Diversity in an Irish Town; The Great Replacement and the Six Counties

Dublin’s bank holiday rally just past is indicative of a seashift in national opinion with the Irish quickly registering an unexpected volkish volte-face against mass migration previously unthought of.

The cat is not just out of the bag but is currently clawing to death its owner when it comes to public polling on migration as ethno-nationalist emotions are uncorked within a populace, a sentiment that any uninformed observer would have thought as almost being extinct two years ago.

With cynical Tory politics sending busloads of Afghans to Connolly Station thus flipping the migration issue on its head for Dublin policymakers there is a general feeling of normalisation on anti-plantation politics in the days leading up to the European and local elections.

The disorganised Highland charge of independent-led populism now underway ironically adds a chaos factor to the political atmosphere with the lack of a clear safety valve only buoying street-level activity into more… ’combustible’ forms.

Roderic O’Gorman and friends have accidentally kicked a petrol canister onto a type of tribal reawakening comparable to the H-Block, Easter Week and the cancellation of Garth Brooks concerts at Croke Park as the Irish nation finds voice through gaggles of marching citizens.

George Nkencho, Aisling Murphy, Lisa Smith, Peter Casey, Yousef Palani, Ebun Joseph; We’ve encountered more flashpoints than we care to remember, all leading up to the release of culturally cathartic energy on our streets. This is just for starters.

These changes pose many difficult questions for us safe in the bosom of the Free State but what about our missing green field in the North?

Even without the prospect of millions of foreigners arriving, the northern state is in a period of transition caught between the rotting away of Orange rule, a post-Brexit tussle between Dublin, Brussels and London, nevermind an age old sectarian calculus no amount of liberal rhetoric and photo ops with the Clintons can mask over. 

And that is without bringing up ingrained paramilitarism and the ever present hand of MI5.

For those wishing to ignore the North it should be remembered that partitionism has always been a mug’s game, with migration control (i.e. our very demographic survival) impossible without being administered on an all-island basis.

Anti-migration nationalism either exists from Listowel to Lisburn or it doesn’t exist at all with the end of partition the last and perhaps most formidable of foes the Irish may face if we wish to exist on this island into the coming century.

You don’t have to be a romantic nationalist or a Provo appreciator to comprehend the strategic imperative to reintegrate the North with the presence of British security forces a 15-minute drive from Dundalk the ultimate hindrance on any true identitarian order taking power in the Republic. 

Would the same state that oversaw Rotherham sit quietly as a future nationalist government in Dublin did what needed to be done to safeguard an Irish-Ireland decades hence?

Does the ability to influence Ireland matter more or less to the British government or Euro-Atlantic alliance in a world of exploding geopolitical tensions with China and Russia?

Who do you think Leo Varadkar would have called if November’s rioters stormed Leinster House or got access to a Defence Forces armoury?

The North is an underappreciated political jungle with the ability to chew and spit out ideologies left or right with its sectarian matrix and attachment with the mercurial entity known as the British security state.

A full blown municipal crisis in Derry over the tokenistic appointment of Kenyan-born SDLP councillor Lilian Seenoi-Barr are the pebbles before a rockslide as the statelet’s tribal binary comes into contact with 21st century style identity politics it is culturally unprepared for.

What has transpired in the Republic since East Wall could be childsplay if the same reaction is juxtaposed north of the border, with the ethno-nationalist feeling nurtured by republicanism providing a metapolitical springboard to an eventual hard right fightback. A fact that smarter Marxists realise.

Some factors to consider as the era of replacement migration reaches the North:

Loyalism’s Last Stand

The political (great)grandsons of Ed Carson have seen better days, as the splintering of the DUP’s core vote over the Windsor Agreement is compounded by the downfall of Jeffrey Donaldson. 

Against a pan-nationalist coalition running the gamut from SF to the centre that has captured regional administration, unionism is instead bifurcating into moderate and radical camps as the DUP itself stumbles from disaster to disaster.

Just like the state itself, unionism is running out of steam intellectually and is increasingly reliant on Tommy Robinson-style joke figures like Jamie Bryson as it negotiates a formal (and likely doomed) alliance with the British populist right. 

Expect some of the more hardline elements to fall into ear-bleeding white nationalist rhetoric in the coming decades as some of the UDA narco outfits run up against, or even may try to integrate, new migrants. 

Also bear in mind the small role a stagnant British far right may play in the final few years of political loyalism. 

As argued before, from the National Front in the 1970s to Dowson’s Britain First of recent history, loyalism is the graveyard of British nationalism with the complicated web of backroom deals and informants the death knell to naive political tourists from the so-called British mainland.

