The Irish left (people)
I agree with the Irish left mainly on civil liberties.
I disagree with them primarily
on the economy, crime, and foreign policy.
Some of the following have noble records in fighting for sexual and religious freedom
in Ireland,
the rights of gays and atheists, separation of church and state,
opposition to censorship, and so on.
But that does not mean that their foreign policy or economic ideas make any sense.
-
Michael D. Higgins
of the Labour Party
is the leader of anti-American politics
in the Irish parliament.
- Michael D. supported the
communist regime of Nicaragua.
- Senate,
27 February, 1985.
-
In the Senate,
20 March, 1985
he describes Nicaragua as
"a small country that has recently thrown off the shackles of dictatorship
...
In every sphere - health, education, welfare, housing - its achievements have been enormous. It is a society which is transforming itself.".
He promotes the idea of inviolable
state sovereignty:
"In international law we have signed covenants that recognise the integrity of national territory, that accept sovereignty. Under international law the belligerence of the statements being made against Nicaragua are outrageous."
He asks for
"support for this democracy that may not exist should we ignore the challenges which are there to it now ... so that we might save people who have established democracy in the wake of the cruellest dictatorship of the century."
-
Michael D. quotes the communist dictator Castro
in the Dail, 2 February, 1999
(also here):
"I recall making a documentary in Rio during the United Nations conference on economics and development when the most moving statement was made by Fidel Castro in a short speech. He said: "Let us pay the debt to humanity before the debt to the banks." Regardless of whether one agrees with him, it explicitly put the right to life expressed internationally above the right to debts.".
-
Michael D.'s response to 9/11
- "rather than seeking to demonise, we have to try,
however painful and difficult it may be, to seek to understand".
- Michael D. on Israel
- Michael D.,
as part of a crackpot anti-Israel European delegation,
28 August 2005,
calls for
the removal of
"all settlements, the more than 400,000 settlers"
from the West Bank.
-
His delegation claims, despite all the evidence, that
suicide bombings are
"executed by Palestinian non-state actors".
- His delegation claims that the Israeli occupation is the cause of the conflict!
"The Delegation views the continuing occupation
and these policies as the root cause of the current deadlock"
-
Michael D. attends a candlelit vigil for the dictator Arafat
- Michael D. on Iraq
-
Michael D.'s meeting with the butcher Tariq Aziz, 2003,
discussing how to keep him and his fellow thugs in power.
Luckily, they failed.
-
Michael D. in the Dail on Iraq, 12 March 2003.
-
Irish anti-Americanism
by John Fay, January 31, 2003,
quotes Michael D. Higgins as saying
that the US is about to "wage war on a civilian population".
-
Michael D. doesn't like being called anti-American
(and
here)
-
Being anti-war means never having to say you're sorry,
Anne Marie O'Connor,
New Ross Standard, Apr 17 2003
- on the liberation of Iraq.
She criticises people like Michael D.
"We all saw the scenes. The utter joy, the scenes of uncensored jubilation. Indeed, watching the euphoria
did wonders for the soul.
So you would think that the entire free world looked at the images of a liberated Baghdad with relief
and with joy. After all, we hadn't seen such a spectacle of repressive regime-bashing since the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Statues were pulled down, Saddam posters torn to shreds, and finally, people were able to
speak their minds."
-
Michael D. regards the liberation of Iraq as a crime,
Dail, 16 April 2003.
"It was on this population that people decided to use the instruments of war.
...
I look back now at all that has been said during this Dáil term regarding this awful and appalling war. To the war mongers who celebrate and suggest we were wrong because not enough people were killed to fulfil our predictions, I say that any loss of life for the kind of project being pursued was a disgrace and a blot on the morality of us all."
- Michael D. on Mark Steyn
-
Torturous apology
by Mark Steyn
- "to be coerced into apologizing more generally is very foolish.
What happened at Abu Ghraib
is terrible because it's an offense to American values, not Arab ones.
It's ridiculous to insist that America has to apologize to Arab thugocracies in which
what's merely simulated in those photographs is done for real every day of the week."
- Michael D. on Steyn's column,
in the Dail,
20 May 2004:
"Repeatedly this column of bigotry, homophobia and racism that is presented every Monday
contains attacks on what we call the basic decencies on some principle of balance.
The editor of that newspaper would want to indicate to me what she is balancing
when she produces material like that.
...
In The Irish Times Mark Steyn said there had been more fuss about a man with woman's underwear
over his head than about a man who had no head at all. This is typical of the
slick, degrading, immoral rubbish which is being propounded every Monday in that newspaper."
