The New Plantation of Ireland

It is interesting how Government and elected politicians will decry working-class attempts to stop the plantation of their communities with outsiders as ‘intimidation’ and ‘racist’ because they are loud, but shy away like cowards when wealthy communities stop the plantations in their areas because they are effective.

Working class Dublin and small rural villages have long been the punching bag of Government policy because these communities lack the institutional skill to navigate the corridors of power in the same way the people of Killiney and Malahide can. As Gript were right to point out, the self-same Ministers who are trying to browbeat Dubliners into submission (and no doubt, signal to the ego-stroking fantasists in the NGO sector) have had no issue with leading the charge in stopping dead halting sites in their areas, or making sure that everyone knows there won’t be a Direct Provision centre in their area.

Minister O’Gorman, Minister Harris, and others, are clear that they support an ephemeral “right to protest” but believe that protests should be inefficacious releases of tension, all in the hopes things will go away. When thousands of people protested outside the RDS over new draconian Covid-restrictions, the restrictions didn’t end. Never, at any point, did local communities meetings with Government officials ever result in the planting of migrants being reversed —rather state agencies use these delaying tactics to dissipate tensions, to create inertia, all the while they continue the act of moving migrants in. 

In contrast, the actions that successfully stopped migration into local areas was a continued placard-and-boycott in Oughterard, and (unfortunately) the attack on the refugee centre in Finglas. This is not to condone the actions of those who felt pressured into undertaking such acts in Finglas, but when Government plays dirty and singles your community out for plantation, is it unreasonable to suspect someone may believe that to be the only sensible recourse?

If Government doesn’t want to have to deal with “intimidatory protests” or criminal damage to property, then Government needs to treat Rural Ireland and Working Class Dublin with the same respect and courtesy and apprehension it treats Dalkey or Howth with. If locals in Killiney don’t want asylum seekers in their community, Ballymun and Finglas and every other place in the country has that very same right. 

The Establishment (and I include Sinn Féin) will be going into overdrive through the next year to struggle to meet the farcical commitments it has made to house the world —in encouraging  foreigners to come to Ireland by circulating material in dozens of languages, in promising them a house within four months of arriving on these shores.

Sinn Féin is already feeling the bite, as the communities which they built their political party off finally revolt against the liberal policies of a middle-class which Sinn Féin is seeking to capture —they went so far as to admit this in an article in the Phoenix where Sinn Féin issued an ultimatum to the East Wall Residents to stop criticising refugees and to focus on Fianna Fail and Fine Gael or go without Sinn Fein’s organisational help. East Wall promptly told them to take a hike.

And so as we head into 2023 the dividing line that we have long said existed becomes clearer and clearer —either you are on the side of Ireland and the Irish, or you are against us. 

“Nothing that has happened or ever can happen can alter the truth of it —Ireland Belongs to the Irish.”