This Week’s Show

Contents

• 01m04s Ireland’s new troubles
• 16m39s Something to dress up for
• 27m51s Free Puerto Rico!
• 31m05s Vance socks it to them
• 32m13s Too many foreign students?
• 32m27s Too woke for Disney!
• 36m11s Signoff:  As Irish as it could be

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your gratuitously genial host John Derbyshire with a look at the news.

This week’s podcast is more than usually self-indulgent. Inspired by the coming St. Patrick’s Day, I got talking about the home islands over the water there and couldn’t stop. I beg your pardon, and hope you find something interesting here — I mean, as interesting to you as it obviously is to me.

Here we go.

02 — Ireland’s new troubles.     Monday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, a sort of ethnic pride day for the people of Ireland and the Irish diaspora. That diaspora, if you include all levels of consanguinity, includes almost one in ten Americans.

In recognition of the event, I thought I’d record my own acquaintance with the Emerald Isle, slight as it is, and give a quick survey of recent events, events that have left Ireland today a not very happy country.

The first things I ever heard about Ireland were from my father. As a British soldier during World War One, before the Republic of Ireland was founded, Dad was stationed there briefly — in County Cork, I think it was — before being shipped to the Western Front.

I don’t know the precise dates Dad was there, but those were the years around the 1916 Easter Rising, with much anti-British agitation. “They shot one of our lads coming out of church,” Dad remembered.

These troubles notwithstanding, Dad seems to have liked the Irish in general. The place was very poor at that time, and Dad sympathized. Quote: “People, pigs, chickens, all living together in one falling-down hut; but they’d always share a drink with you.” End quote. He reported ordinary Irish people as being non-hostile — friendly, in fact.

Dad, who was a stone-cold atheist, blamed the troubles of those times on the Catholic church. Quote: “We’d see them of a Sunday going to mass. They’d wave at us and call out to us, cheerful as you like. But then the priest would work on them and they’d come out an hour later howling blue murder.” End quote.

Forward half a century to my college days in the mid-1960s. Ireland was an independent republic by this time, but still very poor. Young Irishmen, mainly peasant lads from the poorest counties in the far west, would come over to England and work as construction laborers. I worked construction myself in the college vacations, and most of my co-workers were Irish.

Like my Dad, I found them easy to get along with in the generality, good-natured and humorous. They were of course much more experienced than I was in common laboring work. They gave me much patient, helpful instruction on things like the right way to wield a shovel or control a jackhammer. (That sucker will jump up and jackhammer your foot if you don’t hold it right.)

I particularly admired the way they always knew the precise location of the foreman, so that we could slacken off working when not visible to him.

From being among them I learned things not generally known about their country: that it was plagued by criminal gangs, for example — the Sicily of the British Isles. I don’t know if that is still the case.

Everything changed in the 1970s. The biggest change for the Irish came in 1973 when they joined the European Economic Community, which was incorporated into the EU twenty years later. This had major economic consequences. It took Ireland’s governments a while to take full advantage of them; but the following years were the infancy and childhood of the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s and early 2000s.

I got a glimpse of it myself, on a one-month contract as a computer programmer in Dublin, 1981. Ireland wasn’t rich yet, but she was no longer dramatically poor.

The other big change was the Troubles — paramilitary groups fighting and killing over whether Northern Ireland should remain under the British Crown or be united with the Republic. The Troubles generated a lot of headlines but only occasionally spilled over the border into the Irish Republic, which went on steadily climbing out of its ancient poverty to become a modern European nation.

The social transformation of these later years was fascinating to watch; so much so that in 2002, when I had been settled in the U.S.A. for seventeen years, I published a column arguing that, quote: “I believe Ireland to be the most interesting place in the world right now.” End quote.

To give you the flavor, here is the closing paragraph of that 2002 column. Longish quote:

[Inner quote.]  “All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born,” [end inner quote] remarked Yeats at the time of the Easter Rising. What has actually been born in Ireland during this past 20 years has been a modern, secular, hedonistic welfare state with a globalized economy, a Marxified Academy, a crime problem, a drug problem, an immigration problem and a terrorist problem. Is that terrible? Or beautiful? Your answer is probably a good indicator as to whether or not you are going to enjoy the first half of the 21st century.

End quote.

Ireland’s people did enjoy the years around 2002. The Celtic Tiger strode through those years confidently until the crash of 2008 when Ireland, at this point very globalized indeed, took a bad hit.