- Higgins' spluttering incoherence ("homophobia"?),
his utter inability to address Steyn's arguments,
and his thinly veiled call for censorship,
shows the intellectual poverty of the Irish left.
It's very amusing really, watching the innocent, poorly-read,
Irish Times reading lefties
try to deal with a full-on neo-con like Steyn.
It is obvious they never even heard of Steyn
before he dropped
like a bomb into the complacent, insular waters of their Irish Times.
They have probably never even heard of most of
these writers either.
To 1960s lefties like Higgins,
the neo-conservatives are from another planet.
The Irish left don't read them
and don't understand them.
They only read their own - which is why their opinions are so narrow and insular.
- Michael D. is the political heir of
de Valera -
the leader of an inward-looking,
neutral Ireland
that refuses to support our western democratic allies,
but views itself instead (absurdly)
as some kind of innocent peasant ex-colony
that should be allied with the Third World.
- David Norris
is a hero of
the long fight to legalise homosexuality in Ireland.
-
But on foreign policy, he is one of the main opponents of
America and Israel in Ireland.
You would think he would have some sympathy for
the brave American and Israeli
troops fighting the
fascist, gay-murdering Islamists.
But no. All he does is criticise them, snipe at them, and try to demoralise them.
- See blog
(and here).
- Norris on Israel
-
"We should not be trading with a rogue state."
- Norris supporting sanctions against Israel, in the
Irish Senate, 23 Mar 2004.
He is bemoaning the killing of
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Condemnation of the killing of this
monster is universal
in the Irish Senate,
with
notably ignorant contributions
by:
- Joe O'Toole (Ind)
- Brendan Ryan (Labour)
- John Dardis (PD)
- Michael Finucane (FG)
- Labhras O'Murchu (FF)
- Mary O'Rourke (FF) (who quotes Robert Fisk)
Nobody defends Israel.
-
Norris on Israel,
Irish Senate, 20 May 2004
- "There is one thing that we can do. There is a human rights protocol attached
to the external association agreement of the European Union. Since we hold the Presidency of the EU,
why do we not operate that and remove the special status awarded to Israel?"
Again, he gets lots of support
and nobody defends Israel.
-
Norris on Israel,
Irish Senate, 5 July 2006.
-
He describes Gaza as
"an open-air concentration camp".
Note this is after
the Israelis left!
This is after all the Jews (9,000 of them) were ethnically cleansed to satisfy the Palestinian
Muslim supremacists.
This is after the Palestinians were free to set up their own working state.
And yet somehow they are living in a "concentration camp".
- Norris has a bizarre understanding of democracy.
He thinks that just because the majority of people vote for something,
it must be "respected":
"It is a frightening comment on democracy that because we do not like the people who are elected,
we can get rid of them. I do not particularly like Hamas.
As a gay man, I am certain I would not last ten minutes with them.
However, that does not mean I can countermand the sovereign authority
given to Hamas by the people of Gaza."
- For me, human rights always trump
democracy and sovereignty
(that's why I'm not a leftist).
Hamas do not believe in human rights.
So I couldn't care less
how many people voted for them.
Attacking them and deposing them is always legitimate.
Democracy is a means to an end, the end being a free society.
Democracy is not something inherently good.
Rather, it is the only statistically reliable means
discovered so far of establishing and
maintaining a free society.
- When you read these awful Israel-condemning debates in the Irish Senate,
remember that Ireland is a country
that was neutral
during the Holocaust,
that sent condolences to Germany on the death of Hitler,
and that refused to allow almost any Jewish refugees in,
either before, during or after the war.
I don't at all think the Irish politicians are anti-semitic.
Rather, they have
a range of trendy reasons
for their views.
But I think Ireland - like most of Europe
- should shut up about Jews for a few hundred years.
-
Freedom of sexuality in Israel
- It is, of course,
the only country in the Middle East where Norris could live in peace
- the only country where he would not be persecuted
for his sexuality.
- Norris on America
-
Norris on America,
Irish Senate, 5 July 2006.
Hamas, which kills Jews and gays,
and wants to exterminate them all,
is: "the legitimate Government" of Gaza,
while the US government, which runs a tolerant free society, is:
"the dark shadow of the criminal regime entrenched in Washington
which has spread its plague all over the world".
Why left-wingers have even an ounce of sympathy for
reactionary Islamic religious fanatics is beyond me.
It makes no logical sense.
