An Irish Nationalism Worth Defending

Grappling with mass immigration as a Catholic with reasonable concerns

A Foreword from June 2026

Reality-denial is something we have grown accustomed to expecting from across the European establishment. Whether it be the refusal to investigate the harms caused to children by Covid lockdowns, or the refusal to investigate who actually sabotaged Germany’s Nordstream 2 pipeline, the Official Narrative continually reigns supreme over reality itself.

Another such reality that is relentlessly denied is the fact that not all groups residing in Europe are equally likely to commit all crimes. But as per-capita crime statistics from places like Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the UK clearly show, some groups are, according to official data, vastly more likely to stab, shoot, bomb, and rape. This is a fact. The risk of pointing out such a reality is, however, to be called ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’.

“I prefer the term ‘factist‘.” So said self-proclaimed “traditional Catholic”, Frank Wright, during his recent interview on The Peter McCormack Show. “If your descriptions correspond to the awful reality, then they’ll call you a ‘fascist’, because you’re just reality based.” Earlier in the interview, he issued a charitable injunction that is very relevant to the politically incorrect topics discussed below:

“If you do try to talk to people who’ve been captured by that system, so that they recognise nothing but a false reality, and real reality to them seems like a hostile, extremist message, try and have a sense of being something like a social missionary: look at them as the sick and the wounded. They’re casualties on the battlefield. And that battlefield is the attempt to destroy our civilization by this mad liberal system. […] And though it may be extremely difficult to see what you see as your bitter political enemies like that, these are our people too, and we must help them. And that’s better than a permanent state of antagonistic vengeance, with which there is no way forward but increasing division.”

Though Wright was talking about the situation in the UK, the same sentiment applies here in Ireland. Of course it does. The establishments of both countries are heavily populated by cosmopolitan elites who are more similar and loyal to foreign elites like themselves, than they are to the rooted normies of their own nations. The denationalised members of the Irish establishment, whether of global capitalist or lifestyle leftist varieties, appear to have little-if-any interest in protecting and preserving the Irish nation. But regardless of this fact, they are still made in the image of God. And so we must love and forgive them, our enemies, as God loves and forgives us.

This does not mean we must passively accept our ancient nation being utterly ruined by people who appear to hate us; it means that being Catholic does not allow us to hate them in turn as we resist the violent decay and tribal fragmentation of our ancestral homeland. To be an Irish nationalist in this sense is to seek to defend our own from a place of love, not to attack the other from a place of hate. Constantin von Hoffmeister put it well in his 2025 book, MULTIPOLARITY!, when discussing the homogenizing impact that globalization and “the juggernaut of a global capitalist system” have on indigenous groups the world over:

“Some turn to nationalism as a shield, not a sword. For them, nationalism is not about conquest or domination; it is about survival, about refusal to be erased. It is a recognition that their identities are born out of a history, in a place, in a specific way of being in the world.” (pg. 49)

It is in this spirit of defensive nationalism, tempered by Christian love, that I bring attention to two recent acts of barbarity in Ireland that reality denying elites refuse to see as part of broader, Europe-wide patterns of per-capita criminality. Firstly, on May 17th 2026, Irishman Alex Coughlan was found unconscious in Blanchardstown. Gardaí reported he “was assaulted and robbed of his gold ring, wallet and bank cards.” He died 3 days later as a result of “traumatic head injuries” and video footage had circulated online of Coughlan being brutally beaten. Fatima Gunning has reported that both attackers “are from a Muslim and immigrant background.”

Secondly, about a week after Coughlan’s death, and on the other side of the country in rural Galway, Iranian mother-of-two, Masuma Sohrabi, was found dead after suffering horrific injuries. Niamh Uí Bhriain has reported that a man who lived in IPAS (International Protection Accommodation Services) “is the only suspect in the case.” Uí Bhriain tells us that there has been a roughly five-fold increase in the IPAS population since 2021, but that new data shows a nearly eleven-hundred-fold increase in recorded incidents. She quotes Deputy Peadar Tóibín of the parliamentary party Aontú: “There has been a massive increase in the number of incidents in IPAS centres from 2021 to 2025. Many of these have been violent. We have seen a rise from 5 incidents in 2021 to 5725 last year. And for sure this has been caused in part by the increase of the IPAS population. But if you control the figures, to the increase in population there should have been 30 incidents last year not 5,725.”

For years now, successive Irish governments have been totally ignoring the will of at least 75 per cent of the population who think immigration has gone too far. Some have even felt political solutions to be so hopeless they have resorted to perpetrating dozens of “arson attacks against planned, actual or rumoured” IPAS centres. As a dark portent of where these immigration-driven tensions may escalate toward, the Irish police, the Gardaí, in order to battle unprecedented civil unrest, have purchased water cannons. Thanks to extremist immigration policy, we could well be witnessing, to borrow a term from Aris Roussinos of Unherd, something akin to the “Ulsterisation” of the South. If government policy is creating worsening social upheaval, how can we take care of our own and act on the world stage from a place of strength in support of other peoples in need?

