Finn McRedmond’s Vibe Shift: What Comes After Woke in Ireland?

Three weeks shy of a second Trump inauguration is perhaps a decent interval to assess the past decade or so of the culture wars and how the tea lives are looking for our Emerald Isle.

A reluctantly Anglophone nation without a viable right-wing electoral alternative straddling both Brussels, London, and Washington, Ireland is an unusual place politically even before the apparent waning of woke politics.

While domestic politics is hamstringed by gombeen-level inertia and a priority list away from boutique culture war issues it would be hard for Irish politics to avoid the changing currents impacting Europe and the United States wrought by replacement migration and progressive social mores.

The Obama era coalition of Big Tech, the white liberal bourgeoise, and racial grievances lies bleeding on the floor across the Atlantic, and while Coolock or Newtownmountkennedy are not yet the Rust Belt just yet the recent nativist fightback and family referenda indicate something is stirring in the Irish psyche.

The question now is where next?

Writing in this week’s Irish Times, New Stateman columnist Finn McRedmond opines (with more honesty than her Tara Street peers) where this mood shift may take the Republic.

Warning of an intensification of the liberal centre that steered Ireland through the Brexit process nevertheless McRedmond implores Government Buildings to “pay attention to the political and social weather” lest marginalised get itchy fingers and opt for a national populist outlet.

Not the first mainstream columnist to risk their neck for doing so, McRedmond floats the boat on conversations around mass migration and even cough cough “precipitous demographic change.”

As an editorial offering the piece is not bad but heralds certain post-woke pitfalls Ireland can and likely will fall into as the cogs of history turn against both wokeness and the multilateral liberalism that preceded it.

Being last to the party when it comes to challenging woke orthodoxy presents Ireland with some problems when it comes to a near-fatal lack of a first-mover advantage as shown by Trumpian America casting off diversity and green mandates faster than Roderic O’Gorman or the boys at IBEC can tie their shoelaces.

It should also be noted that Ireland has yet to develop properly its distinct brand of anti-system globalism, one that embraces our history, and living realities and avoids the subversiveness of Anglo-American narratives directing our country towards watered-down versions of the nationalism required to dig us out of this demographic hole. 

Joe Rogan may be fine to soften up the body politics for wider political change but all the Jordan Peterson videos in the world won’t alter the current demographic trajectory in Finglas, Rathfarnham, or Mullingar.

The post-woke world offers many saboteurs happy to ride off the countercultural energy of the anti-woke right to guilt the Irish into supporting war crimes in Gaza or linking wokeness as being a secular Catholic Church nevermind those who think the demise of woke is merely an excuse to import half of Bombay.

Any argument against hyper liberalism in Ireland must be given Irish answers in the medium to long-term lest the supposed solution festers into something worse than the disease. It is not conceivable that an opportunistic Fine Gael or unscrupulous independents could take the sting out of any right-wing populist backlash by signaling as being anti-woke.

Ireland is unusual in the susceptibility of the population to broadly nativist narratives even if Middle Ireland requires credibility to carry that popular current into the Oireachtas.

Furthermore for any real critique of wokeness in Ireland and elsewhere it should be acknowledged metapolitical antecedents that gave birth to wokeism namely post-Cold War liberalism and the discrediting of any notion of European self-assertion.

While incrementalism pays gradual dividends, the precipitous demographic situation facing Ireland, Europe, and the wider West presents an almost zero-sum game when it comes to a life after wokeism.

Either we dump the ideology that led us to this place and clamp down within and at the exterior of our society to replacement migration or we will enter a place of pain heading into the second half of the 21st century and one in which newborn children will be strangers in their own country by the time they enter college.

The post-Berlin Wall interregnum of residual ideological conflict is ending and now we emerge into a world where tribe matters above where one identifies on an outdated political spectrum.

Wokeness was a vortex but at least present to young radicals a fixed system of idealism and social policing that the anti-woke side of the aisle cannot mimic. 

The culture wars are ending but into the vacuum hints at an entirely discombobulated world of blood and soil, multipolarity, and the gradual onboarding of post-human technologies.

Kudos for McRedmond for pushing the dial rightwards but that train in many respects already left the station.