FROM OUR LOOTING EDITOR IN DUBLIN

“THE IRISH ARE by nature subversive, factional and divisive, they can’t help it!”

So says historian Professor Biblius Scotti-Magnus, whose seminal work Take It Down, Traitor: How Ireland Destroys Power, was on the New York Times bestseller list for five years back in the 1980s.

“Who are these far-right groups who made such a mess the other night around O’Connell Street? Future dictatorial hordes? I think not. They’re just the frustrated, the ignored, the isolated, the struggling, people who’ve had a belly full of having to eat the shit that the country’s elites have shoveled onto them over the past fifteen years, all egged on by a few demented loonies. And some of these maniacs are driven by nasty personal hatreds which we could well do without, but they’re hardly the Brown Shirts or even Combat 18. Parnell Square East does not constitute nationwide disturbances.

“Remember, many of the people who got stuck in ended up looting. The Irish have a fine tradition of looting during insurrections. How many families made their fortunes during the 1916 Rising? The looting should tell you more than any woke commentator what’s really on people’s minds. They are angry and desperate. And they’ve done what Irish people do best when they’re annoyed: they’ve kicked up a row. Those who say this isn’t us, just don’t know their own country. It is us, in spades. It’s a tradition that goes back centuries, millennia maybe. Faction is in our DNA. Central power is endured, never fully endorsed. And when power finally gets on the nerves of the Irish, they do all they can to tear it down, either by ballot or bullet, or just by wrecking it, it really doesn’t matter. The Irish are not people with a great tolerance for any kind of power. Perhaps 800 years of being ruled by foreigners has made them so. They have gotten into the habit of being habitually subversive; they are now by nature essentially anarchic. Suspicious of all authority. Particularly authority that seems to spit on them. And they have even less tolerance for pomp and ceremony; and none at all for swagger and boast. Look at the farce the Blue Shirts descended into.

“Remember what Brendan Behan said about the first item on the agenda of any Irish organisation: the split. It’s the fractiousness that made conquest here so difficult. You conquered one clan and another rose up; you conquered them with the help of the first clan and three more rose up and the clan supporting you switched sides. And so forth. That’s the Irish way. The minute someone rises to the top, half the population wants to bring them down. The minute they’re down, the same half want to raise them back up and bring the other fellow down. There’s a terrific insular envy that permeates the Irish psyche, hidden beneath the genial facade everyone outside always falls for. Now and then, the facade falls away. Like the other night. No, there isn’t going to be a Fuhrer in Fairview or a Duce in Donore Avenue. No Gestapo. The Garda Representative Association wouldn’t tolerate it. No, none of that. Just people who are angry at the way things are moving and want it brought to the attention of those in power. It might be a good idea to listen to them.”