Ireland does not need to be like this. And so, in an attempt to further highlight our situation and to hopefully empower readers with arguments and data that might be useful when conversing with those who Wright described above as the “sick and wounded”, those who have been ideologically blinded by our reality-denying, “mad liberal system”, I am delighted to republish with LEO the following essay on Irish nationalism. Originally published with Catholic Unscripted on St. Patrick’s Day 2026, it draws on two Popes, the Catechism, multiple Catholic writers, and very uncomfortable data on per-capita criminality from around Europe. In short, it is a sincerely humane attempt to grapple with reasonable concerns around mass immigration.

God Bless,

Ciarán O’Regan – June 2026.

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The essay below was originally published with Catholic Unscripted on St. Patrick’s Day 2026.

The Nation as a Natural Society

Though a man’s family and nation may be imperfect, they are nonetheless his. Rootedness within one’s people and place of shared origin is part of the human condition. “The nation is a natural division, as natural as the family, and as inevitable.”[1] So wrote Catholic revolutionary, Patrick Pearse, in 1916.

No less a figure than Pope John Paul II in his 2005 book, Memory and Identity, echoes Pearse’s sentiment: “nation and native land, like the family, are permanent realities.” This is because “Catholic social doctrine speaks of ‘natural’ societies, indicating that both the family and the nation have a particular bond with human nature, which has a social dimension.” This Polish patriot, self-described, has no qualms in stating that every “society’s formation takes place in and through the family”, and that, as if by fractal extension, “something similar could also be said about the nation.” This is due to the “cultural and historical identity of any society” that “is preserved and nourished by all that is contained within this concept of nation.”[2] The Pope plainly states the position of the Church:

“The term ‘nation’ designates a community based in a given territory and distinguished from other nations by its culture. Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention. Therefore, in human history they cannot be replaced by anything else.”[3]

Ethnically, he lists the Polanian, Vistulan, Silesian, Pomeranian, and Mazovian peoples as coming together to form the Polish nation.[4] The Pope is, however, careful to issue a warning on “the risk of allowing this essential function of the nation to lead to an unhealthy nationalism. Of this, the twentieth century has supplied some all too eloquent examples, with disastrous consequences.”[5] The immediate association of the word “nationalism” with “unhealthy” is rather understandable given his personal experience of WW2 under the archetypal villains of national identitarianism. Instead, John Paul II argues the right way to avoid such a danger is “through patriotism.”

At an earlier point of the book, the Pope sets the groundwork for this demarcation between nationalism and patriotism through explaining the etymology of the latter as stemming from the Latin word patria which “is associated with the idea and the reality of ‘father’ (pater). The native land (or fatherland) can in some ways be identified with patrimony, that is, the totality of goods bequeathed to us by our forefathers.”[6] These goods, wrote the Holy Father, include one’s native land, “but more importantly, the concept of patria includes the values and the spiritual content that go to make up the culture of a given nation.”[7]

The Pope describes patriotism as “a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius.”[8] And so, to return to his attempted demarcation, this Polish Catholic patriot, par excellence, stated his case thus:

“Whereas nationalism involves recognizing and pursuing the good of one’s own nation alone, without regard for the rights of others, patriotism, on the other hand, is a love of one’s native land that accords rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own. Patriotism, in other words, leads to a properly ordered social love.”[9]

A Critique of John Paul II on Nationalism

At the risk of extravagant hubris, it is here I must critique the Pope’s argumentation. Though he makes the positive case for patriotism with clear and precise eloquence, he does no such thing for the negative case against nationalism, despite describing the “nation” in positive terms through a Catholic lens. In arguing against nationalism, he merely states that it “involves recognizing and pursuing the good of one’s own nation alone, without regard for the rights of others”. Though we are left to speculate as to why he suggests this — with one such WW2 related suggestion already offered above — I cannot see why nationalism necessarily implies ambivalence toward other nations, never mind hostility, while patriotism would, in contrast, accord “rights to all other nations equal to those claimed for one’s own.”

On the contrary, it isn’t hard to argue that, in 2026, the political ideology of nationalism — not in any supremacist sense of describing an idolatrous worship of a state or identitarian category, but in the pragmatic sense of believing that the machinery and leadership of a nation’s state should act, first and foremost, in the national interest — stands the best chance of preserving the patriotic loves not only of the Irish nation, but of all other nations, against powerful forces of atomization and homogenization. Such need for nationalism — not as an end in itself but as means to an end — becomes increasingly clear when one looks at the present alternative on offer: namely Ireland’s continued submission of sovereignty to (mostly) soft-totalitarian imperialism under the pressures of transnational institutions.

