Pushing the Limits of Irish Tolerance

The year 2022 ended in Ireland with social media going mad over footage of the Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (above) sticking his tongue down the throat of a young man about half his age in a Dublin nightclub. Varadkar makes great play of three aspects to his identity; one that he is gay, two that he is mixed-race, and three that he has found his life partner. But the owner of the tonsils being tickled by Varadkar’s tongue was not that life partner.

The really interesting thing about this little episode was not that it took place, but that no reference was made to it by Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE, or its supposedly “independent” newspaper, the Irish Times. However, such a very public yet private use of a tongue by a heterosexual Deputy Prime Minister untouched by the divine grace of having racially mixed parents would certainly been rewarded with headlines. What has changed since the tonsil-tickling episode? Not much, save this: Varadkar is now Irish Prime Minister, or (in Irish) An Taioseach, which is not Irish for The Tongue.

This essay appears in the current Quadrant.
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The underlying issue here is not privacy or respect but dogmatic conformism; Ireland, in barely more than two shakes of a pontiff’s chasuble, has been transformed from a deeply Roman Catholic country into Europe’s standard-bearer of political correctness. The country that had outlawed male homosexual deeds until 1992 had legalised homosexual marriage by 2015 with an “equality law” that did not demand that homosexuals perform the act of sexual consummation which it still legally demanded of heterosexuals. Of course, no such act is possible. So, within the strange gravity-field of Irish culture, where almost anything can be what you want it to be simply by declaring it be so, having unequal definitions of consummation (or none at all) nonetheless constitutes “equality” of a peculiarly Irish kind.

Naturally, Ireland has followed the British/US liberal-left model on how to handle the issue of “people of colour” which manages quite effortlessly to ignore the truth that the greatest source of such people is the Indian subcontinent, and instead focus on Africa. As in the UK and the US, Irish advertisements are now replete with people of African origin, far more than the small number of people in Ireland with that genetic history would justify. And now a campaign has started to “dename” the Berkeley Library in Trinity College Dublin because the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher owned slaves. Rather more obviously, he was a conspicuous beneficiary of the Penal Laws, which effectively excluded the majority Catholic community from the practice of law or politics or the inheritance of land or service in the army. The vast majority of Irish people at the time were landless and often starving helots without recourse to law in their own land, yet throughout the twentieth century, Irish people accepted that this was a historical injustice that belonged to the past. Now, however, under the influence of the scandalously uncanonised St George Floyd of Minneapolis, Ireland is viewing the other George, Bishop Berkeley, rather less kindly.

However, Irish political correctness does not always follow the American model, especially in matters of neutrality, to which the Irish people (of the Republic, that is; Northern Ireland has different priorities) are deeply wedded. Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA (which, despite much propaganda to the contrary, has not gone away or surrendered all its arms) remains the most popular political party in the island of Ireland. Just over a year ago, its leader Mary Lou McDonald vehemently opposed financial sanctions against Russia “as a violation of our neutrality”. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and sensing that the mood might have changed, she called for Ireland to end diplomatic relations with Russia, which of course Ireland cannot do, its foreign relations now being largely a matter for Brussels. But not merely was she wrong in law, she (most unusually for her) misread the Irish mood. An opinion poll taken two months after the brutal violation of a neutral country that, like Ireland, belonged to no alliance, showed that far from the Irish people supporting the victim, 55 per cent were opposed to sending it any military aid. The same proportion were against assisting fellow-EU countries if they are attacked, and 66 per cent were opposed to ending Ireland’s policy of neutrality.

Of course, Ireland is not “neutral”: it is merely a defenceless dependency on the western edge of NATO. Ireland recently “celebrated” the centenary of the formation of its Air Corps with a sixteen-aircraft fly-past, which constituted the vast majority of its aerial strength. It has no fighter aircraft, no ground attack aircraft, no troop-carrying capacity, no bombers and no air-defence radar. Unless an aircraft intruding into Irish airspace carries a self-identifying transponder, the Irish Defence Forces will not know it is there. In case of intrusion being detected (and only because the intruder has chosen to make himself known) the RAF is called in.

Yet such is the infantilisation of Irish popular opinion that this dependency is not a subject for national shame. Instead, it is seen to be part of the natural order of things, just as teenagers assume that breakfast magically appears in the morning and dinner similarly arrives in the evening, and pocket money mysteriously, and yet quite rightly, finds its way into their wallets. Thus, Ireland has one of the largest sea areas to protect in the EU, but it resolutely declines to protect it. Two of its nine fisheries protection vessels have been mothballed for lack of crew, and rates of pay are so appalling it is unable to attract new recruits.

