Ireland’s Unnoticed Revolution

 Mon 11:26 am +00:00, 6 Oct 2025  

posted by pete fairhurst 2

I become convinced that the deep ancestral imagination of the Irish people will in the end rise up to prevent the worst happening.

Source: https://johnwaters.substack.com/p/irelands-unnoticed-revolution

My hypothesis, which I’ve been canvassing for nearly three years now, that a major internal coup, an autogolpe assistido (assisted self-coup), took place in Ireland in 2011 — can be substantiated by circumstantial evidence and by reference to a series of bizarre episodes which do not seem to have any other logical interpretation except what I have ascribed to them in the March 2023 article linked here:

Somewhat ironically, in view of what I have described, what I call the ‘autogolpe assistido’ was not merely a counter-revolution, but an attempt to remake Ireland as something approximating its opposite. This is why, for example, the ‘commemoration’ of 1916 that occurred in 2016 was such a stage-managed and muted affair, in effect a controlled explosion of patriotic sentiment that excluded participation by anyone capable of or willing to cut to the core of the issues involved. As someone who had written consistently about the Easter Rising for 25 years, I received just one invitation to participate in any of the events, and this to one of the earliest such: an appearance I made at the James Fintan Lalor School in Portlaoise, in October 2015. Doubtless, this early appearance prompted the powers-that-were to issue a memo concerning the correct protocols of the centenary celebrations, so the error was not repeated.

I have come to the conclusion that the evidence concerning 2011 is sufficiently robust to suggest that, in assessing the recent history of what to date remains ‘our’ country, we should regard that moment in something like the way we might have looked back to 1916 in, say, 1930 — albeit, of course, in the directly opposite direction, i.e. a regression into occupation, deracination and unfreedom. Whereas in 1930, my parents and grandparents might have harked back to the heroes of 1916, we might, antithetically, look to the shocking legacy of the unspeakable Enda Kenny; the utterly unprincipled Peter Sutherland; the sneak Varadkreep; the waiting quisling, Martin, and so forth.

A counter-revolution is, of course, also a revolution of itself, and the one that occurred from 2011 was certainly that. Strangely, because this revolution has never been formally announced, we have no sense of it as an element or feature of our society’s trajectory ‘going forward’. We still think — in as far as we are permitted to think at all — in terms of markers like the Celtic Tiger; the boom-bust of 2000-2008; the various referendums of the years 2012-2018; on to the Covid subterfuge/‘pandemic’; and so forth, innocent of the seismic rupture that occurred as a result of Enda Kenny’s sellout of Ireland to the globalists, of which the dismantling of the Constitution between 2012 and 2020 was in the first instance an open pledge of obedience. All these episodes were of a piece with each other, but all in the final analysis were continuations of the autogolpe.

To understand something of the intentionality behind this imposed moment of rupture, which is what a coup amounts to, we need to conduct an inventory of some kind, to evaluate subsequent events not in the normal train of history as it seems or has been recorded, but in the light of this sellout and its meanings. It is now almost fifteen years down the road from that ‘revolution’, perhaps an opportune moment to examine what it has meant and what might be its chances of amounting to a total full stop on the history of Ireland qua Ireland.