She made a fair recovery through the 2010s; but some economic trends — the financialization of the housing market, high-tech foreign multinationals dominant but short of skilled labor — made Ireland an expensive country, hard to live in for the working- and lower-middle-class legacy Irish population.

A cultural gap opened up, or widened, along with the economic one. While on the path to globalized wealth, the nation acquired a big educated class with luxury beliefs imported from America and Europe — wokesters.

There is something in the Irish national character that made this easier than it might have been elsewhere. The world-saver impulse has always been strong among the Irish. Their missionaries have been credited with keeping Europe civilized after the collapse of Rome.

(My private opinion, based on personal encounters, is that the male-female balance also has something to do with it. Women are, as Orwell told us, the shrillest and most true-believing adherents of any ideology. Ireland seems to be cursed with an unusually large number of such women, of whom Irish men are terrified. Was Mother Machree in fact a ruthless tyrant? Were those civilizing missionary monks of the Dark Ages fleeing from her? I leave this topic for future discussion.)

So in today’s Ireland we see an amplified version of the blithe attitude to Third World settlement now common all over Europe, including Britain. Most of that settlement is undocumented, and so can’t properly be called “immigration.”

The losers here — rural and working-class Irish people — have been protesting and demonstrating for years, most sensationally in the Dublin riots of November 2023 following a knife attack by a foreigner on some schoolchildren. The perp in that case turned out to be a legal immigrant, but that only came out later, after George Floyd-scale rioting.

For a nation of just over five million — a nation once best known for e-migration — the numbers for immigration (with or without quotation marks) are striking, although they need some qualification.

In the year up to April 2024 150 thousand people from abroad settled in Ireland. That was a 17-year high. Of that 150 thousand, however, 30 thousand were returning Irish citizens, 27 thousand were other EU citizens and 5,400 were British. The remainder, nearly 87 thousand, were from the rest of the world, a high proportion of them — I can’t find an estimate — having no documentation. And in that same one-year period almost 70 thousand people left Ireland, the highest emigration figure since 2015.

Carol Nolan, a member of the Irish Parliament, commenting on these figures last August, said, quote:

This is a multi-generational catastrophe unfolding in plain sight; one that is already crippling the capacity of the state to meet current housing and medical need.

End quote.

At about the same time last summer, there were indignant news stories about the village of Dundrum in County Tipperary, population 165, where the Irish government planned to settle 280 “international protection applicants.” That’s an Irish euphemism for “illegal aliens.”

There is now a steady rumble of discontent on social media about illegal settlement. On X, for example, Michael O’Keeffe posts daily, at least. Another Michael, journalist Michael Murphy of the London Daily Telegraph, posted a good 15-minute YouTube clip last year, as also did the immigration-skeptical Hindsight thread.

For all that rumbling, though, it’s not likely Ireland will do anything to stem the inward flow of settlers. In that respect the Irish are behind other European countries, where mass deportation is now a subject for open public discussion. Ireland’s ruling class remains blithe.

Opinion polls show half of Irish voters want immigration reform; but in the general election last November, no major party took a strong position on the issue. Three-quarters of the vote went to the big old unimaginative center-right and center-left parties with the rest going to Greens and far-lefties.

So for Ireland, present trends will continue. Well-educated foreigners will come in to work at high tech in what is today a rich country. Destitute Third Worlders will come in for the freebies. Legacy Irish from the countryside and poorer towns will emigrate, as they always have.

A “multi-generational catastrophe”? Quite possibly; or perhaps it will all be managed somehow. I doubt I shall live long enough to see the result.

If demography is destiny, Ireland will undergo great change in the future; but they will put that change off for as long as they can.

03 — Something to dress up for.     So yes: Monday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day. Much less noticed was this past Monday, March 10th: Commonwealth Day.

Say what, Derb? You mean, like, the Commonwealth of Virginia? Or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Which one?

No, neither of those. Not Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or Puerto Rico either — all of them commonwealths for some purposes. No: this Monday, March 10th, celebrated the British Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Empire. And yes: Commonwealth Day was originally Empire Day.

I can remember my primary-school class being assembled in the schoolyard on Empire Day to sing There’ll Always Be an England. Heaven help me, I can still sing it. [Sings]:

There’ll always be an England
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me …

No, I’m not drunk, just a little nostalgic. That England, the one I grew up in, has of course been transformed by the passage of time. Some of the changes have been for the better: public health, life expectancy, social equality, technological advance, … There have been losses along with the gains, though.