The Open Society and Its Solvents

Imposed under post-WW2 ideological hegemony is an “open society” totalitarianism which works hand in glove with transnational capital — both of which are complimentary societal solvents that reciprocally enhance the others ability to destroy the deep relational bonds within which life’s meaning is found. In his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, Catholic editor of First Things, R.R. Reno, describes the “open society” view that one “of the strong gods that the nations of the West must overcome is the nation itself.” Reno traces this to Karl Popper’s highly influential post-WW2 book, The Open Society and Its Enemies:

“Popper knows that there will always be ‘state worshippers’ and other proponents of ‘collectivism.’ They are the cause of the world’s troubles. Such people must be dealt with firmly; anyone who relishes his homeland and its history is a ‘racialist,’ according to Popper. […] One can see how Popper anticipates our own era and its paranoid rhetoric. If someone worries about the effects of immigration on his nation’s culture, he is xenophobic. If he organises a political party that seeks to restrict immigration, he is a fascist.”[10]

With regards to the notion that transnational capital is also a societal solvent, we clearly see a world in which impersonal economic forces are shredding organic communities and dissolving traditional ways of being. Against this, nationalism offers resistance to the deracinating and disenchanting forces of Mammon that treat human beings as nothing but units of labour and consumption, and the natural world as nothing but commodities on a spreadsheet. Indeed Karl Marx, in a speech delivered in 1848, described “national barriers” as restricting “the progress of capital”. Marx, however, saw the destructive forces of capital as a good thing since he thought it would break up “old nationalities” and push “the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point”, thereby hastening “the social revolution.”

Patrick J. Buchanan, a Catholic writer once heavily involved in the highest levels of US politics, wrote in his 2002 book, The Death of the West, that “just as globalism is the antithesis of patriotism, the transnational corporation is a natural antagonist of tradition. […] With share price and stock options its reason for being, it will sacrifice everything and everyone on the altar of profit.”[11] In his 2021 book, Whatever Happened to Tradition?, Timothy Stanley, a Catholic writer for The Telegraph and biographer of Buchanan, followed suit:

“Conservatives of the last century or so have protested against the collapse of the family, the desecration of culture and the loss of religious faith, routinely overlooking the responsibility of their own wealth and ambition. What conservatives dare not confront is that capitalism is part of the problem.”[12]

The Lifestyle Left and the Abandoned Worker

Illustrative of this is mass immigration. In basic terms, the interest of a company seeking to maximise returns for shareholders is to pay its workers as little as possible while still getting the job done. If the supply of workers was narrowly fixed to those of one specific nation, however, those workers would hold more sway in terms of bargaining power. If that company could get access to workers from outside that nation, on the other hand, the bargaining power of the collective worker pool decreases proportionately. It is for this reason that Bernie Sanders, in a 2015 interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, described “open borders” as a “Koch brothers proposal” that would make Americans poorer because it would “do away with the nation-state” and suppress wages, to the benefit only of the wealthiest few.

A nationalist left focussed on protecting Irish workers from the excesses of the market, despite having a deep tradition in Irish revolutionary history, is basically non-existent in Ireland’s contemporary mainstream politics. Reigning supreme is what German politician, Sarah Wagenknecht, has described as “lifestyle leftism”. Thomas Fazi outlined in a 2022 piece for Compact how the lifestyle left is focussed on “consumption habits and moral attitudes” and is “urban, cosmopolitan, pro-globalization, pro-immigration, pro-identity politics”. Wagenknecht has instead called for “left conservatism”:

“[This is] a left that returns to its original mission of improving the lives of the working and middle classes but also understands that doing so means rejecting globalism—turning, instead, to the democratic nation-state as the only terrain on which it is possible to collectively challenge capitalism. Such a left appreciates that states should take care of the well-being of their own citizens, especially the most underprivileged, before they can for newcomers from far-flung places.”

Reno describes “strong gods” as “the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”[13] The irony of ironies here, of course, is that many of the strong god shredding “open society” totalitarians hell bent on destroying Faith, Family, and Fatherland are self-identified leftists serving as useful idiots for global capitalism. By furiously fragmenting Irish society into isolated units, lifestyle leftists clear the way for predatory capital to move in and feast on the pieces. Ireland’s contemporary prophet Against the Machine, the Orthodox Christian Englishman Paul Kingsnorth, describes the phenomenon of “woke capitalism” — the complimentary fusion of lifestyle leftism with big business — in a May 2021 essay, Blanched Sun, Blinded Man:

“The new left, like the Machine which birthed it, longs to abolish all markers, limits, borders and boundaries, thus fitting seamlessly within the world made by the Machine. Hence the curious sight of a supposed ‘revolution’ which has the support of every major corporation and media outlet and the entire intellectual establishment of the West, and sees Big Tech shutting down its dissenters on a daily basis.”

