The world has started to take notice of the increasing frequency and size of rallies in Ireland on the issue of immigration. Many people are asking, what is this about?
In typical Irish fashion, it’s not just a numbers game as it’s much more than that.
But the figures are startling. In 2022, over 286,000 new social security (PPS) numbers were given out by the state. Less than 23 percent, or 65,000, went to people born in Ireland. The number of social security numbers issued to people from other EU countries and from countries outside of the EU both outnumbered those to Irish nationals.
Given the population of Ireland South has increased by 46 percent since 1990 — from 3.5 million people to over 5 million people today — it’s clear a dramatic change in demographics is taking place in Ireland, especially as our birth rate is currently 1.5 children per woman. More on that later.
But no one ever asked the people of Ireland whether they consent to the new plantation or colonisation of Ireland. We had it before in the 17th century and it didn’t work out so well for the natives.
Over the last two months, rallies against uncontrolled, unvetted immigration have been increasing in frequency and size. Those who participate are mainly working-class people and concerned parents worried about whether their children will be able in the future to rent an apartment or even walk around their community in safety. In contrast to the government-financed NGO worker-heavy, middle-class, open-borders protesters, the #MakeIrelandSafeAgain rally participants are often young women with buggies and kids in tow. Indeed, a popular meme symbolising the rallies is a woman pushing a buggy. The rallies against uncontrolled immigration have been fastidiously peaceful and good-humoured so far. There has been violence, but solely from far-left counter-protesters who have on three occasions in three weeks driven their cars into rally participants. One Marxist fanatic has already been charged with running his car into a peaceful protester and endangering life during a rally in East Wall, central Dublin, last week.
People are protesting against the government’s immigration policy, which in practical terms is pretty much open border chaos. Discussion about immigration in Ireland has been more or less much Verboten by the mainstream political and media class for decades, but TV programmes on this issue are currently coming in thick and fast.
It was revealed during the Prime Time programme on state broadcaster RTE on Thursday, for instance, that over 60 percent of those who fly into Dublin airport to claim asylum say that they have lost their passport between getting on the plane and arriving at the customs kiosk in Dublin. An additional group also presented false papers. So it’s pretty clear that the International Protection procedure is being utterly scammed in Ireland.
The same holds true for the 70,000 or so Ukrainians who get immediate refugee status in Ireland. Whereas the state told the Irish people it would be all women and children, instead, 39 percent of those Ukrainians coming to Ireland are young males — certainly decades under 60 years of age and many with accents and “sun tans” suggesting they are not from Ukraine at all. Many people feel the political class are allowing the country to be taken for a ride, and it is making neighbourhoods far more dangerous. There have been a rash of stabbings, murders, and rapes over the last two years.
The government’s open borders immigration policy is egged on by the left-wing opposition of Sinn Fein, Labour, and People before Profit, whose mantra could easily be: “Brits out, everybody else in.” They are dripping with cultural self-hatred and Hibernophobia, dressed up as pathological altruism for foreigners.
The immigration crisis in Ireland has helped contribute to a significant housing crisis. As the number of immigrants coming into Ireland has increased, so has demand for houses and apartments, and as demand has increased, so too have house prices and rents. In turn, as more low-skilled migrants come in from safe countries such as Georgia and Albania, all claiming asylum, many highly-skilled Irish young people cross them at airports as they fly off to countries where Irish graduates can find a well-paid job, where they can afford a house and start a family. This is one of the core reasons why so many mammies with buggies turn up at the rallies.
But beneath the surface of the rallies, something much more profound is going on. For many of the people attending these rallies, it’s not just about the security and safety of their communities, nor if their children will be able to afford a home in the future. Scratch beneath the surface and it’s clear that a culture war is breaking out in Ireland.
On one side you have patriotic working-class people who love Ireland, who are, if not practicing Catholics, at least sympathetic to Christian teaching, who want to decide what is being taught to their children in school, are wary — indeed opposed — to the state imposing trans ideology on their children. These people instinctively rebel at the idea of foreign control by Big Bureaucrats, Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Pharma. They would like to see their laws made and borders controlled by people they elect to a parliament in Dublin. And above all, they believe that the laws which should be made in Dublin should be for the benefit of Irish people.
We were not put on Earth to provide free housing, healthcare, and education to the rest of the world. Ireland is more than a wet rock in the middle of the Atlantic, full of rootless, nation-less consumers and producers. No. Ireland is our home, not an economic hostel. We are Irish, we are a people and a nation, bound by history and culture, by faith and by family to this land. We are a nation, not a colony, and we will not allow a second plantation of Ireland to take place.
In November 2018, the Irish Freedom Party organised a rally outside the Irish Parliament against the U.N. Migration Pact which dealt with illegal migration by, in a fashion, making it all legal by a stroke of a pen and rendering borders virtually meaningless. What started small with a crowd of 150 was the first successful right-of-centre rally in Ireland for many decades. What started off as a small acorn has started to take root and to grow. More people are now working for the beginning of a new national flourishing of Ireland where personal freedom, peace, prosperity, and national sovereignty can once again take root and grow.
Hermann Kelly is the founder and president of the Irish Freedom Party. He is from the Bogside in Derry and once edited an Irish Catholic newspaper before becoming a columnist at the Irish Examiner and Irish Daily Mail. He worked as a press officer for the Eurosceptic EFDD group in the European Parliament for 10 years and currently works as a press officer for Romanian ECR MEP Cristian Terheș. As a guest writer, the above copy remains in British English.
