work of renewing the social fabric torn asunder by subversives on the far-left.