The European Pattern of Violent Decay

Successive Irish governments, as well as their lifestyle leftist parliamentary opposition, have abandoned Irish workers in allowing the Republic’s population to grow some 40% over the last three decades due mostly to economic immigration, such that in 2026 there are more foreigners in our Republic, in absolute terms, than there are in China — a country whose population is some 260 times that of ours. These same leaders are also presently allowing an indefinite number of asylum seekers to come here, typically via safe countries, and stay regardless of whether or not their international protection application is successful. Just like our British neighbours, Ireland is demographically on course to become minority indigenous within this century.

It should go without saying that many immigrants have embraced the Irish people, have folded themselves into our communities, have accepted our ways, and have gone on to positively contribute to our nation. That said, it would be grossly insincere to ignore the glaring costs and challenges of such a rapid influx.

Ireland’s “open society” social experiment has been disastrous from the perspective of protecting the bargaining power of Irish labour. It has been feckless from the perspective of basic infrastructural limitations such as housing availability or hospital capacity. But worst of all, it has been treasonous from the perspective of preserving the Irish nation as a cohesive entity capable of retaining freedoms won in blood. The rapid influx of wildly diverse peoples at a vastly faster rate than anything even approximating adequate assimilation into Irish culture can keep up with, is an obvious recipe for tribal conflict — something Ireland’s North, especially, has been no stranger to.

No sooner had we gotten passed the worst of The Troubles, our de-nationalised elites decided it would be a great idea to facilitate the creation of new ethnic and religious tribes on the island who, as we will come to below, are discouraged from assimilation into the Irish nation. This is a catastrophe. In fact, things have gotten so dire in Western Europe, Ireland included, that we have a mainstream academic like professor David Betz, of Kings College London, outlining in publications like Military Strategy Magazine and Brussels Signal how we have been fostering typical civil war conditions.

Even if talk of civil war sounds hyperbolic, the violent decay of what has been normal Western European society is undeniable. “There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden”, wrote Brendan O’Neill of Spiked in October 2023, “that it’s the only country outside of Mexico that keeps a record of them.” A 2024 report by Reuters describes how “Sweden had by far the EU’s highest rate of deadly gun violence per capita last year.” In 2024 alone, Sweden saw hundreds of gang related shootings and well over a hundred bombings. In October 2025, Euractiv reported that the Swedish government unveiled “a long-awaited proposal to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 to tackle the country’s spiralling gang violence.” The report also describes how “Swedish gangs expanded their operations to neighbouring Denmark, Norway and Finland, where their particularly violent methods are worrying authorities.” A September 2025 article by The European Conservative quotes Arvid Hallén, Program Director at Sweden’s Oikos think tank:

“This is all, of course, a direct consequence of the last few decades of irresponsible immigration policy in Sweden. If Sweden had had mass immigration from Denmark or Germany or Poland, we wouldn’t have these issues, but the problem is that we’ve had immigration from the Middle East, North Africa, mostly the Horn of Africa. These groups are much harder to integrate.”

Looking to Belgium, an October 2025 Politico report overviewed an anonymous letter published by a judge arguing the country was becoming a “narco-state” — a state in which the judiciary is losing its ability to safely perform its job. The report described how Brussels, the capital of the EU, had seen 60 drug related shootings thus far in 2025. The European Conservative had previously described in a March 2025 report how the gangs that dominate the streets of Brussels are “mostly of North African origin”:

“Shoot-outs between these gangs happen almost weekly, often in broad daylight and sometimes even using military-grade rifles. Bombing each other’s headquarters with makeshift explosives is not uncommon either, and neither is seeing ‘civilians’ get caught in the crossfire.”

Published about a week before the Politico piece above, in Valeurs Actuelles, was an article about the concerns of Jean-Louis Sanchet, a former commander of the “elite unit fighting urban violence of the national police from 2021 to 2023.” The article lays out how in the coming years France could break down along ethnic and religious lines, with territorial seizures by gangs like we have seen in “Kosovo, Lebanon and Brazil in particular.” Indeed, Sanchet describes how intelligence services have apparently already identified 62 areas that currently require “reconquest” by French authorities along with 751 “sensitive urban zones”, many of which are “considered dangerous.” This former police commander argued that “links of opportunity” exist “between radical Islam, uncontrolled immigration, and drug trafficking.”