If we think of ourselves as living in a post-revolutionary country, the meaning of everything is changed completely. Were it not for the maintenance of the pseudo-reality by the rancid purchased media, it would now be manifest that these have been fifteen disastrous years for Ireland qua Ireland, a reality underscored by the constant reminders that ‘Ireland Inc.’ (the antithesis of Ireland qua Ireland) has been breaking all records for moving fake money around. We have, as already intimated, dismantled our Constitution from just about every imaginable direction, leaving nothing but the administrative shell. The 180-year all but uninterrupted flight of our own people has recommenced with a vengeance, even as we are swamped under hundreds of thousand — if not actually millions — of indifferent or hostile aliens who mostly have to be bribed to come here, but are most certainly not here for any reason related to the betterment of Irish lives or futures. In this recent period also, virtually all emphasis or preferment has been withdrawn from our indigenous population and in large part from the indigenous economy. Both are left to flounder and decline — and that was even before the tourist industry, once the jewel in the Irish crown, came under full-frontal attack by dint of the commandeering of hotels from the tourist industry to house utterly deleterious foreigners. The Covid assault of 2020 and 2021 decimated most of the small change of our indigenous economy, rendering us almost totally dependent on external operators — all part of The Plan. Meanwhile, free speech was being attacked under every conceivable cultural and legal heading, to the extent that the most rudimentary element of democratic life — public conversation — ceased to be possible or wise. Our Fourth Estate was summarily dismantled and replaced by a herd of nodding donkeys, willing to write or say anything provided the price was right, and as long as the cheques kept plopping on their doormats on the last Friday of the month. Our cultural life was denuded of all meritocracy, with rewards, honours, and even the entitlement to function at all, preserved only for those willing to be licensed to trade in the Big Lie. Our children and grandchildren were assaulted with all kinds of filth-based propaganda as they sat at their school desks, rendering them probably the most indoctrinated and demoralised generation ever to grow up on Irish soil. Our public institutions, state and privately run, became — without exception — utterly corrupted and morally bankrupt. Even the Catholic Church capitulated to the New Reality, becoming a mouthpiece for globalist propaganda, Woke bullying, subtextual noncery and general derangement.

As can be observed from the muted, defeated demeanour of our indigenous population, we are now a nation on the verge of outright and final defeat, our homeland having already been purchased or won from underneath us, with only the formalities of delivering vacant possession to the new owners remaining to be arranged. This, as I have been explaining, is already in train.

In short, our country has been stolen from under us, without a shot being fired, mostly in broad daylight, while most of the population continued to prate empty pieties about tolerance and compassion, and hurl banal accusations of ‘racism’ against those whose brains had not turned to cheese.

A few months back, I was reading a book called Politics and Politicians, originally published in Britain some ninety years ago, by a man called F. S. Oliver, which I mistakenly said — having just started reading it — was about Sir Robert Walpole, the British Whig politician who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1721 to 1742. In fact, while the opening section is indeed about the life and times of Walpole, Oliver expands this into a pretty broad canvas, in which he claims license to write about anything that happened in the world in that period, or thereafter up to the point of his writing. It is, in fact, a collection of essays, brought together under an esoteric description directed at some inscrutable marketing strategy having limited relevance to its content.

Actually, though, it offers, even if by accident, a most interesting capsule of social and political commentary in the world of nearly a century ago. Published in 1934, it strays into areas of geopolitics, such as the aftermath of the Great War of 1914-1918 and the Russian revolution of 1917. There is a very interesting chapter about Vladimir Lenin, the leader of that revolution, and his career in government afterwards, which was somewhat less glorious than his revolutionary period. What I found most interesting was the succinct analysis Oliver offers concerning the ‘laws’ and logic of revolution, which may be extremely apropos for us in the situation in which we now find ourselves, not least in enabling us to observe some of the reasons we have fetched up where we have, and where ‘we’ — or at least what used to be our country — might go to next.

One of the striking things is that, judging from Oliver’s treatment, there was very little news coming out of Russia concerning the true nature of events occurring there at the time of his writing. Although Politics and Politicians was published a decade after the ascent to power of Joseph Stalin, Oliver does not even mention his name, but expresses the sentiment that the absence of news from the Soviet Union probably means that things have settled into something of a dull routine.(!!)

Aside from this rather presumptuous error, his analysis is both interesting and penetrating. Oliver takes the deliberately amoral view that Vladimir Lenin was a great revolutionary but a poor political leader. In office, Stalin went a long way towards destroying in power what he had won with the gun — largely, says Oliver, because he failed to realise that no society can survive unless continuity is maintained. I believe he was right about this, despite failing to anticipate the literal accuracy of his own prognostications for the eventual outcome of the Russian revolution.

