The Belfast cumann of Fianna Fáil wishes the Orange Order a happy July 12th (with a lovely photo of uniformed men and boys in brown shirts marching behind British terrorist – yes, terrorist – flags).
“Belfast Fianna Fáil wish all members of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland a happy 12th of July. If you’re celebrating today, we hope it’s a joyful and peaceful day for your families and your communities.
Fianna Fáil supports calls for the 12th July to become an Irish national holiday, in the same way we support St Patrick’s Day also being recognised as a national holiday across Ireland. We must cherish the wealth and diversity that exists across our island.”
One presumes they mean “diversity” like that shown below.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Even if stated that – as an historicism – ‘Orangemen’ fought with the yeomanry against the United Irishmen in the 1798 rebellion, in the year 2013 the Order is – at base – a sectarian organisation: Fianna Fáil – long devoid of republican ideology or moral fortitude – should be consigned to the dustbin of history!
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One could only happen for the latter but FF and FG have their political roots in the old Irish Parliamentary Party as much as the revolutionary-era Sinn Féin and those roots go DEEP. FF is not the problem as such. Ireland’s political culture which gives rise to the likes of FF, FG and Labour is the real problem.
On the Orange Order one is struck (as others have mentioned) by the lack of condemnation from the Protestant Churches of the order’s behaviour. I might suggest that the Orange Order is to the Anglican and Presbyterian church leaderships in Ireland what the religious orders were to the Catholic church leadership in times past (and still are to a lesser extent). What is an Orangeman but a Christian Brother for Protestants? Just a thought.
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I don’t know: I was really just trying to figure out in my head the nature of one political party guilty of economic treason endorsing organisation of racist bigots! Feeling suitably smug having beaten my boyfriend in a race to the nearby Páirc na bhFianna near UCD, it struck me how it’s perhaps less about religion than identity that working class loyalists are protesting – fear – they’ve been let down by the 1998 Agreement as much as low wage workers in the 26 counties have seen the “tiger” years bypass them in favour of the all-important middling class voters, north and south. The result has been and will be an ever widening of incomes, generations of low wage families competing with federal citizens and naturalized Africans, Chinese, Arabs – creating a carbon copy of the failed social experiment seen in rapacious 20th century European colonial superpowers: what will happen in the 2030s onwards are race riots in north Dublin – all directly in opposition to the ideal An Phiarsaigh 7srl, namely a tolerant, pluralist, Irish speaking, representative republic – not a multicultural, conformist, monolingual, federal confessional state!
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Fianna Fáil in Belfast is trying to create space for itself by nudging aside the SDLP and posing as a sort of Nationalist Alliance Party. Very much the plan of local cumann activists. At the leadership level in Dublin they really couldn’t care less as long as nothing is done which will embarrass the party nationally. Can’t see it as much of a electoral game-plan but the local FF honcho in the city is the son of a prominent Unionist journalist and newspaper editor so it might work (though probably not).
I’ve never understood the capitalist rationale behind young people in Poland being forced to emigrate to Ireland to take up jobs while young people in Ireland are forced to emigrate to Australia to take up jobs, while young people in Australia are forced… and so on and so forth. It renders human beings to the level of commodities on an international labour market: buy low, sell high. Surely the responsible capitalist dream is to create jobs for people in situ, in their own communities, so that those people and their communities are enriched through better lifestyles, opportunities, heath, education, etc. And what of those left behind? Poland apparently now has the villages and towns filled with old people the way Ireland did in time past because all the young folk have left for elsewhere. Actually the same is happening again in some rural communities here. Socialism and social-democracy is surely opposed to the socio-economic culling of local communities? Yet many on the Left are silent. The exploitation of the immigrant is terrible but it is more than an individual story. Those left behind are victims too as are those displaced by the immigrant.
Ireland was rendered as lesser nation with the continuous loss of generation after generation of its brightest and best. Poland, Lithuania, Nigeria, etc. will be the same. Only the old and the corrupt elite will be left behind.
