The Long Defeat: In Further Defence of Conservatism
Last November, I wrote an article for the Burkean entitled "In Defence of Conservatism". It drew two responses, one in December of that year ("Rebuking Conservatism", 07/12/2020) and one nine months later ("Does Conservatism Pave the Way for Progressivism", 11/09/2021)....
Gaelish: A Proposal
Does Ireland exist? Is there such a country as Ireland? This question occurs to me more and more as time goes by. There is certainly a large island to the west of Britain which is denoted by that name. The...
In Defence of Conservatism
About twelve years ago, I wrote a fantasy novel by the title The Black Feather. It remains unpublished, which I put down to the fact that it is unpublishable — not to mention unreadable. It was a blast of the...
The Terrible Beauty of Pop Culture
The very first RTE television broadcast was transmitted on New Year's Eve 1961, and the first speaker was President Eamon De Valera. He expressed considerable foreboding regarding the new medium: "I must admit that sometimes when I think of television...
The Weight of Banality
Facts don’t care about your feelings. The phrase, associated with the American right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, has by now become something of a cliché among conservatives. It’s usually aimed at “snowflake” liberals who (as the theory goes) prioritise emotion over...
Why Do We Let The Left Own Irish Culture
In February of 2018, Hermann Kelly, now the leader of the Irish Freedom Party, organised an Irexit conference in Dublin’s RDS, at which Nigel Farage was the main speaker. The event received much coverage in the Irish media, and also...
Christmas: A Conservative Festival
Once a year, the modern world indulges in a celebration of everything it usually disdains: family, nostalgia, tradition, sentimentality, innocence, festivity, ceremony, and even (albeit usually indirectly) religion. Christmas is the annual return of the repressed, on a societal level....
Cultural Nationalism and Ethnic Nationalism— A Plea for Rapprochement
The most important cleavage in politics today is the cleavage between globalism and nationalism. This is hardly an original statement. Indeed, it has almost become a truism. In country after country, election after election, the burning issue is not economics,...
The Decline of Poetry
In 2016, the organisers of the Rose of Tralee announced that contestants would no longer be allowed to recite a poem as their onstage party piece. The explanation was that poetry was “slowing down the flow of the show”. The...
Reviving the Irish Revival
Many years ago, I tried to read Clive Barker’s gargantuan fantasy novel Weaveworld, which centres around a magical world hidden in a carpet. I didn't make it even half-way through its six hundred pages, and I only have a very...