People like Norris certainly make left-wing politics seem to be based on emotion
rather than reason.
-
Norris on Bush
(and here),
Irish Senate, 20 May 2004
- "here we have a criminal involved in war crimes
...
it is unparliamentary to allow that man to remain unimpeached
...
He is a war criminal."
-
Norris discussing whether President Bush could be arrested on his visit to Ireland,
Irish Senate, 23 June 2004.
The Greens also want to arrest Bush.
-
Norris and the Greens exemplify the "dreamworld"
and "postmodern paradise" that much of Europe lives in,
totally detached from reality
since they have for so long been
children protected
from the harsh world by America.
I wonder if, in the future, some European government
(Belgium maybe?) will actually
get so detached from reality that they
will try to arrest or attack the US President.
Certainly, I would support US military action against
any country that did this.
- Proinsias De Rossa
-
De Rossa
compares the Israeli security wall
to the Nazi ghettos:
"Looking at the watchtowers, guns and barbed wire, I thought of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Growing up just after the second World War, I could not understand how the world stood by (*)
while six million Jews
were gassed, burned and buried alive. I learnt the answer in Qalquilya.
First, you dehumanise your victims, than you criminalise them en masse, and then you imprison them en masse.
Finally, you can kill them while the world watches."
- Reply to De Rossa:
- (*) The world did not stand by, Mr. De Rossa.
Britain and America - the two countries you have spent your entire career attacking
- fought to stop it, and sacrificed
900,000 lives
to end it.
They were joined by
Australia, Canada, New Zealand
and
many others.
-
Ireland stood by, it is true -
to its eternal shame.
Ireland stood by
because of all the appalling
anti-British, anti-American and "anti-war" people
who, unfortunately, so often dominate discourse in this country.
People like
the modern Irish left,
in fact.
-
Sinn Fein - your first political party - not only stood by,
they actually
supported the Nazis.
Were you not aware of this?
It was no secret, then or since.
If you "could not understand" growing up in the 1950s
how the world stood by during the Holocaust,
if you thought it was such a big issue,
then how come the first political party you joined
was the only one in Ireland that had supported the Nazis?
-
Yes I know you were never pro-Nazi.
Yes I know Sinn Fein were no longer pro-Nazi when you joined them
(because Germany had lost).
Yes I know you have renounced Sinn Fein long ago anyway,
and gone through
a long political journey since.
I am glad you have.
But you've still a long way to go
before you understand who are the kind of people who will
"stand by"
in the face of fascist, communist or Islamist tyranny,
and who are the kind of people who will
go out there and fight it.
If you really wonder how people could have stood by in WW2,
then you should become (as I have become)
a fan of Britain and America,
and a bit of a sceptic of countries like Ireland.
- Soviet Archives
(also
here),
by the brave Russian dissident
Vladimir Bukovsky,
contains many documents secretly scanned by Bukovsky from
the former Soviet Union.
- The section
KPSS and Communist World
(also
here)
contains alleged
communications between the Soviets and foreign leftists,
including the item:
- Item 0640,
alleged letter from the Workers Party of Ireland to the Soviets,
15 Sept 1986.
- The libel case letter
- The above
is the letter at the centre of the
De Rossa Libel Case
in which De Rossa won
£300,000 plus costs.
See
libel case details.
- De Rossa denied that the signature was his.
In other words, his position is the letter is a fake.
- I do not plan to repeat here either the contents of the letter,
or the contents of the newspaper article in the libel trial.
You can find them at the websites I link to above.
-
See notes on linking to libel.
-
The case shows how one has to be very careful
in criticising left-wing politicians and media figures in Ireland.
Speech is much freer in America
than in Ireland.
-
Bukovsky replies
to this allegation that his archive contains a fake.
- Finian McGrath
(see here)
- The left-wing Independent TD
Finian McGrath
denies that
Cuba
is a repressive dictatorship.
"It's a different kind of democracy to Ireland", said Ireland's
useful idiot.
- McGrath called for a state visit to Ireland by the
unelected dictator and mass murderer Fidel Castro.
- Finian McGrath,
interviewed in Magill, Feb 2006:
"I think Castro is a great guy, a charismatic figure who's been
totally misrepresented by the West."
Magill asks: "So you've no problem with his torture chambers and suppression of free speech?"
McGrath: "Well, that's all news to me.
I never heard about that.
Amnesty hasn't said anything about it to me lately.
This is just rightwing propaganda."