His remarks, though inevitably couched in archaic language, may have a great deal to say to those of us whose countries have in recent times been invaded and/or subjected to coups of whatever kind. If we apply his reflections to the modern context, they come surprisingly to life, penetrating the depths of the conditions of occupation and radical interference, both syndromes which the people of Ireland have experienced in considerable measure. Seen like this, Oliver’s implicit prognosis is remarkably positive.

‘Every politician,’ he writes, ‘learns before he is out of his nonage that it is impossible to cut sheer across a nation’s history and start afresh from a clean edge. This would be like ringing a fruit tree and expecting it to go on bearing a crop. For the history of a nation is the sap of its life, and death is certain if the flow is stopped. Destruction in this form has occasionally followed some barbaric conquest, when flourishing peoples have become as dead wood, rotting and crumbling into a fine powder of exiles, outlaws and slaves. But no internal convulsion that I know of has ever carried ruin quite so far. The fanatics and theorists have always been held back by the horse-sense of common men before they had ringed the bark the whole way round.’

This is perhaps even more true of the dismal stewards of Ireland’s 2011 autogolpe than it was of Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades in their management of the revolution that occurred just 18 months after the Easter Rising in Dublin. The image of the ringed fruit tree is apposite in both contexts, the metaphor referring to the horticultural practice of retarding the flow of sap to the upper reaches of a fruit tree, so as to direct what is available to the fruit rather than the tree. Several of Oliver’s chosen phrases — ‘death is certain’; a people ‘become as dead wood’; ‘rotting and crumbling into a fine powder of exiles, outlaws and slaves’, have manifest relevance for Ireland 2025. Oliver was wrong in assuming that Russia would not make such mistakes, and we would be equally wrong if we imagined that Ireland could escape the remorseless logic of his observations at this most parlous moment in her history.

I believe he is correct also in his observation that the core problem resides in the survival of zealotry long after its prudential usefulness. This, for certain, is true of the current administration of Ireland, at least for all practical purposes. The people nominally in charge may be lump eejits without a cogent thought in their heads, but they are in the stranglehold of unseen actors who know that the purpose of all this is precisely the outcome that F. S. Oliver prognosticates. Nothing of this is accidental or the direct fruit of stupidity; it is coldly calculated and planned to the nth degree.

‘Post-revolutionary politicians,’ Oliver continues, ‘are the salvage men of a revolution. Unless their commonplace ambitions can find employment, everything is likely to be lost. And the reason why revolutions that have failed are so many times more numerous than those that have succeeded is that the fanatics and theorists are apt to keep the upper hand until they have brought everything to ruin by their pedantic obstinacy and contempt for custom.’ We can observe the outworking of this syndrome in Ireland this very week, with our political class sitting around discussing whether and how they might ordain ‘non-binary’ as an officially recognised third gender. And there was me thinking there were seventy-two genders – whatever happened to the missing sixty-nine?

Of course, the politician, even if possessed of even the slightest ability (all but unheard of nowadays), has no power. The Government of Ireland, no more than that of any Western country, is not in charge. Those claiming to be in power are merely messengers and gofers, who have had the last trace of patriotism surgically removed from their rancid carcasses. The ‘revolution’ fomented in 2011 was not, as is the norm, a spontaneous affair orchestrated by indigenous fanatics or longtime native activists. Still less was it dreamed up by domestic politicians. It was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, offered by the external puppet-masters to politicians who had no other options, and minuscule conscience about selling their country down the river. Being organised chiefly by professional outsiders, the autogolpe assistido lacked any true foundation in the political culture of Ireland. Irish energies and personnel were utilised, to be sure, but chiefly as a pool of administrators, facilitators and attack dogs, the latter being essential to preventing any resistance from taking hold. In the main we’re talking here about the LGBT goons and Antifa thugs that manifested in the 2014-2019 period, and the BLM activists (sometimes the same people) who orchestrated the events of the summer of 2020, which conveyed to anyone with eyes to see that something revolutionary was in train, and that the underlying intention was there would be no going back. These secondary and tertiary forces were the sole ‘fanatics’ on display, and they had little or no power, or even knowledge of the true nature of the project, volunteering for treasonous service because they foolishly presumed that the forces in control had benign intentions towards their ideologies of choice. In fact, the puppet-masters favour no ideology other than as a software of manipulation. The ‘street activists’ who so willingly jumped in to police their neighbours were just the ‘useful idiots’ who manifest in all such situations. The revolution, which had wholly different objectives, and completely different beneficiaries, was held in balance and harmony by the professional outsiders, with some help from the indigenous political caste, and ran strictly on a need-to-know basis..