A commission on the state of the Defence Forces, finding itself quite unable to set achievable military targets, created the concept of “levels of ambition”, to which it grandly allocated the military-sounding initialism “LOA”. This was a politer term for what is in reality wet-dream-land (WDL), with meaningless fantasies about Ireland buying fighter aircraft and behaving like an adult. The only real finding for which the WDL commission met general approval was its criticism of the Defence Forces for having a “masculine culture”. Masculinity of any kind in modern Ireland is of course a vice, and usually attracts the adjective “toxic”.

The real purpose of the Irish Defence Forces was inadvertently admitted by the announcement that the Naval Service was to spend €150,000 on “sail training” for “young persons from disadvantaged backgrounds”. Irish seas are fished by anyone who wants; its skies are wide open to intrusion; its army has no troop-carrying helicopters, or tanks, or serious artillery. But never worry: the young poor will know how to reef a sail, and possibly even sail a reef.

It’s not that the Irish Army has nothing to do. It has “peace-keeping” troops in Lebanon, who are flown there by any other country but Ireland—once upon a time, even by Ukraine. “Peace-keeping” is a favourite term to describe the Irish army and is especially esteemed by the powerful liberal-left constituency, which has taken the place of the Catholic Church as the source of national morality. That “peace-keeping” can only be done by soldiers trained in the recondite art of killing people is a subtlety lost in the orgy of self-congratulatory emoting that is the substitute for thought amongst the libleft. A salutary reminder that “peace-keeping” is usually to be done amongst the war-like came with the brutal killing in December of Private Sean Rooney in a clash with Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon.

Now if it came to a showdown between Hezbollah and the Irish Army, the latter wouldn’t even come second. The former is a surrogate of Iran, and an instrument of Tehran’s intended policy of genocide of the Israeli people. The only reason why the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) still exists is because Tehran regards it as a useful buffer against Israeli retaliatory incursions. Certainly, after forty-five years of existence, there is nothing remotely “interim” about it. If the term UNIFIL has any meaning, it is United Nations’ Incessant Failure In Lebanon. The Irish Army continues to participate in this farce because it is a sly way of getting the UN to subsidise it, as meanwhile it is falling apart for lack of capital investment in hardware, never mind the wretched pay for its soldiers. But instead of Private Cooney’s death prompting serious questions in the media about why the army continues to participate in UNIFIL, it merely led to lachrymose ululations about what a gallant lad he was. Overall, this tragedy was an accurate measure of how seriously Ireland doesn’t take defence.

So when Russian troops rampaged through Ukraine last spring, raping and slaughtering civilians, and Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Simon Coveney declared that he was “uncomfortable” with the idea of Ireland sending lethal aid to the embattled country, he really was speaking for the Irish people. It is a genuine belief in Ireland that it is “talks” that end wars, rather than victory or exhaustion. That there are always talks at the end of a war is seen in Ireland to be the reason that any war ends, which is rather like saying the washing-up after a meal is the reason why people stop eating.

The substitute for action is meaningless promises, the utterance of which Ireland is a master. Rather than deploy troops on the border to curtail the IRA between 1978 and 1996, Ireland sent them to Lebanon. Last autumn, Coveney promised that all Ukrainians who came to Ireland would be made welcome and given accommodation, jobs, money and schooling, and possibly even a spot of sail training. By January 2023, this promise had been scaled down: single men were no longer welcome, and if any actually managed to get into the country, the Irish state would do nothing to assist them. Single women, however, would be welcome. It is unnecessary to describe the outcry with which this outrageously sexist policy was greeted—because there was none. Just as marital unions between homosexuals are not subject to the requirements of consummation that apply to heterosexuals, discrimination in favour of women is not seen to be sexist in any sense. And I really do mean seen. Not merely would most Irish people probably not understand what I just said in that sentence beginning with “Just as”, I can think of no Irish newspaper which would allow a man to write it.

That, of course, is hypothesis; what is not is that not a single columnist, male or female, has addressed the scandal of the imprisonment of the broadcaster Mícheál Ó Leidhin. Were he black, or a woman, or a homosexual, there would be marches to the Irish parliament, Dail Eireann, demanding his/her release. Instead, he is a middle-class heterosexual white man, effectively meaning he is beyond redemption. Three years ago, while out drinking with a woman friend, they met a friend of hers. Ó Leidhin got on so well with this new acquaintance that she agreed to go back to his place for sex. In his bed, he performed what is coyly known as foreplay on her, but is more accurately called masturbating her. She declined to have full sex but promised this might follow later. They both slept. Ó Leidhin later woke up, and no doubt with her earlier promises in mind, got on top of her and began to feel her breasts. She woke up and told him to stop. He did. They went back to sleep. When they awoke, he drove her home. They met some days later to discuss the night, and she expressed annoyance at the later episode.