Most nostalgia-inducing of the losses has been the loss of the national solidarity expressed in that song.

It wasn’t actually much to do with the Empire. A big part of it was having been on the victorious side in World War Two. There was sentimentality about the monarchy, too: the pretty young Queen, her handsome consort and their photogenic children. Back of all that was a sense of kinship, of common ancestry.

Most of that has faded, inevitably. Today’s Britain is no longer a nation of much importance. Ranked by GDP per capita she’s actually poorer than Ireland — ranked number twenty against Ireland’s number three.

Much worse, and less inevitably, that sense of kinship has taken a hit from uncontrolled mass immigration. Opinion polls record widespread resentment about this; but that resentment seems unable to find a political home. The two historically big political parties won’t touch the issue.

A new party, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, seemed for a while to take a more robust approach, but just recently Farage has been scoffing at the idea of mass deportations. As if deliberately insulting his followers, he has also appointed as chairman of the party a bloke named Muhammad Ziauddin Yusuf. Reform is imploding and immigration restrictionists are now as homeless as before.

The British Empire is of course long gone. After India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 Britain’s other imperial possessions followed pretty steadily for fifty years: through to little Belize in 1981, Brunei in 1984, and the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

However, most of those imperial possessions didn’t cut the cultural tie when they cut the political one. Most signed up to the British Commonwealth of Nations: a voluntary association now of 56 countries with total population two and a half billion.

Most populous member nation: India with over 1.4 billion. Least populous: Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation with fewer than twelve thousand citizens. Other big, notable members: Canada, Pakistan, Nigeria, the U.K. of course, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, … there’s a comprehensive list on Wikipedia.

So what does it do, this Commonwealth of Nations? What’s it for?

The Commonwealth is advertised as a goodwill outfit. We’re all friends, right? Different nations of different races, different religions, different history, but we can all get along, right?

So there are educational exchanges, help dealing with each other’s problems, co-operation on international issues like public health, a Commonwealth Games every four years (the even-numbered years in between Olympic Games), and so on.

It doesn’t always work out so nicely. Commonwealth countries have been known to go to war with each other — four times, in the case of India and Pakistan. Cynics point out that there’s an obvious financial angle: poor countries benefiting from association with rich countries.

And then, the Commonwealth makes lots of busy work for the British monarch and his or her family. He — it’s currently King Charles III — need never be bored. He can always arrange a state visit to Sri Lanka, Tanzania, or Fiji: honor guards, banquets, tour of the Presidential Palace … what’s not to like? He probably has to deliver some kind of aid package, but that’s easily arranged.

It’s all a bit lackluster compared with the glory days of Empire, though. That residual glitter of monarchy in fact serves mainly to steer British minds for a while away from the unhappy truth that their country is no longer of much consequence.

Sure, the national story is an amazing one. The people of some damp, foggy islands in the eastern Atlantic somehow spread their language around the entire globe, to have it spoken on tiny Pacific islands and on the frozen mountains of northwest Canada — even, if only very briefly, on the surface of the Moon.

Might Britain be a happier place today if she had never been great? If she’d just stayed on those foggy islands and left the rest of the world alone?

Or suppose she’d quit the Empire business all at once, after World War Two, and totally retreated into small-nationhood, minding her own business all through the second half of that century and developing her own quirky national personality, like Koreans or Hungarians? I sometimes wonder.

Back in 2014 I went a bit further than wondering. I wrote a little alternate-history speculation about how the British Isles might have turned out if they had become Soviet satellites in 1951, like the East Europeans. I’ll read you the closing paragraph. Quote:

Following the fall of the Soviet régime, the British, fortified by returned émigrés — most notably Princess Elizabeth — quickly found their feet, emerging in the early 21st century as a major economic and cultural power. It is amusing to speculate how things might have turned out if the islands had kept their independence from 1951 to 1991. Would they, like the free Western nations, have opened their borders to waves of unassimilable Third Worlders, destroying social harmony and reducing their historic populations to foreigners in the lands their fathers had fought for? We shall never know …

End quote.

But then, of course, Britain’s monarch wouldn’t have had the Commonwealth to dress up for.

04 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Long, long ago, even before there was such a thing as Radio Derb, I posted a column at National Review headed “Necessary But Impossible.” In it I listed ten things that I thought came under that heading: necessary but, for political or social reasons, not possible.