This sounds like a much more stable set of circumstances than that described by Oliver as pertaining in Russia in the post-1917 period, but that may be a misreading. Even if the intentions behind the takeover of Irish affairs had been directed at some longterm benefit to the Irish nation, these conditions would have led to disaster willy nilly. That the disaster was planned is something many people refuse to accept, and I completely understand why. Indeed, we might look at what is happening now and decide that this was, as per Oliver’s analysis, the result of cock-up rather than conspiracy, but, given the nature of the people in charge, this would be delusional. Even had the autogolpe been an ‘honest’ endeavour, with the longterm good of the Irish people in mind, both the professional outsiders and the indigenous messenger boys would have been, for differing reasons, at sea concerning how to manage the revolutionary and civic energies in a manner that would maintain the population in quietude for an extended period. True, they had access to a corrupt media and all kind of psychological techniques, but these are double-edged swords and it is probable that they have relied too much on the population remaining misled, frightened and muted. They have also lacked any real sense of how to maintain a process of cultural continuity, for the reasons that the outsiders knew nothing about Ireland in the first place and the indigenous politicians, being the dregs of Irish life, had no imaginative grasp of what might be necessary to bed things down in any kind of stabilising or propitious way. This may be good or bad, depending on what happens in the coming year or two.

The autogolpe, as a consequence of all this, remains unstable. Without a doubt, the effects of what has happened to Ireland include the nihilisation of history and the insinuation that, in fact, among the effects of the assaults of recent years is that Ireland can no longer lay claim to any agreed past, or any culture worth talking about, or any racial character or ethnicity worth the name. Sure, we enjoy a relatively homongenous genetics, but tribally and ideologically we are more divided than at any time in the knowable past. The results will for certain include the arresting of our national capacity to bear future fruit under innumerable headings. ‘Multiculturalism’, even if it were not an insult, is an oxymoron. A ‘multi-culture’ is a non-culture, a mess of babble and hubbub — even when it occurs in a place where there are no obvious catalysts for discord, such as — purely for example — an enforced invasion by unwelcome and hostile outsiders, in which state coercion is used against the people who pay the bills.

For certain, the tree of Irish life has been ringed all the way around, with a view to artificially boosting its output. When the Central Bank tells us that we are not importing enough immigrants to keep costs tamped down, we know that the very idea of nationhood has lost all, so to speak, currency at the official level. As far as Ireland’s administrators are concerned, a country is just like a business, in which personnel come and go, in the sway of market forces. Ireland operated by an entirely different workforce would for them represent a superior proposition, since their sole interest is in feeding the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) monster that is the Irish ‘economy’. The idea of something called ‘The Irish People’ is hence deemed an ancient shibboleth, and a retrograde one, for the sole issue of true importance is business, and the welfare of those engaging in it. And business, it now appears, has no point but itself.

In this sense, Oliver’s analysis may seem, at least momentarily, irrelevant to our situation. But I do not believe so. A country or a nation is not a shop or a field. Its ownership cannot be usurped or traded as though its history had no meaning. Its people may be stripped of their power and sovereignty, but as Pearse told us, their ghosts do not go away in the manner of sheep to the slaughterhouse. Those who seek to huckster over the heads of the Irish People and cut deals in the blood-soaked land of this island must take cognisance of the fact that such matters have a metaphysical as well as a material reality.