The kind of catastrophe Ireland’s “open society” regime is creating looks to be somewhat less imminent, but no less worrisome. We have already seen the November 2023 Dublin riots which broke out after an Algerian reportedly launched a knife attack on three young children and their brave carer outside of a school. Then there was the October 2025 Dublin riots after a 26-year-old man, reported to be a failed asylum seeker who required an Arabic translator in court, allegedly raped a 10-year-old girl who was under State care, on the grounds of the Citywest asylum hotel.

The Per-Capita Reality

Patterns of broader criminality are also drivers of public discontent. The European Conservative has outlined how October 2024 “figures from the Danish ministry of justice showed that perpetrators of 29.6% of the country’s violent crimes and 32.4% of rapes are from a non-Western background, despite making up only 10.6% of the population.” Similar data are seen in Germany.

In the UK, we see an incomprehensibly massive rape gang scandal involving disproportionate numbers of Pakistani Muslims. In May 2025, Conservative MP Katie Lam pointed out that “Afghans are 20 times more likely to be sex offenders” than native British. Corroborative data presented in the Daily Mail the month prior showed the top 5 per capita sex offenders in Britain to be Sudanese at 24x the native population, Afghan at 20x, Eritrean at 18.5x, Iranian at 18x, and Iraqi at 17x. Similar trends appear in Germany where, according to a highly disturbing documentary published in February 2025 by New Culture Forum, EXPOSED: How Immigration Has Caused a Rape Crisis in Britain & Europe, Afghans and Pakistanis are 16 times more likely than Germans to be implicated in rape.

Here in Ireland, the Women’s Coalition on Immigration has been established to address this urgent yet politically radioactive reality. At a March 2026 meeting of this group in Dublin, Deputy Carol Nolan, a TD in Ireland’s Dáil (Parliament), criticised the “unsustainable and uncosted” levels of immigration into Ireland and the “blind eye” that has been turned to immigration being a “contributing factor to violence against women and girls.” TD Nolan pulled no punches:

“When it comes to violence against women and girls, the multicultural model, which silences or at the very least only offers muted criticisms of unacceptable and aggressive forms of interaction, must be challenged. We cannot stand by and allow a predatory mindset to be protected or unacknowledged simply from fear of criticism from ‘polite society.’ To do so would be to offer a de facto blessing to attacks upon women and girls or to see it as an acceptable form of collateral damage that must be accepted as a by-product of mass immigration.”

While “open society” totalitarians will not like what I am about to say, the obvious must be stated with unapologetic bluntness: this sort of savagery is not surprising since different peoples have different cultures and, by our moral standards, some cultures are simply savage. To point this out, however, is to risk persecution. “The slow dripfeed of a perverse new morality into the public domain”, says former UK MEP Alex Phillips, “now essentially regards being a perceived racist as a far worse crime than being a rapist”.

A case which supports this point was provided by Dr Eoin Lenihan, an Irish journalist and author of the #1 bestselling 2025 book, Vandalising Ireland. In a July 2024 piece for The European Conservative, Lenihan described how 9 of 10 gang rapists were left free while a German woman angry about a 15-year-old girl being gang raped, and who then insulted one of the gang rapists, was imprisoned. Lenihan goes on to write: “Young Germans, frightened and uncertain about the future, are demanding that their elders—who only ever lived with abstract ideals of multiculturalism—listen to their very real concerns.”

In a July 2025 piece for The American Conservative, Mike O’Shea described a Hungarian border patrol guard telling him about Afghans he had previously detained. The Afghans claimed they wanted to get to Europe for “blonde women and money from the wall”. O’Shea describes how these men would likely have paid people smugglers many thousands of euros to get them that far. Such so-called “asylum seekers” are merely opportunists responding to incentives.

But if a nation like Afghanistan is so alien to ours that it has culturally normalized traditions such as “bacha bazi” — the prostitution, rape, and enslavement of young boys dressed as girls — why would we expect people from Afghanistan to easily integrate into native European societies? The sexually abused dancing boys of Afghanistan is a 2010 BBC article which unveils this horrid degeneracy. Therein we read about one of these tortured children: “I ask him what happens when people take him to hotels. He bows his head and pauses for a long time before answering. […] Omid says he is paid about $2 for the night. Sometimes he is gang raped.”

Unlike Sweden, Denmark, or Germany, the Irish state has not released per capita crime data based on migration status or national origins. However, as mentioned above, that does not mean patterns have not been noticed. In an August 2025 piece published soon after a Garda (Irish policeman) was subject to a knife attack by a man of Pakistani heritage who seemed to be shouting “Allahu Akbar”, editor of Gript, John McGuirk anecdotally stated what crime data from European neighbours clearly shows: “every week I am forced to confront a fact: People of migrant heritage are vastly, vastly over-represented in the criminal courts.”