- Note to Finian McGrath:
Type "Amnesty" and "Cuba"
into a search engine:
- Amnesty country report 2005.
"[Amnesty International] last visited Cuba in 1988
and has not been permitted into the country since then."
Says it all, really.
A regime so criminal they will not even permit Amnesty to exist there.
- All Amnesty articles on Cuba
- For example,
Cuba: No dissent allowed,
9 August 2005:
"The Cuban authorities continue to suppress any form of dissent
by methods such as harassment, threats, intimidation, detention and long-term imprisonment."
What is wrong with McGrath that he cannot simply read what Amnesty say about Cuba?
-
Eamonn McCann
has been a pioneer in anti-sectarianism both North and South.
But he is also an extreme leftist
- a SWP member
and Trotskyist.
- McCann claimed (on the
Eamon Dunphy show,
Newstalk 106, Mon 20 Mar 2006)
that the Iranian
President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
was "elected".
Nice to know he supports brave dissidents
struggling for freedom in foreign lands.
- SWP member Eamonn McCann led a
sabotage attack on allied equipment
in wartime, destroying the offices of US defence company Raytheon, Derry, Aug 2006.
-
He
openly admits it:
"we hurled computers from the windows, used fire extinguishers to put the mainframe out of action and destroyed any paperwork and computer discs we could find".
- Eamonn McCann
photographed occupying the building
and destroying its offices because it supported Israel.
Shame on him.
-
Eamonn McCann,
Socialist Worker no.262, Aug 2006:
"The US/Israeli assaults on Lebanon and Gaza have posed the question:
"Which side are you on?"
On the side of the US and its Israeli surrogate,
or the side of the resistance?
Socialist Worker makes no bones about it.
We are on the same side as Hezbollah and Hamas."
- Fintan O'Toole
-
Fintan O'Toole starts spewing anti-Americanism on September 12, 2001
(also here)
- He can't even stop for one day!
- Here's what Fintan O'Toole said on
Sept 12,
after the deliberate killing of thousands of innocent American men, women and children by
hate-filled Islamic religious fascists:
"But there will almost certainly be a dark side. For there
is in American culture a fundamentalism no less strong than that of those
who may have plotted yesterday's carnage. The tendency to divide the world between
the forces of God and the forces of Satan, the elect and the damned, is, ironically
one of the things that America shares with its most ferocious enemies."
-
Fintan O'Toole's appalling reaction to Sept 11th
by Eoghan Harris
-
Fintan's selective facts
by Eoghan Harris
- See blog-irish.
-
After the Ball, by Fintan O'Toole, 2003,
tells you everything you need to know about Fintan O'Toole.
-
Here is a man - like many others - who did nothing but complain
as Ireland transformed from a land of emigration and unemployment in the 1980s
to one of the richest countries on earth.
By his ideas, he did everything he could to stop this happening.
He has been heaping abuse on the "Celtic Tiger"
for years.
And now, one brief economic slowdown
and he produces this book
with its sneering title,
delighted that the "Ball" is over,
gloating that at last, he may be proved right.
- But of course, the good times aren't over.
The Celtic Tiger isn't ending.
Prosperity isn't ending.
And it's Fintan O'Toole who will look bitter and foolish.
Thank heavens Ireland isn't run by narrow men like him.
It used to be, in the days of de Valera.
But not any more.
-
2005 growth 'fastest in five years' says CSO,
Irish Independent, March 31st 2006
- "The economy grew by 5.4 pc in real terms last year,
the fastest expansion in five years, CSO figures estimate."
Just one of hundreds of articles I could have chosen to illustrate that
you should not rely on people like Fintan O'Toole for your prediction
of what will happen next.
- If Michael D. Higgins
is the political heir of de Valera,
Fintan O'Toole is the intellectual heir of
Alfred O'Rahilly
- providing the intellectual support for an inward-looking,
"anti-imperialist", anti-foreign companies, anti-capitalist,
neutral Ireland
that refuses to support Britain and America.
- Vincent Browne
-
Saddam trial breaches international law, Vincent Browne,
October 23, 2005.
-
Vincent Browne
disputes the trial of Saddam:
"Saddam Hussein was quite right to question the presiding judge at his trial.
Under what authority was Rizgar Mohammed Amin sitting in judgment on the legal president of Iraq?
Saddam was a tyrant, he manipulated the electoral process to give feigned legitimacy to his rule but,
under international law, he was - and remains - president of Iraq.
In contrast, the judge presiding over the trial of Saddam has no legitimacy whatsoever.