Even for these ruthless cretins, there are facts to be faced. A haunted house is not necessarily an ideal place in which to open up a new business — for example the whorehouse which might be said to correspond metaphorically to the likely future of this island under those who seek to dispose of or claim it. To adopt Oliver’s metaphor, the prospect of increased yields is based on the presumption that the tree can continue to live, which in this instance is deeply questionable. Where, then, does this leave the bargains that are made over this sand bank of ours? Not all tree species are suitable for ringing, and some may be more sensitive to the practice than others. Ireland’s culture is ancient and rich but it is also subtle, more filigree than flash, and therefore more fragile than others. And you can’t really do good business on an island without a culture. Already, as per the analysis of F.S. Oliver as stated above, this culture is in an extreme state of collapse, arising, you might say, from lack of organic nourishment and unimpeded sunlight. And yet, its spirit burns on, and not merely in the hearts of those currently in occupation. ‘Ireland’ in the world is a force to be reckoned with, having many admirers and even lovers among the powerful and dangerous. It is also a land of many, many ghosts, and those who seek to deny or ignore this might usefully study the multiplicity of tales and alleged legends concerning the fates of those who have desecrated fairy forts by building Georgian piles upon the bulldozed sites of these sacred mounds.

In such circumstances as now obtain, the counter-revolution of 2011 remains radically unstable, for it has received no imprimatur from the living Irish, never mind the dead or the unborn, or, for that matter, the ‘living without birth’. Given these realities, the only way a revolution may be sustained is through a constant cycle of chaos-making, backed up by the explicit threat of coercion, which keeps the people distracted and demoralised in equal measure, which is essentially what we have been experiencing in the past five years. But this strategy of perpetual demoralisation has its limits, and may offer opportunities for a reversal, as F.S. Oliver explains in the following extract, albeit that he speaks here of a revolution which initially received the acclaim and approval of the affected people:

When [at a certain point in the post-revolutionary period] people are no longer in a fever of excitement, but are settling down into their old workaday and holiday humours, the busiest, noisiest crowd of theorists and fanatics is overmatched. For in their presumptuous self-confidence they have declared war upon too many and too strong antagonists. They would cut off history and tradition with a pair of shears; would do away age-old loyalties and affections; would knock religion on the head; and in their folly would defy even common custom, which of all adversaries is the burliest wrestler. And the substitutes they endeavour to set up are known at once for what they are — for men of straw, for forms without strength and shapes without life. A brand-new political system with edicts to match it, and executions on a grand scale to enforce the edicts, and zealous schoolmasters to mint young minds in some approved button-mould, has but a poor chance with the forces it has so rashly challenged. For though we plume ourselves on the freedom of our wills, we are less ourselves than we are our ancestors. Their blood beats in our arteries, and our thoughts have to fit themselves as best they can into brain-cells that are part of our inheritance. This is a mortmain that no dictatorship can do away. Looking back no further than our great-great-grandparents, each of us has had thirty progenitors, an invincible preponderance whose dead hands in loving-kindness hold us back from self-destruction.

This is hopeful, even in this present moment in this our all but defeated country: that, deep down, the pilot light of genuine Irish patriotism remains spluttering, but with signs of endurability. When I read the paragraph just above, I become convinced that Oliver brings us good news, and that the deep ancestral imagination of the Irish people will in the end rise up to prevent the worst happening. I have vacillated for five years between this position and its antithesis, but there are some signs in Ireland now that what he here describes may be on the point of emerging, in spite of everything.

What he is saying is that, when the revolutionary period comes to an end, the politician must be aware of this moment and its significance, and take steps to tamp down expectations, but at the same time provide reassurance of continuity. This didn’t happen in 1920’s Russia, nor has it happened in Ireland in the past decade and a half. On the contrary, the contempt of the Irish political class towards its own people has developed into unconcealed loathing. Of course, it may be observed that the Russian revolution survived for another seven decades after the conditions he assessed for his prognosis prevailed. Yes, but remember also that things move far more rapidly now, in this instant world of complex moment-to-moment inter-connection.

If Olivers thesis is broadly right, the possibility of a last minute awakening may represent our best hope. While the revolution is afoot, he says, the people are open to all kinds of shocks and changes, since they crave an end to the failure and tedium that has gone before. But this phase ends suddenly, and the political class need to be aware that this shift is approaching and may erupt at any moment.