However as with anything unionist related, expect London politics and spooks to always pull loyalism’s chain as required.

Derry and Belfast A Tale of Two Cities?

Having its natural economic hinterland cut off by the border, nevermind having a slew of human rights abuses committed by the British state, did a lot to justifiably discredit partition in Derry with the 70% Catholic town feeling already different to a more cosmopolitan Belfast when it comes to the early states of (neo) plantation dynamics.

More so than Belfast, Derry has a static working-class population dispersed in communitarian estates as well as a lingering sense of paramilitarism with very little pull factor for inward migration. 

Low-level ethnic-cleansing is rather shamefully still a feature in the town that was both the birthplace and the graveyard for the Civil Rights movement with the fallout from the recent imposition of an African mayor perhaps a tell-tale sign of what happens when the city and the region’s tight-knit political machines clash with an entirely alien form of identity politics.

The new African Mayor in Derry doubles down on calling people "terrorists" for protesting against illegal migrants & Open-Borders

This is why it's critical to vote for Irish candidates & not for foreigners who will call you a "terrorist" for not wanting open-borders 🇮🇪 pic.twitter.com/cNH8YEbY7A

— Paul (@PeterPaulGuy) April 30, 2024

Derry will be a hard nut for globalism to crack in the coming decades for a variety of historical and socio-economic reasons. 

When Rackets Collide

Think post-ceasefire politics in the six counties is just about John Hume memorials and American tourists touring around Game of Thrones film sets? 

Then think again.

From UDA drug gangs running the streets of East Belfast and almost blowing up Simon Coveney to the crucifixions by local hoods, nordie politics while lacking the semtex-based qualities of yesteryear is still a threshing mill of sectarian political machines and narco-cliques.

Adding third world migrants en masse to this milieu is just a recipe for trouble.

In the North the banlieue is very still native with the prospect of internationalised Nigerian, Pakistani or Turkish gangs running up against local youths and under the surface rackets a major curveball to any plantation for the 21st century.

The more gombeen elements of the green and the orange are busily hoovering up rent from newly arrived migrants as old communitarian hubs for both sides of the divide are quietly hipsterifiied.

Imagine Marseille but if the Arab gangs were replaced by Irish and loyalist youth with the reaction of the criminal and racketeering underworld to diversity an unspoken factor in how the region at large shapes up in the era of replacement migration. 

Republicans’ Metapolitical Crisis

Socialist republicanism’s heavy duty response to embryonic right-wing nationalism in Ireland is less an ideological commitment to anti fascism but an implicit recognition of the fact rooted forms of nationalism mark the ideological deathknell to their Marxism that wears the green jersey.

The republican left and Stormont-bound SF may have grassroots and a strong institutional game in the case of the latter but are facing a rebellious core constituency as demographics eat into the so-called Catholic majority paraded around by supposedly non-sectarian republicans.

The mainstream thinking behind a border poll is already a decade plus out of date with recent migrants preferring the English connection by a 4:1 majority, and would likely be a defining bloc.

National liberation almost always eats the left. The hoods who firebomb PSNI police vans can and will do likewise to refugee centres the moment the social impact becomes obvious. The left rides a tiger when it dabbles in Irish republicanism with the ideological coalition between socialist politics and ethno-nationalist defenderism a price too high for many Marxists before.

Don’t rule out some republican-left groups leaning in on migration control rhetoric as evidenced by recent policy documents from the IRSP as republicanism yet again faces up to the reality of ethnic-politics clashing with the universalism of Wolfe Tone.

Conclusion: The North Begins Again?

The diplomatic nosedive between Dublin and London the past month is only set to get worse regardless of a Starmer premiership, as Ireland at large faces being torn asunder in regulatory battles between the EU and UK. 

This chasm is opening while loyalism is its weakest political ebb and more prone to street violence and the island at large is being coaxed into unity through a form of unity preferred by the Atlantic alliance and Dublin liberals.

The Great Replacement adds to this confusional turmoil, complicating an already unsettled status quo doomed to be dragged along by the upheaval of the multipolar age.

Getting a sudden foothold in the Republic was one stepping stone for right-wing nationalism but it is high time to get thinking about that quadrant of our island still bearing the demographic scars of plantation.

The political project of Carson, Craig and Paisley is biting the dust one way or another as outside powers seek to bed down the six counties as a safe space for liberalism as recent rumbling in the Republic show just how quickly supposedly docile Irish can turn once it becomes socially acceptable.

The North will be the making or breaking of us, not just to our disparate movement but a nation at large.