Green Politics In Ireland
/The widely publicized “Sinn Féin Surge” in the recent Irish General Election has more in common with the previous year’s “Green Wave” in the European elections.
Once again, a sudden gain by a minority party is being hailed as a landslide victory – even though it is nothing of the sort. A cursory glance at the election results makes it clear that the numbers don’t add up: Sinn Féin now has 37 seats, one less than Fianna Fail and two more than Fine Gael. So the boring old middle-of-the-road Establishment parties, who have been in power since the foundation of the State and spent the past four years in a symbiotic “Confidence & Supply” relationship, have fifty percent of the vote. This figure, coupled with the widespread, publicly expressed disillusionment with the Government, implies that the vote for Sinn Féin was merely a protest vote – and that a cautious 50 percent of voters actually voted against Sinn Féin.
In the weeks preceding the election, it was clear that Fine Gael wanted to lose – were indeed "throwing" the election. Those who poured scorn on this theory were forced to admit this when Leo Varadkar and his Justice Minister, Charlie Flanagan, announced a plan to celebrate the centenary of the Black'n'Tans – an army of thugs drafted in by the British to terrorize the Irish and suppress the rebellion. The Government Party also issued glib statements on the the health system and homelessness (Varadkar's response to the news that a homeless man had been crushed to death when his tent was scooped up by a waste-collecting truck was to tell journalists to ask the rival party's Mayor of Dublin about it). Unsurprisingly then, the "Left-wing" Social Democrats abstained from a vote on Taoiseach (prime minister) leaving Mary Lou without enough votes to become leader of the country. With the collapse of the EU and subsequent recession looming (Brexit makes this inevitable, as Britain was a net contributor, and its departure will bear out the EUrocrats' warning of "contagion"), it was clear that Fine Gael wanted to pass the torch to a scapegoat – and who better than their old foe, Sinn Féin? The Black'n'Tan commemoration didn't go ahead, but as an exercise in the dark arts of Public Relations, it was a master coup, as Sinn Féin gained an army of new followers, all fired up with nationalistic indignation. The Wolfe Tones' song "Come Out Ye Black'n'Tans" became the anthem of the Sinn Féin Surge.
While it was Sinn Féin’s best ever performance in an election, it was by no means a “swing to the Left” as many pundits have claimed; in fact, other Left-wing parties failed miserably, with Solidarity People Before Profit actually losing their high-profile deputy Ruth Coppinger and failing to make an impression with their candidates in urban areas (in the end, they only got five elected including the leader, Richard Boyd Barrett). Labour, who never recovered from a spell as junior partner in coalition with Fianna Fail during the Austerity years, lost former Deputy Prime Minister [Tanaiste] Joan Burton as well as Kevin Humphreys, and only six of their TDs were elected. Another who failed to take a seat was former Lord Mayor of Dublin Christy Burke, who is the epitome of a Leftie (he served time in prison in the 1970s for membership of the Provisional IRA, battled with his own alcoholism, fought drug dealers as one of the leaders of Concerned Parents Against Drugs, and is known in the inner city for being a rough diamond with a heart of gold – his acts of charity to homeless people and drug addicts have raised him to near-sainthood status). The Social Democrats won just six seats despite a strong campaign on housing and health, untainted by scandal. Because of this, Sinn Féin’s claim that they would have gained more seats had they run more candidates just does not add up.
Old-school Lefties are extremely wary of Sinn Féin, with veteran Dublin City councillor Mannix Flynn describing them as “a cult” who are “lining their own pockets.” The ex-prisoner, who survived horrific abuse in an industrial school run by nuns, and who as a result of his experiences shares their open hatred of the Catholic Church, would have much to gain by joining the Shinners instead of remaining as an independent, told crime journalist Paul Williams in 2017:
They’re committed to making themselves the most powerful party in the country; once they do, then they’ll forget about everybody . . . They haven’t radicalised or changed any of the working class areas . . . They started lining their own pockets. I have no time for these people. These people have hijacked our communities and they need to be thrown out of our communities . . . The Sinn Fein promise of liberation is nuts – it’s a cult. You simply can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; they’re a highly disciplined organisation. They’re run along a military cult line.
The recent exodus of high-profile members of Sinn Féin has given the public an insight into the alleged bullying culture at the core of the party. Peader Tobin, disciplined by the party over his pro-life views, actually started his own party, Aontu (and was elected). Sinn Féin even had its own #MeToo incident, in which Mairia Cahill, who was sexually abused by senior IRA members, accused the party of covering up the crime, forcing her to go public to expose it; she recently accused Mary Lou McDonald of failing to respond adequately to her questions.
