THE BABY-KILLING VOTE AND THE LOSS OF IRISH IDENTITY

by Colin Liddell

It seems that the Irish have voted in an overwhelming landslide to scrap one of the most distinctive elements of their society, namely the Eighth Amendment, a constitutional commitment to opposing abortion.

Only three years ago, it was a vote to allow homosexuals to "marry."

In both these votes I caught myself feeling that Ireland was becoming much less Irish. As a simple visual confirmation of what I mean, look at images of the "Yes" supporters celebrating. In almost all cases, there is not a single Irish tricolour in sight.

With these referendums and the fact that the Taoiseach (an ostentatiously Irish title for the head of the government) since last June is a gay Indian by the name of Varadkar, it seems that Ireland is not only losing its Irishness by the day, but is positively happy to do so. Makes you wonder about all the years spent fighting the Normans and the English to gain their "independence."

So, what exactly is going on in Ireland? Why is Irishness itself apparently unravelling, and does this have implications for wider issues of identity in the West?

This is a question that demands a profound answer rather than a superficial one. Indeed, we need to start with the essence of Irish identity. Many will disagree with my next point and even find details to dispute it, but, in its broad outlines, Irish identity is very much an oppositional one, something that has always had a large "negative" component. It is based on the rejection of Englishness and Protestantism as much as it is based on any positive expression of "Irishness"—indeed more so. Before that, it was based on rejecting "Normanisation."

The ill-fated 1916 uprising.

Here we see the stubbornness of the fringe peoples not to be conquered. For centuries the Irish fought to be a kind of "Scotland" instead of a "Wales." That is, they aspired to be granted a rough equivalence with England, rather than to be a subjected and forgotten province.

But while Scotland was able to achieve this by being militarily awkward, the Irish has to do so by being culturally awkward, which meant sticking to the Catholic faith.

Both of these approaches were distancing techniques, designed to fend off the centralising gravity of England while exerting a certain amount of leverage.

When the time came for Scotland and England to pair up, the Scots could turn their distancing device—i.e militarism—to the mutual benefit of both partners, something that strengthened the Union and made the resulting Empire prosper. The Irish, by contrast, could not do this with Catholicism. By using that as their distancing and leveraging mechanism, the Irish were condemned to remain oppositional to England all the way through the period of the actual Union, at times providing a kind of drag on the British Empire and providing an example to colonial peoples of effective ways in which British power could be resisted.

This put the stamp on Irish identity and tied it closely to a kind recalcitrant Catholicism, that has always been at the heart of Irish identity.

But the problem with an oppositional identity like Irishness is that it requires antagonistic proximity or even forced Union with the thing opposed in order to remain potent. The two become symbiotic.

However, since the achievement of Irish independence nearly a hundred years ago, the political and economic structures and tensions that have fuelled Irishness have been been removed. There has also been a clear acceleration since the European Union started to overextend its role from the 1990s onwards.

Of course the first real blow to Irish identity was independence itself, by which the nation found itself to be just another small, European nation, like Denmark or Belgium, say. The oppositional element of Irish identity could easily have atrophied then and there, but there was still the overbearing social, cultural, and economic presence of England, a fact driven home by the UK retaining (quite rightly in my opinion) six of Ireland's Northern counties to make up Northern Ireland.

The importance of this schism in feeding Ireland's oppositional identity was even suggested in the pattern of the abortion vote, where the only region to vote "No" to abortion—and therefore to be more stridently Irish—was County Donegal, as this is almost cut off from the rest of the Republic by the British part of Ireland. While other parts of Ireland may be able to forget the division of the island, or at least push it into the background, this is much less possible for the people of Donegal simply because of their geographic position (see below—Donegal is in pink, denoting a "No" vote).

Since independence the general pattern of Irish society has been away from the old oppositional relationship with England that had powered Irish identity. But, ironically, the Catholic nature of that identity served to create new conflicts that continued to feed and prolong Irish identity much later than would have otherwise been the case.

After the North was severed from the South, the wounds healed, but the existence of a Catholic minority in the North with a higher birth-rate than the Protestant majority, created new tensions that expressed themselves in the so-called "Troubles," a period of political and paramilitary conflict between the Protestant and Catholic populations in the North which ran from 1968 to 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement established a new stasis.

This period marked a transition from a confident, stable, majority-Protestant Northern Ireland, with a growing Catholic minority in the background, to an uneasy coexistence of nearly equal-sized communities bolstered by mutual fatigue and disgust with 30 years of conflict.

The effect of this period, however, was to stop, reverse, or slow the gradual dissipation of greater Irish identity. It is no accident that the 8th Amendment was actually passed into law in 1983 at exactly the midpoint of this period of renewed Anglo-Irish conflict.

The end of the Troubles in 1998, no matter how unsatisfactory for both parties, was ultimately bad for Ireland's oppositional identity. Not only was Catholic Ireland able to move away from a direct political and paramilitary conflict with the UK, but the growing economic and political role of the EU, which greatly accelerated with the introduction of the Euro currency (Ireland joining in 1999), allowed Ireland to even move out of England's economic shadow for the first time in centuries.

With the fading of this oppositional identity, it is no coincidence that Catholicism as well as a wider sense of Irish identity sharply weakened. The result was that the Zeroes (2000-2009) saw growing immigration, combined with falling Church attendance, an ebbing of respect for the Church, and an increasingly secular society. The paedophile scandals that became prominent at this time in Irish society were not drivers of this decline in respect for the Church, but instead symptoms of it. Such things have always occurred among the Catholic priesthood, but the Church in the past was potent enough to keep things hushed up and society suitably cowed as it tried to deal with it internally. The weakened Church of the post-Millennial period was unable to do this.

That feel when you get to kill the unborn.

Here then we see why Ireland is losing its identity and voting away key parts of its long-running identity. It is no longer Ireland. It is just another undifferentiated part of the global West with "Ireland" merely a convenient tax law or export destination label.

Likewise the Irish people are no longer the Irish people, but instead the increasingly polyglot and multiracial "pick n' mix" that now typifies any low birthrate Western society with its eye on moral signalling, gender equality, and materialistic indices of success.

(Note: Even though Ireland's fertility rate it is still one of the highest in Europe, it is already well below replacement level—1.92 children per woman—and can only fall after this vote.)

In the Irish experience we see particularly clearly that Identity has a strong oppositional element, and that when this is lost, identity wavers and weakens. This also suggests an explanation as to why the more hegemonic groups in the West—the English, the Germans, the WASPs, etc.—traditionally have less identity.

The Irish have moved from being a close-knit group, defined by embedded cultural, religious, and other oppositions to their larger neighbour, to being a group temporarily hegemonic and "unchallenged" on their own island. But hegemony without identity is false, and soon weakens.

The situation that this creates—the usual mix of atomisation, gender equality, gay rights, falling birthrates, mass immigration, and multiculturalism—will either recreate the oppositional forces needed to recreate a potent Irish entity, or else we will see the dissolution of Irishness so that in 100 years all that will be left is the name.

This points to, but does not fully answer, the important question of what identity is. Without opposition is there even any real purpose to identity? Can identity only exist in the negative, and, if so, does that mean that who we define ourselves against is what really defines us? Are the Irish in fact just the anti-English and now that Englishness has become meaningless, is Irishness going the same way?

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying it here. He is also featured in Arktos's new collection A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders.