Debunking The Guardian’s Version of Irish Identity 

A recent piece in Britain’s leading publication in moral lecturing and liberal preening The Guardian is reminding Irish people, amid a wave of nativist rage and anger, that they are in fact mongrels or “a mixed bunch” and should therefore embrace open borders.

Titled ‘Who are the Irish?’, the author, an Irish History Professor in Queen’s University Belfast Maurice J. Casey who specialises in ‘modern Ireland, queer history and the history of international communism’, foists his gay race communist version of Irish identity onto his readers. 

He writes of growing up in Cahir, Co Tipperary where an “estimated 30% of the population were born outside Ireland.”

Is this a bad or good thing, you may ask.

He doesn’t quite say, but elaborates further on his experiences with his multiethnic peers in school. 

He mentions the Eastern Europeans of Ukrainian and Baltic descent collectively speaking Russian, and expresses the sadness he felt for a Polish friend who didn’t quite know whether they were truly Irish in the insular identitarian Republic. 

But far from Cahir being a lone multicultural town amid a monocultural land, Casey extols the fact that it is “perhaps impossible, now, to find a community in Ireland without an immigrant population.” 

Casey claims that “the island’s geographic position in the Atlantic has always connected it to global flows of people, goods and culture”, before adding that, “for centuries – not decades – Ireland has hosted immigrant communities.” 

However, far from being an inevitability due to geography, Ireland’s recent wave of migration is anything but.

With only one airport and no direct flights from many of the countries migrants tend to come from such as Nigeria, India, Jordan etc., Ireland should be an outlier in terms of low migratory inflows. 

In fact, despite such a massive uptick in migration in recent years, Ireland has managed to maintain relative homogeneity with its location acting as a bulwark to mongrelisation. 

According to a scientific report in 2018 titled ‘The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland’, Ireland’s geographic position in the “North-Western seaboard of Europe” actually favours “genetic homogeneity” with “several traits found to be at high frequencies within the Irish, compared to the mainland European populations, including; cystic fibrosis, lactase persistence, coeliac disease, galactosaemia, and multiple sclerosis.” This, and other studies, imply that at least 80-85% of the native Irish genome is Gaelic Irish, existing here since pre-Viking times, making us one of the most homogenous nations in history.

It’s often noted that because Ireland never colonised or subjected any group of people to oppression it shouldn’t be tarred with the same the same brush of other nationalities such as the French and British. Invectives of ‘coloniser’ or accusations they suffer from an inbuilt ‘white guilt’ is usually followed by promoting mass immigration as an antidote.

You would think the Irish would be immune from such tropes. 

Alas, amid growing waves of migration settlement in small towns and villages coinciding with greater attempts by Irish State forces to clamp down on those objecting to such unwelcome impositions, international onlookers are baffled as to why the relatively peaceful and geopolitically docile Irish have to put up with such displacement. 

US media personality Tucker Carlson once said in his usual inquisitive and blunt fashion: “Why are you doing this [mass migration, white guilt] to the Irish? 

“They are the indigenous population of their island and you’re watching them die and replacing them with people from the third world.” 

However, this is a false narrative according to Casey. 

In Casey’s world, and in the minds of most left-wing academics, the opposite is true. 

In an inversion of spectacular proportions it is actually the Irish who, more than anyone, should embrace multiculturalism.

According to Casey: “Ireland’s history of diversity predates the state itself.” 

His proof?

A British Pathé Reel of the “Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an early jazz band, at Dublin port in October 1921.”

The belief that the presence of a single Jazz Band in Dublin port in 1921 shows that Ireland has been a sea of diversity for centuries heretofore is verifiable proof, if one were needed, that the standards and acumen of contemporary academia is about as sacrosanct as the journalistic requirements at The Guardian. 

While no official census was taken in 1921, it’s safe to assume that well over 90 per cent of the Island in the 1920s was White Irish, and no amount of British Pathé Reels negates that fact. 

While the author notes that there were close to 30,000 immigrants in Ireland at the time of independence, in 1913 the founder of the Sinn Féin movement and President of Dáil Éireann until his tragic death Arthur Griffith decried the preponderance of the non-native population of “two-and-a-half per cent” as “too great a percentage for a country like ours.” 

Casey further develops this tract by explaining that because of Ireland’s history of emigration a new form of national consciousness, not of nativism, but of shared “intertwining migrant histories” should emerge in direct contrast to “far-right illusions.” 

Eschewing ethnos as a concept worthy of pride, Casey decries the saying “Ireland belongs to the Irish” describing it as a “far-right slogan.” 

“The Irish”, in this case, signifies an imagined “Irish race” whose “purity” requires protection,” he says in a derisory tone. 

The leader of Ireland’s 1916 uprising Padraig Pearse, who declared the Irish Republic at the steps of the GPO, who coined this supposedly “far-right slogan”, used it as a rallying cry in the years preceding the upheaval in central Dublin: 

“Nothing that has happened or that can ever happen can alter the truth of it. Ireland belongs to the Irish. We believe, then, that it is the duty of Irishmen to struggle always, never giving in or growing weary, until they have won back their country again.” 

Indeed, far from being “imagined” Pearse was fully conscious of the Irish as a “race that played a big part in early European history.” 

To suggest this sentiment is somehow a recent phenomenon grown from reactionary forces to recent inflows of foreign nationals suggests the Irish History Department in Queens should consider recalling Casey for his historically constipated neo-Marxist ramblings. 

Further on in the piece, he implies that “racism has a long history in Ireland and the diaspora” citing an article outlining US Vice President and current presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ familial ties to the Anglican Ulsterman slave owner Hamilton Brown. 

Again, how the actions of a Scots-Irish planter, whose sole reason for being on the land was to displace the native Catholic Irish from the most hitherto Gaelicised province in Ulster, proves a long-standing association of Ireland with racism is beyond this writer’s comprehension. 

As such, Casey ends his bizarre ahistorical tripe by asserting that Ireland’s “migrant story” shows how incomplete Irish identity is and further “reveals how solidarity is an active choice we make.” 

Speak for yourself, Professor. 

For “the right of the Irish to political independence”, according to Arthur Griffith,  “never was, is not, and never can be dependent upon the admission of equal right in all other peoples.” 

By overturning Ireland’s history and ignoring the sentiments of her past leaders Casey has managed to concoct an imagined version of Irish identity to conform to his preserve academic queer and Marxian abstractions. 

Par for the course for The Guardian.