Sinn Fein and the IRA
It is true that the party gained a lot from young, naïve voters who didn’t know (or didn’t care) that Sinn Féin is the political wing of the IRA, who were responsible for the bombings on the London Tube and the village of Omagh in Northern Ireland; they didn’t care about more recent atrocities such as the torture and murder of a young man, Paul Quinn, by the IRA in 2007, and the refusal of Sinn Féin’s Conor Murphy to apologize to Flynn’s grieving mother for having falsely branded the 21-year-old victim a criminal, and the cynical gamesmanship of party leader Mary Lou McDonald in demanding a private meeting with the mother rather than simply condemning her party’s role in adding insult to (severe, mortal) injury. It’s also true that many of their new voters adopted Sinn Féin’s stock excuse for everything: the Loyalists also committed atrocities. However, while moral and ethical gymnastics enabled a whole new demographic to hold their noses to vote for the Shinners, for many other people the party who once declared they would take control of Ireland “with a gun in one hand and a ballot box in the other” still had too much of a whiff of sulphur off it.
International observers who persist in branding this as a victory of sorts for the Left in Ireland might be surprised to find that Left and Right don’t mean the same in Ireland as they do anywhere else. The leadership of all the parties in the Irish parliament (Dail Eireann), including Sinn Féin, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, are socially Left-wing like the US Democrats, with strong policies in favour of abortion, LGBT, immigration and other “Woke” issues – though the grassroots members of Fianna Fail are largely pro-life (which makes their continued support for the leadership all the more hypocritical). Economically, the parties are a mish-mash of right and left, and Fine Gael’s Open Borders policy is not as Leftie as it seems; they are protecting the interests of big business and landlords, who gain immensely from an unlimited supply of cheap labor and tenants accustomed to living in Third World slums. Sinn Féin are a mixture of extreme right, extreme left and lawless anarchy; those middle-class voters who voted for them for the first time in this election could only look on with apprehension as some of their representatives celebrated their victory by singing anti-British songs and yelling “Up the Ra!” [IRA].
Added to this caustic cauldron is a toxic ingredient: the Greens. While announcements of a “Green Wave” sound ludicrous, they managed to raise their vote from three to 12 seats. Once again, this most unpopular party are the kingmakers.
The Greens are Machiavellian political sluts, willing to make up the numbers with any party in return for getting the green light to push their agenda. They survive in the kind of parasitic political relationships which destroy junior partners; in Government with Fianna Fail, where they should have been the mudguard for the senior party, implementing unpopular carbon taxes, the Greens used their position not only to push their agenda – but to reassure their minority constituency that they would keep their promises, no matter how unpopular they were with the wider populace. The Greens, accustomed to being seen as cranks and weirdos, gain credibility and, it seems, a kind of sadistic satisfaction from causing maximum discomfort to the majority of people, who wouldn’t vote for them anyway.
Draconian regulations
So successful have the Greens been at infiltrating every strand of public life (including the unelected civil service where they teach children and run local councils) that they seem to have Greenwashed their rivals, who all promoted Green policies in their election literature, clearly believing that this would gain them votes at the Greens’ expense. Promises to set aside more funding for cycling infrastructure were prominent on just about every mainstream candidate’s leaflet. This made Green Party leader Eamon Ryan quite green with envy; his response was the slogan, plasterered on all his posters: “Want Green? Vote Green!” But this translated in the minds of jaded Irish voters to: “Want Green? We’ll get Greens – whether we want them or not!”
During every election, a common theme in the conversations between ordinary people is the need to “vote the Green out!” Because Ireland has a “proportional representation” system, voters get to pick a series of candidates in order of preference. With a typical ballot sheet offering 13-15 candidates, and one Green party member running in each constitutency, all a voter has to do is vote for everyone but the Green candidate. However, there are usually some even less attractive candidates, and the Green usually gets a fraction of the vote “to keep Sinn Féin / Fianna Fail / Fine Gael” out. The Greens have survived for years on the basis that they were – until recently – seen as inoffensive crusties. But as their influence has been felt increasingly painfully, anti-Green sentiment has been more vocal.
The rural lobby in particular is vehemently anti-Green because the Greens have campaigned to ban turf-cutting (to save the bog), cut the number of cattle, encourage everyone to “go vegan,” grow trees on farmland and (hilariously) re-introduce wolves to the Irish countryside (party leader Eamon Ryan has been widely ridiculed for that suggestion). Only the wealthiest “gentleman farmers” can afford to “go green” because they can afford to set aside vast tracts of land for forestry and because the farm is only a tiny fraction of their income.
To paraphrase Kermit the Frog: “It’s not easy being Green” – unless you are a schoolchild or an urban Millennial, living within cycling distance of your job as a schoolteacher or computer programmer. Like Communism, Green is great when you are young and don’t have responsibilities.
