They keep going on about “mass immigration”. Everyone’s worried about something these days, but not all of us are worried about the same thing. I’m worried about mass eviction, mass speculation, and mass landlordism. They’re worried about the foreign lad pulling pints or the nurse from Nigeria keeping the hospital running. It’s nonsense. You don’t hear them shouting about American corporations buying up half the city, or the vulture funds that own entire housing estates. But let one refugee get a roof over their head, and it’s suddenly the end of Irish civilisation. Give me a break.
They keep saying “Ireland for the Irish”. That sounds lovely, but which Irish are we talking about? The lad sleeping in a tent on the M50? The single mother waiting ten plus years for a house? Or just the ones with the right accent and clean fingernails? When they say “Irish”, what they really mean is “people like us”. The same elite that ran this country into the ground are the ones they’re dying to impress. They pretend to stand up for ordinary people while licking the boots of the same class that sold our land to the highest bidder.
They call themselves radical nationalists. Radical my arse. There’s nothing radical about blaming the foreign worker for your problems. Real radicalism is standing up to the powerful, not punching down at the powerless. Connolly knew that. Pearse knew that. The Republic they fought for was about freedom and equality, not purity and paranoia. Freedom doesn’t mean closing the door behind you once you’ve made it in.
Now, when they start talking about treason and deportations, that’s when the nonsense turns dangerous. That’s the same kind of talk used for a hundred years to silence anyone who disagrees. If there’s treason in Ireland today, it’s being done by the crowd selling off public housing to developers, not by the migrants cleaning their offices.
They have the cheek to quote the First Dáil, the same Dáil that said Ireland belongs to her people. Not to race or creed or capital, but to everyone who lives and works here. They go on about “our culture being erased”, yet you’d never see them fighting to keep an Irish language school open, or standing with workers on strike. They love the idea of Ireland, but they couldn’t care less about the people in it.
They say they want to “take Ireland back”. But from who exactly? From the nurses keeping the hospitals open? From the lads driving the buses? From the women teaching our kids? If they ever took Ireland back, they’d hand it straight over to the landlords and billionaires anyway.
The truth is that real Irishness isn’t about bloodlines or passports. It’s about solidarity. It’s about standing shoulder to shoulder against greed, corruption, and the people who tell us we’re not good enough unless we fit their idea of Irish. It’s about the working people who keep this country alive, whether they were born in Dublin or Dakar.
If you want to defend Ireland, grand, I’m with you. But defend the workers, defend the renters, defend the people who’ve come here to build a better life with us. That’s the Ireland Connolly dreamed of. Not a fortress full of frightened men, but a republic of equals.
Ireland unfree shall never be at peace, and Ireland run by fascists would never be Ireland at all.
⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.
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