It is against this background knowledge of the immigration driven violent decay across Europe that I wish to highlight a short speech by 15-year-old Irish girl, Kaiden McKenna, from Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan. Mckenna, a champion boxer, gave her perspective on the IPAS reality in her hometown: “As a young person, especially a young girl, I feel more unsafe now than ever.” She described how “after a few scary encounters” she “can’t even walk alone to the bus anymore”, and how one of her parents have to escort her as she walks “through what is now known among the young ones as the ‘dodgiest part of Blayney’.” She describes how she has lost freedom of movement in her own town:

“Going for a run with my mother metres behind me in the car, because it’s not safe, is unacceptable. It’s only going to get worse if there are more IPAS centres in Blayney. […] I’m not against the ones who flee, but who’s looking out for me?”

It isn’t only crime statistics from all over Europe that lend legitimacy to the concerns of this brave girl and her family. It’s common sense.

What Makes Someone Irish?

The Irish state have been creating conditions for carnage. And while arguing against reckless immigration policies from a place of concerns around criminality is challenging enough, when it comes to defending the ethnocultural component of national belonging, a whole new level of vitriolic hysteria is encountered. The post-WW2 “open society” consensus has been radical and unsparing in its rejection of any indigenous European identity.

Primarily thanks to the reaction against the supremacist atrocities of mid-century Germans, but also due to various ideologies that gained traction in Western institutions, such condemnation of anything resembling an assertion of ethnocultural loyalty only applies to indigenous Europeans, colloquially described as “white”. The result of this is that indigenous European peoples are the only peoples who are condemned for asserting that they are, in fact, peoples.

And the Irish are, undeniably, a people. As Dr Matt Treacy outlined for Gript in response to scandalous comments in the national media that the Irish were “mongrels“, Irish ethnic homogeneity can be genetically traced back to a minimum of 4,000 years. And so, as an ancient ethnos that has ancestral roots in this land going back at least five times longer than Māori have been in New Zealand, if Irish people are not indigenous here, nobody can be said to be indigenous anywhere. However, in the view of “open society” totalitarians, native Europeans who express such a fact are, at best, viewed with suspicion.

Indeed, when we see the sort of explicit cultural liquidation that is taking place — including the sort of assault against Irish history that describes indigenous Irish as “mongrels” and reframes us as villains with “white privilege“ — one is left with little doubt as to the intention. “Who controls the past controls the future”, wrote Orwell in 1984. “Who controls the present controls the past.” Buchanan knew:

“Destroy the record of a peoples past, leave it in ignorance of who its ancestors were and what they did, and one can fill the empty vessels of their souls with a new history, as in 1984. Dishonor or disgrace a nation’s heroes, and you demoralize its people.”[^14]

Just as ISIS, in order to consolidate ideological hegemony, have destroyed non-Islamic historical sites in captured territories, “open society” totalitarians are assaulting our national roots by vandalising Irish history. Whereas ISIS aim to foster a society of paradise-seeking warriors in service of eschatological Islamism, “open society” totalitarians seek to foster a society of free-floating activists in service of utopian progressivism.

As part of this we see oikophobia in the form of asymmetric multiculturalism: the cheerleading of foreign cultures and traditions as praiseworthy, while simultaneously assaulting the indigenous national cultures of Europe as inherently oppressive and racist. A prime example of asymmetric multiculturalism perpetrated by Ireland’s thoroughly de-nationalised, deracinated and hivemind establishment, is the framing of “Family A” in the new secondary school curriculum — a caricatural presentation of traditional Ireland as backward, boring, and bigoted. This assault on Irish indigeneity must be seen to be believed. Niamh Uí Bhriain outlined this hateful insult to Irish people in Gript:

“We’re rating families in the classroom now? Under the pretence of respecting diversity? This is actually a disgusting exercise in bullying of schoolchildren whose families like being Irish, are proud of being Irish, and who therefore could find themselves targeted in school — an outcome that should be completely and absolutely unacceptable to any parent. Again, imagine if the classroom exercise compared a black family to another family and then asked the kids what family they would choose to belong to? There would be government-funded NGOs rioting on the streets.

The message throughout this exercise, in my opinion, isn’t that we should respect other cultures — it’s that other cultures are superior. Diversity is superior. And we are going to beat that into your kids, not with a strap, but by an assault on their identity and their family life and their sense of pride.”

It is against this backdrop of anti-white bigotry, and asymmetric multiculturalism, that I would argue Irish ethnicity is important not only on the metaphysical level of organic loyalty towards one’s extended tribe (which could well turn out to be key to preserving the sort of widespread pre-political loyalty required for a functioning democracy), but as the most obvious means of cultural transmission.