If even Sweden – the great left-wing hope of the liberal west – can experience the worse effects of multiculturalism, then what hope anglo-centric, right-wing, conservative and intolerant Ireland? I fear you will probably be proved right 😦
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Succinctly put! An open and honest debate about immigration let alone multiculturalism has never been had in this country and dissenters from the convention are immediately labelled racist particularly by publicly funded agencies. Your point about emigration can easily juxtaposed with the essentially government funded immigration is what is! Others (like my boyfriend) are too equivocal to describe it in its’ proper historical context: 21st plantation of Ireland! We’re not aloud as a society to differentiate between ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘migrant worker’ (racist), we’re not allowed to insist that the state’s primary school teachers speak Irish (racist), we were not allowed to vote ‘no’ to Nice Treaty I (racist) and so under! All of this nullification of debate will lead to it’s natural conclusion in town centres around this country and broadcast throughout the world by a media controlled by an orthodoxy that associates nationalism with racism, patriotism with exclusivity and conformity with dissent! A hopeless case unfortunately.
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Actually that should have been “nonconformity”! -:) Yeah, beyond tragedy really: Ireland is no less or more racist than other countries and terrible instances of racism go under-reported (part of the establishment-narrative of not openly discussing immigration) but then it’s not just the pace of change over just 15 years, it’s addition of joblessness – but perhaps it was all inevitable – either way you’re right, it’ll all end badly – ní fios!
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One of the saddest reasons I have seen for supporting mass immigration to Ireland, and why we should welcome it, was from several anglophone extremists commenting on an article on TheJournal.ie (a site that seems to have become the “Daily Mail” of Irish online commentary such is the gutter-like level of opinions expressed there). They believed that immigrants would reject the Irish language and culture en masse and that this would spell the final death knell of the Irish language (by which they actually mean Irish-speaking men, women and children). The arguments, boasts really, were that these new Irish citizens would only want to live in an English Ireland not an Irish Ireland. Together with Ireland’s existing monolingual anglophone majority they would help “kill” any form of an indigenous identity. The people leaving those comments seemed to take a real delight in this plan for mass social engineering and completing the job the British started.
Of course these Angloban zealots actually have no interest in overseas nationals. In fact they despise them as much as they hate Irish-speaking nationals. It is simply another weapon, a demographic weapon, in a culture war that has been waged since 1169. They will turn on them eventually – arguably they already have.
One can only hope that the anecdotal evidence of people from Poland, Lithuania, etc. finding an interest in native Irish culture and language because they have none of the post-colonial inferiority complexes of the Irish have is true. It would be a great irony of history if the saviour of Irish was the non-Irish. However it would be one I’d personally take great pleasure in rubbing in the noses of the anglophone establishment.
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I do find a lot of sympathy with your argument and guess it was reason why I voted in 1992 for Maastricht after listening to an enthusiastically ‘European’ like Vincent Comerford in first year Maynooth. I do know a few recently naturalized Hungarian-Irish, Lithuanian-Irish and Polish-Irish and they’re polite of course but ultimately Irish language rights are a curiosity. However, in hindsight I’m not sure there’s any point in differentiating EU from non-EU, and having spoken with naturalized Chinese-Irish, Nigerian-Irish, Libyan-Irish and Pakistani/Indian-Irish, I’ve yet to meet first generation who have an interest in the Irish language. Which of course makes them no different from the Hiberno-English speaking majority – some of the next generation perhaps (as migrant studies have shown) but to quote Mary-Lou, “here’s the thing!”. You may not like this, Séamas, but if I had to cast Tá/Níl again in a ‘Good Friday Agreement’ referendum, I would absolutely vote against it. We have no border with the six-counties. It is not hearsay to say that the majority of the North/West-Africans and former British-Indians who travel into the Republic come via Scotland through Northern Ireland. The tens of thousands of immigrants who have been naturalized since current Government came into power is deemed justification for accelerating the possessing of backlogs exacerbated by the continued public-sector embargo! Would this really happen in the US/Australia/New Zealand without a whimper? Of course not because to question the consensus in Ireland is racist! Debate stifled… until it’s too late!
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