He was appointed by the illegal invaders and occupiers of Iraq.
The court has no basis in the Iraqi constitution or Iraqi law.
It has no basis under international law."
- This passage alone is enough to make me dismiss
Vincent Browne's entire life's work.
Nobody who describes an unelected dictator as being
(or ever having been) the legitimate ruler of any country
can be taken seriously when they write about politics.
As Richard Waghorne
says, such a statement is in opposition to
"the fundamentals of democratic thought".
- Perhaps Vincent Browne is saying that the legal recognition of Saddam by other states
shows what a nonsense international law is.
But no, he intends the possible lack of legal status of the invasion to be a criticism
of the invasion.
- Waghorne describes my world view:
"Moral clarity demands that we deny tyrants the status of legitimate rulers.
To do any less is to accord to unelected strongmen the same moral status as democratically elected leaders."
-
Nuclear hypocrisy over Iran (pay to view), Vincent Browne, Irish Times, February 1, 2006.
-
Vincent Browne is relaxed about Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology.
Why? Because the democracies have nuclear technology,
so it would be only fair for every maniac dictator in the world to have it too.
"Iran is entitled to develop nuclear energy".
He even defends their threats against Israel:
"In challenging the legitimacy of the state of Israel, Iran ... is advancing a reasoned opinion supported by historical fact."
-
He even makes excuses for their pursuit of nuclear weapons:
"If Iran wants to acquire nuclear weapons capacity, it has been encouraged to acquire it by those very countries that now threaten it."
And of course he says Israel is to blame for Iran's plans to destroy it:
"even if it was the case that Iran was then or is now trying to acquire nuclear weapons capacity, the blame for that would lie with those states that conspired to create those circumstances in which Iran feels it necessary to acquire such capacity."
-
One would have thought the left would be against nuclear proliferation,
not in favour of it.
- He actually condemns the 1981 Israeli bombing which stopped Saddam's
nuclear weapons program!
- "How is it that double standards in the conduct of foreign affairs is the accepted norm?"
he asks like a simpleton,
wondering why it's ok for Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran.
Why doesn't he try listening, just once, to the answer.
It's because Israel is a democracy
and Iran is a dictatorship.
Dictatorships should not be treated the same as democracies,
not on this issue, or any other.
There's something fundamentally wrong with
Vincent Browne that he cannot see this.
- He even ends with:
"Meanwhile, hands off Iran."
Thank heavens people like Vincent Browne don't run the US or UK.
What a dangerous world it would be if people like him had power.
- Tom McGurk
- John Fay on Tom McGurk after Madrid
- "I suspect that what McGurk really fears is that Bush might be right after all."
-
How Castro showed up Uncle Sam,
a sick tribute to the dictator of
Cuba
by Tom McGurk, Sunday Business Post, 24 February 2008.
- "Castro has left Cuba with real status among Latin American countries".
Yes, indeed.
The status of being
the least free country in Latin America.
Indeed, the only dictatorship in the region.
- "Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, western capitalism and the free market seemed messianic and triumphant. Against this backdrop, Castro's solitary experiment, that persisted on a small island off the coast of Florida, became even more tantalising."
So in the middle of all this wonderful good news,
Cuba's sad, solitary, bad news story became
"tantalising"?
He obviously only has contempt
for those Cubans who sadly hoped that the fall of the Soviet empire
would mean their liberation too.
- The propagandist McGurk says:
"Despite what propagandists say, the Castro revolution proved hugely popular with ordinary Cubans."
How does McGurk know, since Cubans are not free to tell us?
- "Of course, the average Cuban has little material wealth, and the Party remains at the centre of everything. But, then, this is a society where, with food, housing and transport so cheap, and education and health free, material wealth is largely irrelevant. Anyway, since the state owns all the shops, goods are the same price everywhere.
To be in Cuba is to experience the wonder of a society where the tyranny of consumerism does not exist. There is no advertising at all and individualism comes second to the common good."
So, from his position as a wealthy, well-paid media star in Ireland,
one of the richest and freest countries on earth,
does McGurk casually dismiss a society of endless poverty and complete lack of
individual freedom.
Oh, the tyranny of being rich!
If only McGurk could be poor like the Cubans!
-
Of course, he doesn't actually want to live in poverty in Cuba, you understand.
He just thinks it's wonderful that all those rustic, quaint, photogenic foreign people do.
McGurk is
in a long line of
western leftists praising foreign tyrannies they would never live in.
Return to The Irish left.