This has somewhat limited relevance to our current situation, for the reason already stated: that the autogolpe was in no sense demanded or wished-for by the mainstream of the Irish population. Everything that happened after 2011 was foisted on us, with the assistance of wall-to-wall propaganda and the almost total suppression of viable and genuine opposition. But there comes a time when the revolution must be declared complete, whereupon a new dispensation of expectation and tolerance begins.

‘During the revolutionary period,’ Oliver writes, ‘an astute politician will never attempt to put out the blaze. On the contrary, it may profit him to be seen busily pitching fuel on the bonfire. His speech and action at this stage must not be taken as showing his true mind, but only as flourishes — the more astonishing the better; the more seemingly novel and unprecedented the better. If he shows sympathy with the prevalent mood he may gain power; while if he tries to withstand it he will be swept away. And at the height of a revolution the prevalent mood is to look upon the past as utterly bad. The very fact that a deed or a phrase shows disrespect for the past is enough in itself to earn a favourable acclamation.’

To some extent, these conditions have been ‘live’ and detectable in the circumstances of post-autogolpe Ireland. In the early stage of the revolution, with a range of constitutional limitations being sabotaged and rendered decrepit, there was a degree of celebration among the ignorant young, but those of the young who have not already left for Australia sit and wonder now where it all went wrong. Quite obviously, all the Woke gesturing was by way of misdirection, promising a new and ‘enlightened’ Ireland in place of the caricature that was daily presented by the purchased press and broadcast media. This was the meaning of the ‘marriage referendum’ and the “Repeal the Eighth’ initiative, as well as the purpose of the Tuam baby genocide hoax and the closure of the Irish embassy in the Holy See, in late 2011. All these initiatives were pursued by two consecutive Fine Gael Taoisigh, Enda Kenny and Leo Varadkar, under instructions from their external overlords and paymasters, in order to set the scene for the onslaughts on family, parenting, marriage and human life that were planned and being put in train. Ironically, the latter gesture of bravado — the embassy closure in the Vatican — reveals itself in retrospect as being administratively unnecessary, since the Church under Bergoglio (and possible no less so under the present pretender) required little coaxing to join in the tyrannical assault on the nuclear family.

In that last cited passage from F. S. Oliver’s essay, therefore, we can detect a strong echo of how things emerged in Ireland in the period of and since the Celtic Tiger. Politicians adopted a demeanour of hostility to the people, while at the same time failing to offer restraint or reason to the demands of fringe groups and ‘minorities’, pitching in with the mob in pursuit of the thrills and potential political gains of the Queer and Woke revolutions. These had been in train for perhaps two or three decades, but after 2011 went to a new level, and in 2020 reached their negative apotheosis, where we remain stuck. The political establishment came to believe that their revolution had ‘taken’, and that only a few soreheads remained outside the tent.

In my view, this amounted to a total misreading of public opinion, a mistaking of the effects of bullying and propaganda for actual public affirmation. As Oliver avers, once the initial veneer of the period of change begins to tarnish, the people look for security, familiarity, and the restoration of basic values upon which they have previously relied. In the following passage, he describes what is really required as the revolution recedes into the blurring past:

Sooner or later this exaltation passes and the prevalent mood insensibly changes. People discover gradually and without a shock that they are still living in the world they were born in; they begin by little and little to resume many of their former habits, to think their old thoughts, to scoff and gird at innovations, even to complain because old grievances have been done away that had served so many previous generations as excuses for grumbling. Novelty is no longer a  recommendation but a reproach. Changes and reforms are more acceptable if they can be dressed up in a familiar appearance. New institutions have a better chance.of maintaining themselves if they are built against old ones that have stood four-square for centuries. New ideas gain admission to the popular mind more easily if they are twisted artfully into the strands of old traditions; and if a new loyalty or affection is to capture hearts, it must succeed in personating some familiar sentiment.