Whatever “the true essence of Irishness may be,” as I previously wrote in Gript, “it is not explicitly taught but implicitly learned: learned from our land; learned from our use of language; learned from our shared myths and stories; learned from our music and literature; learned from our cherished sporting traditions; learned from our subtle ways of being in otherwise unremarkable situations of mundane toil”. Most importantly, however, Irishness is “learned from our people. To know Irishness is to have knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge that cannot be described but must be met.”

It was in late 2024 that I met such Irishness during a fascinating chat about immigration with a black university student who we’ll call Philip. Throughout the course of our conversation, Philip voiced concern about the rate of Islamic immigration into Ireland because of his knowledge of brutal Christian persecution in places like Nigeria, as well as growing issues in France. Born in the EU to West African parents but raised in Ireland nearly all of his life, Philip had a thick Irish accent while Irish mannerisms, turns of phrase, and subtle conversational rhythms ran effortlessly under the surface. He was an unapologetic Christian who described himself as Irish at one point and, with sincere argumentation and passion, presented as truly loyal to the nation of Irish people that had formed him. Philip had clearly spent most of his life surrounded by Irish people and, though he will never be Irish in an ethnic sense, I have no issues arguing he was Irish in the culturally formed sense.

In contrast, roughly 18 months or so prior to meeting Philip, at a protest encountered by chance, I had a rather combative interaction with a particularly hostile activist. This somewhat archetypal “open society” lifestyle leftist, let’s call him Derek, was an indigenous Irish male who argued aggressively in favour of men being allowed into women’s sports and prisons, and for puberty blockers and gender affirming surgeries — euphemisms for chemical castration and surgical mutilation — for “trans” children. Though having been born and raised in Ireland, Derek’s lifestyle leftist weltanschauung (all-encompassing worldview) seemed fully divergent not only from my own, but from what I’d argue to be at least 80% of Irish people.

In terms of the fundamentals of cultural expectation — such as what men and women are, what characterizes the virtuous life, what constitutes the common good — I shared far more in common with Philip the African Christian than with Derek the indigenous lifestyle leftist. Both, however, are men I experience a sense of national kinship with.

An explanation for this sense of shared nationhood, despite no ancestral connections to Philip and no discernible overlap in weltanschauung with Derek, is possibly found in a simple model I received from a Catholic friend who has spent a lot of time thinking about such issues. If we consider the three factors of being born to Irish ancestry, being formed by indigenous Irish society, and being loyal to the Irish people, both Philip and Derek each have two from three which, in my friends model, can make them Irish. While Derek’s lifestyle leftism suggests he lacks broader loyalty to the ancestral rootedness of Irish people and the propagation of their patrimony into the future, he still has Irish ancestry and formation. And while Philip lacks bonds of blood to our people, he was undoubtedly formed in character by us (aided massively by our common Christian anthropology that still, for now at least, largely underpins many basic patterns of normal Irish society), and has an intense loyalty towards the people that shaped him.

The Limits of Assimilation

The nation of Ireland has proven itself capable of assimilating some small number of individuals who, like Philip, actually wish to be absorbed into the national fold. With sufficiently deep and extended immersion into Irish society, and the subsequent formation that would occur through consistent interaction with indigenous people, individuals such as Philip, even if they will never be from Ireland, may eventually become of Ireland.

In order for assimilation to have any chance of actually occurring, however, a sufficiently dominant ratio of indigenous to newcomer needs to exist in any given area. Variations in cultural compatibility provide an additional challenge. Someone to address this extremely politically incorrect topic head-on was a Catholic priest in Mayo, Father Brendan Kilcoyne. In July 2025, Father Kilcoyne advocated for Christian-only immigration in order to avoid the sort of issues seen in neighbouring countries. And given the sad fact our establishment elite is largely populated by cosmopolitan minds of metal and wheels — careerist apparatchiks who want to destroy your family farm, medically transition your kids, euthanise your loved ones, ram unlimited immigration down your throat, re-write history and, should you complain about any of it, persecute you for spreading “far right hate speech” or “Russian disinformation” — how else could cultural assimilation occur if not through immersive contact with natives?

On the other hand, the nation of Ireland is not capable of assimilating any number of individuals who wish to remain separate and retain a primary allegiance to their ancestral peoples or culturally incompatible belief systems. If an individual arrives in Ireland striving only to become administratively Irish and retains a weltanschauung that is irreconcilably hostile — such as the British Muslims who forced a Batley teacher into hiding for showing a cartoon, or the French Muslims who murdered the original cartoonists — they are less fellow citizen than invading coloniser.