Fully a year later, she reported the incident to the Irish police, An Garda Siochana, alleging she had been sexually assaulted by the man whom she had already allowed to masturbate her. The police prosecuted him, and the case came to trial last May. It is putting it mildly to say that defence counsel appeared to be half-hearted in his efforts. That he never even suggested that what had happened when they first went to bed constituted implied consent for what followed a couple of hours later indicates as much. However, few people enlist for a life at the Irish bar with the intention of having their career ended by the hysterical shrieks from government-funded single-issue advocacy groups such as the Rape Crisis Centre and the National Women’s Council, and Ó Leidhin’s defence counsel did not apparently belong to that gallant few.

Irish courts allow alleged victims to make a “victim impact statement”, the assertions of which cannot be challenged by defence counsel. She told the trial judge that Ó Leidhin “used sexual violence as a method of violence towards me”. She said he had violated her body, her mind, her sense of self and her sense of security in the world, impacted on every facet of her life. The night of the “assault” (my inverted commas) was the last night she would ever go to sleep believing she was safe … the stress and fear did not end when the “attack” (ditto) ended and it had replayed again and again … She had become depressed and suicidal and had made an attempt on her life. All this was because a man who she had consented to go to bed with, who had already masturbated her and almost certainly had felt her breasts, had later in the night felt her breasts—and just her breasts—once again.

Judge Karen O’Connor sentenced poor Ó Leidhin to fifteen months’ imprisonment. He was sacked by his employer, the national broadcaster RTE, and put on the sex-offenders register, which means he can never work with children or drive a taxi or a bus. His career as a broadcaster is of course dead. On appeal, another woman judge, Judge Aileen Connolly, said that a woman was entitled to feel safe with a man she had gone to bed with, knowing that sexual activity would only take place if she was awake and had consented. The appeal court confirmed the sentence, and Ó Leidhin’s life is now in ruins, merely for doing something which every single one of us, man or woman, has probably done at some time in our lives—namely caressed the sexual parts of a sleeping person beside us.

Yet such is the inviolable and unexaminable status of the dogma of woman-as-victim that not one single newspaper columnist has written about this scandal, and nor has any politician raised the issue. But why would they? Ireland is stuffed to the gills with government-funded, single-issue advocacy groups dedicated to the enforcement of the PC agenda, usually through extra-parliamentary means, and most commonly through an abject or willing media. The press is no longer a watchdog for freedom but a canine of a different pedigree—the leader of the hunting pack.

Emoting is the favourite public pastime in Ireland, and there is a price to be paid for it, especially when promising that not merely are all immigrants welcome, but there will be jobs and beds for them. So naturally, Ireland has now run out of accommodation. Hotels are full of asylum-seekers and refugees as well as illegal immigrants masquerading as either or both, their accommodation being paid for by the Irish state. Moreover, it is effectively illegal for the state to evict them, meaning that with much of its bedspace occupied by guests of the nation, Ireland will sooner or later bid farewell to a great deal of its tourism industry, a major component of its economy.

There have been ugly protests against the generosity that the Irish state has shown to outsiders, especially in deprived areas of Dublin, where the promise of learning how to master a clove-hitch seems not to have dampened the emerging and deeply unpleasant moods of xenophobia. This is being blamed on “the far right”, a useful catch-all expression common to Britain and the US whenever lazy, moralising journalists encounter something they don’t like and can’t understand, and worst of all, won’t even try to analyse beyond the invocation of their favourite (and usually imagined) bugbears.

Ireland is discovering what other advanced countries have already learnt: that there are limits to the tolerance of ordinary people as governments embrace policies that are unrelated to the needs and expectations of those people and most of all, their children. Ireland does not have enough houses, schools and hospital beds for its own people. Yet by EU law, it is compelled to admit to its shores any of the 450 million residents of the European Union, as well as any number of migrants who, spuriously or otherwise, claim they are refugees.

There are limits to the elasticity of human tolerance, and Ireland has probably pushed them to breaking point. But even to admit to that is tantamount to admitting to the new mortal sins of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. So, better say nothing and practise tying some bowlines.

Kevin Myers’s previous Letter from Dublin appeared in the November issue.