Macron Avoids All the Hard Questions on Dublin Visit

Thursday afternoon traffic was made just that bit worse this week in Dublin as Emmanuel Macron’s security entourage did its best to jam up an already clogged city. 

Arriving on a whistlestop tour of the country, the French geriatrophile received warm coverage from the Irish press pack and leadership caste alike, visiting in the hopes of laying down the law on the Republic’s much contested corporate tax regime.

While making it amply clear his visit was primarily motivated by intentions to strip away tax levying powers of the state, he nevertheless was embraced by our elites, still glowing from the post-Brexit of not overtly being thrown under the geopolitical bus. 

In Macron’s Eurofederalist vision du monde, Ireland, or rather the 26 counties, is an Anglo-American economic waystation to be brought into line as Brussels consolidates power. None of this was borne in mind as the French dignitary swanned around the Fair City.

While he is sooner to be lynched by his own citizenry as a result of the French State’s totalitarian response to covid, sadly no gilets jaunes were present around the Merrion Street area during his saunter.

The former Rothschild investment banker finished his tour of this Europhile colony with a  meeting with President Higgins and a selection of the nation’s top intellectuals,le pauvre salaud!

The most ghastly part of his tour came in an audience with students at TCD (choreographed by Simon Harris no less) where the French President answered a variety of softball questions from the rich and the thick of Irish tertiary education.

Lamentably, no Burkean writers were able to make it past Macron’s security grunts or Trinity’s unrelenting covid restrictions. 

While it was all snowdrops and daffodils ostensibly, some of the more serious questions we ought to have been asking Macron and ourselves could have been the following:

Shouldn’t the mere hint of having our hands forced on the tax issue be taken as an act of foreign coercion?

If Macron’s love offensive fails, how quickly will his smiles change to actions conscripting us into changing our minds?

Is the future of the French Republic even that viable as the state’s military top brass muse on the prospects of a coup d’etat, and the nation’s security forces fail to stamp out a low level Islamic insurgency?

Is Macron’s Eurofederalist worldview in tatters amid the EU’s botched covid response, nevermind bullying attitude towards Hungary and Poland?

Will Irish troops be drawn into any French related conflicts such as Mali and Libya?

Did January’s hamfisted attempts to blindside the Dublin government by almost reimposing a hard border over vaccine exports not typify how conditional our relationship is with Brussels?

Etc Etc

At the best of times, the country’s corporate tax regime is hard not to despise, binding us to a lowest common denominator form of Anglo-American capitalism and the social decay that goes along with it. However, one appreciates the wisdom of not jumping out of the pan and into the fire when one examines the reality of the Eurofederalist proposition. That’s not excusing the pan though.

A foreign leader arrived in Dublin this week with the desire to abrogate any trace elements of our national sovereignty. To advance his goal of a EU superstate. Never failing to throw ourselves at the feet of any charismatic outsider, modern Ireland behaved true to form and fell prostrate.

Swaggering Eurofederalists may not trigger the same ethnic muscle memory that loyalists or British chauvinists do among Irish people when it comes to protecting national sovereignty, but they mean it as much harm. 

Macron arrived here on a political victory lap, ready and willing to suck up what remaining powers that exhausted contraption we call a state has and was greeted with tea at the Áras and smiles along Nassau Street-Quelle tristesse!