Number nine of my ten things was: Grant independence to Puerto Rico. Here’s what I said, quote:

Who wants Puerto Rico? Well, obviously the Puerto Ricans do. It’s their place. Not “their country” because it isn’t a country. It’s a “commonwealth,” which is a fancy way of saying it’s a US colony.

What are we doing in the colony business? Isn’t this a free republic? Didn’t we get started in the first place as an anti-colonial enterprise?

We can’t offer Puerto Rico statehood because they have nothing in common with us, not even a language. (And, oh, also because any Senator or Representative who voted for such a measure would be lynched on return to his home district.)

What’s that you say? — Puerto Ricans have fought bravely in our country’s wars? Great! Let’s give U.S. citizenship to those who have done so! God bless them! For the rest — give them back their country.

End quote.

With all President Trump’s talk about annexing Greenland or Canada, the topic of de-annexing Puerto Rico — that is, of giving the place independence — is in the air. It’s not clear that this is a thing the President could do by Executive Order; it probably needs approval from Congress.

Puerto Rican independence activist Javier Hernandez has actually drafted a proposed executive order for the President to look at, and sent a memo arguing for Puerto Rican independence to 30 White House and Cabinet offices as well as to several Republican and Democrat lawmakers.

I took that from a March 13th report at Daily Mail Online. The whole report is rather long; I’ll leave you to read it for yourself. I don’t know what the odds are that anything will come of it, but it’s nice to see the issue being aired.

Item:  Earlier this week, in acknowledgment of St. Patrick’s Day coming up, President Trump played host in the White House to the Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin.

No, if you are reading: I haven’t mis-spelled that. In Irish the “e” comes before the “a.” If you are listening, though, I almost certainly have mis-pronounced it. I have never found enough room in my head to master both Analytic Number Theory and Irish pronunciation.

The two leaders seem not to have found much of consequence to talk about. The main focus of the news stories was on the socks that our Vice President J.D. Vance wore for the occasion: cream-colored and decorated with shamrocks in, of course, green.

Item:  I have been arguing for years that, and here I can just quote from myself — this was May 17th last year — quote:

Higher education is a precious national resource. Our own citizens should have first call on it. No institution of higher education registered as such with state or federal government should have a student body more than five percent non-citizen. Wait: five percent? How about two percent?

End quote.

Now, reading about this Hamas supporter being arrested by ICE, I learn that over half of Columbia University’s enrollment is made up of foreign students.

I want to revise my earlier suggestion. Two percent? How about one percent?

Item:  Back there a way I referenced George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, observing that it is women who are the shrillest ideologues. Here I need to give you the full Orwell quote. Quote:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

End quote.

In support of that remark, I offer you 23-year-old Rachel Zegler. Ms Zegler is a movie actress. Her latest role is as Snow White in Disney’s new live-action remake of the movie with that name, which is scheduled to be in theaters March 21st.

Ms. Zegler is as woke as it’s possible to be. She signs off her emails with “Free Palestine!” She wouldn’t sing the song “Some Day My Prince Will Come” from the original 1937 movie because, she says, she doesn’t need a man.

Disney’s been pushing DEI initiatives for years, adding content warnings to the streaming versions of their classic movies like Fantasia and Peter Pan, but Ms. Zegler seems to be too much even for them. The movie’s European premiere was held at a remote castle in Spain, with no reporters invited.

Starting to read the news stories about this fuss, I found myself marveling that a movie with the title Snow White could even be made nowadays. If the heroine was black, of course they might get away with it; but Ms. Zegler looks totally white in the pictures I saw. Reading deeper, however, I learned that she identifies as Latina; her mother comes from Colombia. So I guess that’s all right, then …

05 — Signoff.     That’s all, ladies and gents. Thank you for your time and attention, and please allow me to remind you, as is my custom, that you can support the VDARE Foundation by subscribing to Peter Brimelow’s Substack account, or with a check to the Foundation itself at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759; and you can support me personally by earmarking that check with my name, or by any of the other options spelled out on my personal website. You can also support me indirectly by subscribing to that excellent monthly magazine Chronicles, to which I am now a regular contributor. Thank you!

For signoff music, something Irish of course. This is an old favorite of my younger years, and as Irish as it could possibly be. If you can sit all the way through it without moving, your powers of physical self-control are supernatural.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week