The same can be said for a child that is born on the island yet is not formed by indigenous Irish ways of being. Given that the ratio of Irish to migrant is now about 4:1 (if not closer to 3:1) and getting less Irish by the day; our capital city is already minority indigenous; our schools are becoming less and less indigenous; and our birth rates are collapsing not least because marriage is increasingly rare and the sacrificing of children to Moloch is horrifyingly common: how could we expect cultural assimilation of even the most willing individuals to occur? More and more guests going through their daily lives alongside fewer and fewer indigenous hosts leads to an obvious conclusion: assimilation is becoming increasingly impossible, especially when we see a school curriculum that is training children to hate their heritage and to think of themselves as de-nationalised “global citizens“.

This is an enormous problem since attempts to build multicultural societies have long shown themselves to have “utterly failed”, as former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, argued in 2010. France’s bleak status as Europe’s jihad capital, alongside its regular (not-unrelated) rate of church burnings, encapsulates the suicidal reality of Europe’s already failed multicultural experiment. Buchanan foresaw all of this with sober clarity and unflinchingly wrote of how the choice to allow masses of Arab and African peoples to “pour in” means that “social tensions will rise”, and that ethnic and religious conflicts are to be expected.[15]

In a 2012 interview with Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Buchanan described how the US had a 40 year pause on immigration from 1924 to the mid-60s and that this period, in conjunction with a solid program of patriotic education in schools, a shared popular culture through emergent technologies of radio and television, and the shared struggles of the Great Depression and World War 2, allowed for the formation of an American people out of what were formerly disparate ethnic groups. He argues that by 1960, 97% of the people in the U.S. spoke English, 95% of the country was Christian, “African-Americans were the most Churched and Christianised of all”, and “so we had one country, one nation, one people” — something he describes, rightfully, as an “incredible achievement.”

The Catholic Teaching on Migration

Pope Benedict XVI articulated the Catholic position in 2010: “The Church recognizes this right [to emigrate] in every human person […] At the same time, States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person. Immigrants, moreover, have the duty to integrate into the host Country, respecting its laws and its national identity.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241 provides elaboration:

“The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

From a Catholic perspective, while respecting human dignity, Ireland not only has the right to defend its borders, but to expect immigrant guests to integrate with appreciation and responsibility toward their hosts. This is not a radical position.

What’s Left to Defend

Yet on current trends, the Irish nation looks set to become an endangered ethnocultural silo, subjugated under an increasingly despotic transnational apparatus, suffering from what neighbouring countries have shown to be increasingly barbaric ethnic and religious division. It is not hyperbolic to expect worsening levels of anarcho-tyranny.

The immigration catastrophe is the single biggest issue facing Ireland in 2026. This is because the short-term criminality, medium-term destruction of social cohesion and institutional trust, and long-term “multicultural” balkanisation of our nation, all serve to make it harder for our people to address any other problems. Alarmingly, we are copying western European neighbours in creating what professor Betz and commander Sanchet, alongside increasing numbers of other commentators, have described as civil war conditions. Turning Ireland into a balkanised post-Christian outpost is hardly what our ancestors had in mind when struggling for centuries under the British yoke.

However, with all that said, we might already be too far gone — perhaps it is simply time for the indigenous people of this island to see their culture erased and people replaced.

But if not, if hope prevails, then to preserve the Irish nation is to preserve an unapologetically assertive indigenous ethnocultural core around which to build a cohesive and coherent island of sanity — one capable, God willing, not only of weathering the frenzied storms to come, but of being strengthened by shared struggle such that we can help other nations in need. After millennia of lineal transmission, let’s not be among the end of the line. Not only are we responsible for the safety and stability of the Irish nation today, we are the ancestors who will determine Ireland’s future. This is an Irish nationalism worth defending.

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[^1]: Patrick Pearse, The Coming Revolution: The Political Writings and Speeches of Patrick Pearse, 2012, Mercier Press, pg. 269

[^2]: Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005, Phoenix, pg. 75

[^3]: Ibid., pg. 77

[^4]: Ibid., pg. 87

[^5]: Ibid., pg. 75

[^6]: Ibid., pg. 65-66

[^7]: Ibid., pg. 66

[^8]: Ibid., pg. 73-74

[^9]: Ibid., pg. 75

[^10]: R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods - Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, 2019, Regnery Gateway, pg. 4

[^11]: Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West - How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil our Country and Civilisation, 2002, Thomas Dunne Books, pg. 229

[^12]: Timothy Stanley, Whatever Happened to Tradition? - History, Belonging and the Future of the West, 2021, Bloomsbury, pg. 188

[^13]: R.R. Reno, pg. xxiv

[^14]: Patrick J. Buchanan, pg. 147

[^15]: Ibid., pg. 232