At this stage the politician is obliged to occupy himself with smoothing away the hard, rough edge of novelty wherever it chafes the popular skin. At the same time he must save his own face. He will attempt this by a reverent display of images, by carving revolutionary maxims on walls and monuments, by hurling at the outside world the old, braggart defiances that have by this time dwindled to conventions of low vitality. But it would be quite contrary to his intention were this show and shouting to lead to any serious disturbances; for the sole purpose of it all is speciously to advertise his own consistency.

Consciously or unconsciously every full-grown politician accepts this law of continuity. If, since Lenin’s death, there has been a dearth of politicians in Russia — if idealists and theorists, with no better assistants than propagandists and clerks, have had it all their own way — failure and yet another period of anarchy would seem to be inevitable.

We may reflect with some intrigue on the historical ironies of these observations as they apply to Russia in the mid-1930s, and how the Stalinist boot came down hard upon the face of Mother Russia. How these ruminations relate to Ireland in the mid-2020s is even more intriguing.

It will be clear that the Unspeakable Creeps who have been nominally governing Ireland in recent times have been utterly unaware of the extremely important advice proffered by Oliver here. Instead, they let the throttle out on the revolution, and put the peddle to the metal, pushing unashamedly (though sneakily) for the obliteration of everything that is Irish and of the past, without the slightest regard for the consequences or the feelings of the indigenous people.

The impression of people who have not been through revolutions, or studied one or two of them in some depth, is that revolution is a process of demolition and reconstruction. In point of fact, it usually amounts to nothing but destruction, and that is certainly the case with the Irish revolution of 2011, now running on empty. It was, really, in its impact and damage, a Maoist-style war on the past and on tradition, and therefore amounted to a process of scorched earth, which has left virtually nothing worthwhile standing in its wake. Ireland is now, as I have said so often, in a state representing the realisation of Thomas Davis’s legendary reference to a ‘sand bank’, an eruption of rock in the Atlantic with no visible collective life of affection or shared passion, an island offering opportunity for profit from financial sleights of hand, and little besides. This realisation of Davis’s nightmare is the achievement also of the dream of those whose hatred of Ireland was such as to have them hold the gate open to her invaders. These conditions, it goes without saying, make Ireland-as-it-is inhospitable to the natives, but this ought not be read as necessarily a permanent or penultimate condition.

We should not make the mistake of believing that evildoing can indefinitely remain a profitable business, for prosperity does not long walk hand-in-hand with wickedness. Perhaps our best hope is that the overreach, stupidity and malevolence of the Unspeakable Creeps who have destroyed our country will in short order cause the island of Ireland to become equally unattractive to the interlopers, who, having no stake in this sand-bank, will leave it, and us, in peace. A seemingly precarious hoping, to be sure, of which the ultimate meaning may seem to be that Ireland cannot be saved until after it has first been decimated and left for dead. But only if you think too superficially, while driven by apprehension and despair.

The good news is that whatever is going to happen is due to kick off pretty soon. The further good news is that, at the point when the poo-poo hits the punkah, those running the country, from within or without, will require to enlist the tacit support of the indigenous people they have treated with such contempt. This, to some extent, will restore the people’s power, and provide an opportunity for consent to be withdrawn. The outcome is by no means guaranteed, but they may find that, with more of the facts emerging in plain sight, they are dealing with an entirely different gallery than before. Again, the phenomena the Unspeakable Creeps have mistaken for mute obedience, for acquiescence, even for approval of what has been happening, may emerge under the coming circumstances with a radically different facial expression.

The moment we have arrived to is akin to that in the tog-o-war, when the team that has the upper hand and on the point of victory is fully extended and practically sitting on one another’s laps, all but flat out on the ground. This moment, when the self-imagined certain victors need to unseat and reconvene their energies to achieve that final advantage of grip or traction that is necessary to secure their victory, is the optimum moment for the underdogs to pull them to the ends of the Earth.

Let us mend our disarray and prepare ourselves for the final and most crucial pull. And let the would-be thieves of Ireland’s worth and wonder remember well an echo from a century and ten years ago: ‘They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’