By Andrea Widburg
For centuries, the Irish fought British Protestants and, eventually, southern Ireland prevailed to become the independent Republic of Ireland. However, there’s a new theocratic overlord headed their way, and they don’t seem inclined to fight this time. Preemptive surrender appears to be the chosen pathway, at least for those people in Galway who were told the most common boy’s first name in their city.
You’re about to get the world’s shortest history of Ireland: England long coveted Ireland. By the mid-16th century, under Henry VIII, it conquered the land (although not the people). For the next 370 years (or so), the Irish people fought to get the English out of their country.
England abused the Irish with unparalleled ferocity, especially during Cromwell’s reign. In addition to inflicting death on the Irish through war and police powers, England relentlessly quashed all Irish efforts to improve their economy. The great famine in the mid-19th century occurred in large part because English laws left the Irish with little to grow other than potatoes so that, when blight devastated their only food crop, their choices were to die or abandon their homeland for America.
In the early 20th century, the push for Irish independence saw the creation of the Sinn Féin political party and its military arm, the Irish Republican Army (“IRA”). In 1921, four-fifths of Ireland, the Catholic part, gained almost complete independence from Britain. Eventually, in 1949, Ireland was fully independent, becoming the nation we know today: The Republic of Ireland. In 1973, Ireland joined the European Economic Community, which later became the EU.
For all those centuries, the land now known as the Republic of Ireland, or just plain Ireland, was wedded to Catholicism, which their monks had kept alive during the darkest years of the Dark Ages. No matter their travails, they never gave up their faith. They were equally committed to their unique Irish culture, keeping their language and practices alive, even as the British periodically criminalized them.
However, there are two things that are even greater than Catholicism. One of those things is leftism. Where leftism goes, religion dies, and that’s what happened in Ireland. Aided by revelations about child sexual abuse in the Church, which shook people’s faith in that institution, as well as Ireland’s political drift to the left, the bottom fell out of Irish Catholicism. Individuals are still faithful, but the nation is not, something made patently clear when it legalized abortion in 2018.
The other thing that is greater than Catholicism is demographics and immigration. Consistent with their loss of faith, the Irish, once known for enormous families, began to have fewer children. Meanwhile, Muslims began to move to Ireland. Ireland was probably welcoming because the Irish are fiercely supportive of the PLO, which they seem to analogize to the IRA. This immigration began slowly but is consistently picking up speed.
That brings us to Galway, in the West of Ireland. It’s Ireland’s fourth most populous city, with almost 86,000 people as of last year. It has a growing Muslim population, too. Interestingly, my admittedly cursory search for specific data on the numbers couldn’t find data for 2016 forward. That means I couldn’t track the full effect of Germany’s Angela Merkel forcing the EU to open its doors to Muslim migrants.
However, the one thing that’s clear is that Muslims are making Galway their home. That’s why The Irish Inquiry sent a roving reporter onto Galway’s streets to ask residents what they think was the city’s most popular boy’s name in 2022. You already know the answer, although most of the people questioned professed ignorance:
What’s fascinating about the video is the way the people, once they learned that fact, quickly schooled themselves to insouciance, presenting the politically correct face of “okay,” that’s fine, whatever. They know they’re not supposed to express shock that one of Ireland’s oldest and biggest cities, a bastion of Irish Catholicism for hundreds of years, is rapidly becoming Muslim. And certainly, Southern Ireland knows where this ends up. Northern Ireland’s divisive majority Protestantism came about because, beginning with James I, England deliberately resettled Protestants in Ireland to change its Catholic faith.
This is true for all of Western Europe. I know from my travels that residents who have roots in these countries going back hundreds or even thousands of years are unhappy, but they keep their mouths shut. They have no First Amendment in Europe, and they know what happens to those who criticize the elite’s chosen people, whether “transexuals” or Muslims.
If you’re interested in a little nostalgia about the British Isles when they seemed admirable, I just learned that many of the books from one of my favorite Scottish-based writers, D.E. Stevenson, are now available on Kindle for remarkably reasonable prices.
Stevenson is not a great writer, but she is a charming writer. Her books are about nice, ordinary people in a polite era who deal with ordinary challenges and, in dealing with them, become better, stronger, and more moral. I call these “getting it right” books, and I like them even better when a wholesome romance is attached. They are very much a reminder of how unbelievably the world has changed in 80-90 years.