And the old image of the Greens as harmless hippies no longer acts as a mask. Anyone who examines their policies dispassionately (as I have done, as a former eco-fanatic who once sailed in a Greenpeace ship to mount a protest at a nuclear power station) must conclude that the Green Agenda is hypocritical and counterproductive. The Greens used to be against the use of nuclear energy because of the devastating long-term consequences for the environment in the event of an accident such as Chernobyl. Now they are for it because, they say, it is kinder to the earth and public health (risk notwithstanding) than burning fossil fuels.
Their windmills are a tourist-repelling blight on the Irish landscape and seascape – and, as a bonus, rely on fossil-fuel back-up because they are unable to cope with strong winds and are useless in calm weather.
The Greens’ current drive to get petrol and diesel cars off the roads – and replace them with electric and hybrid cars by 2030 – is based on the flawed belief that producing a huge battery and replacing it every three years is better than making a combustion engine which could last for 30 years or more. They ignore the environmental cost of mining cobalt to produce the lithium-ion batteries, the effects on the health of people living near the mines (some of which are in the African Congo) and the human rights abuses documented in these mines. They also ignore the fact that there will not be enough electricity to keep these cars moving – whether it is generated by windmills or fossil fuels. Arrogantly, they ignore the legitimate concerns of motor mechanics who will be out of business and vulnerable members of the community such as elderly people for whom driving means independence, and women of all ages, who need the security of private cars more than ever in a multicultural environment.
The Greens have managed to make life difficult for just about everyone, through a relentless infiltration of local authorities, where they impose draconian parking regulations and are currently pushing the idea of congestion charges and increased motor taxes. They use both Left- and Right- wing tactics to extract “green charges” from householders: under the guise of recycling, private trash-removal companies force the householders to serve as unpaid waste-sorting workers while paying for the privilege – and these private companies have been given the authority to enter homes to gather evidence for prosecution if they suspect that the householder has been keeping costs down by burning rubbish. Where once there used to be one bin collection every week for every housing estate, there are now at least three, involving at least two private companies – all polluting the air.
This monstrous marriage of capitalism and communism makes the Green Agenda irresistible to all the main political parties in Ireland, who have allowed the Greens to promote their agenda through EU legislation which owes its ideology to the likes of the globalist bankers behind Extinction Rebellion, the US Democrats and the Elders (Mary Robinson, Richard Branson and pals).
The Globalist Agenda
The globalist agenda has certainly made for some strange bedfellows: Big tech, Big Pharma, Communism, Capitalism, charities, strict Muslims, Liberals, and, now, “Green” politics, which is anything but friendly to the environment with its passionate advocacy for nuclear power, self-defeating recycling legislation and electric car batteries produced at great cost to the environment, and indeed 5g.
Green politics has its greatest advocate in Sir David Attenborough, who achieved cult status long before Greta Thunberg was born. And it has its demons in the scientific community, such as the late botanist David Bellamy, much loved by generations of British and Irish children for his entertaining documentaries, whose illustrious career on BBC was cut short after he declare the “Climate Emergency” as “poppycock.”
The Globalist Green agenda is ultimately about destroying the economic stability of the Western world, so speculators can buy up land cheap. It is a tactic used by carpetbaggers, warmongers and financial sleight-of-hand merchants since time began. It explains how the Swiss banks benefited from World War II, how every war produces a blood-stained trail of millionaires and why “environmentalism” is now synonymous with public acts of self-loathing (in last summer’s Extinction Rebellion riots in London, demonstrators glued themselves to the tarmac and performed a “dance of shame” to apologize for humanity’s presence on earth).
It also explains why the Greens and all the mainstream political parties, as well as the captains of industry, NGOs and assorted taxpayer-funded entities, and their backers in the European Parliament and US Democrats, are busy issuing a warm Irish welcome to immigrants from countries where women’s rights are an alien concept. And it is damning evidence of a massive political and economic machine behind the drive for the installation of the latest tool in the war on Ireland: 5g and “smart meters.”
International groups made up of scientists, doctors and activists have warned that people are sleepwalking into an electric cloud of despair, as we embrace modern technology – including electric cars, wifi, mobile phones, baby monitors and fitness watches. Exposure to “electrosmog” is blamed for a wide range of health problems, from insomnia, irritability and headaches to cancers, auto-immune diseases, disorders of the nervous system (Parkinson’s and Motor Neuron disease), Alzheimers, autism, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), miscarriages and genetic defects.
[…]
This is just an excerpt from Culture Wars Magazine, not the full article. To continue reading, purchase the April 2020 edition of Culture Wars Magazine.
