The Irish right
The use of the term "right" here
is just to have a short way of referring to these people,
in the absence of a better term.
The left uses "right-wing" as a
pejorative term,
but obviously I do not regard it as such.
I would be happy to describe myself as
libertarian-right, for example.
I have elements of
both left and right in my beliefs.
What this page is about is listing some of the
defenders of the west in Ireland
- that is, people who broadly support
the free democracies
against their
non-free enemies.
Whatever this makes them, it makes them not "left".
The modern left
seems indifferent or even hostile
to the victory of democracies like
America, Britain and Israel over tyrannies.
Some of the defenders of the west in Ireland
are religious,
"right-wing" or
(on the Northern Ireland issue) unionists.
I may disagree with them on some domestic issues, but they are right
about the world beyond Ireland.
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By "right" on this page I mean people that generally support the west
against its enemies,
for lack of a better term.
Not all of the links on this page could be called "right-wing".
(I'm not even necessarily "right-wing" myself.)
But none of these are anti-west.
I'm also listing here people that I like in some way
(though I may not agree with all of their writing).
There are various other figures on the Irish "right"
that I don't like so much, either because I plain disagree with them,
or maybe I just don't like their style.
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Defenders of the west in Ireland
- Mary Harney
-
Speech, 21st February, 2003
(and discussion)
- "For a long time, there were crude anti-British attitudes in Ireland that got us nowhere.
Now we see the stoking up of anti-American attitudes.
...
The extreme left in Ireland has always been virulently anti-American"
- Alan Shatter
-
Government must find the courage to say we support forces fighting
tyranny,
28 March 2003,
The Irish Times
- "The Government did the right thing in resisting pressure to close Shannon
to US military planes. Having done so, it should have the courage to go a
step further and to clearly say that we side with the democracies in this
war and oppose tyranny."
- "In this State, we now have a Labour Party opposed to action to bring about
the fall of a tyrannical regime with an appalling record of human rights
violations; a Green Party willing to tolerate the continuation of a regime
which has not only developed but which has used biological and chemical
weapons and which could in the future facilitate their use by terrorist
groups; and, to cap it all, a Sinn Fein party opposed to the use of force
by everyone except its own private army."
- Avril Doyle's speech on neutrality
is impressive for its all too rare (in Ireland)
scepticism about the UN
as the source of all moral legitimacy:
- "There are some ..
who make out that NATO
is the bogeyman of the world and that the United Nations
is the panacea to our global ills. However, if we are to be a truly independent and neutral country
.. then we cannot allow the veto of one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council
to prevent Ireland from participating in EU missions if we believe that they are appropriate,
necessary and in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter.
What I'm saying is that Irish foreign policy decisions do not and should not
require the agreement of Moscow or Beijing."
-
Senator Feargal Quinn talks some rare sense on Israel in the Seanad, June 2010,
in contrast to the usual mob of anti-Israel extremists like David Norris.
-
The Oireachtas Ireland-Israel Friendship group
- Who would I vote for?
- Tom Cooney
-
Constantin Gurdgiev
-
Rory Miller
-
The Israel-Nazi Slander in Historical Context
- on the modern left-wing Holocaust denial:
-
"Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories have no relation to the horrors carried out by Germany
during the Nazi occupation of Europe
...
If you doubt this ask yourself the following questions: would it have been possible for Jewish schools
in German-occupied Holland, Poland, Hungary and numerous other countries, to indoctrinate their students
with the most outlandish anti-German propaganda and incitement?
Would these same school children fresh from their brainwashing classes have been free to enroll,
in the glare of the world's media, in summer camps dedicated to training a new generation of anti-German guerillas?
Would their religious and secular leaders have been able to go on their own TV channels
and call their occupiers the "sons of monkeys" with impunity?"
- Richard Aldous
- Sunday Independent
- Irish Independent
- Kevin Myers
- Ian O'Doherty
- I'm not an O'Doherty fan.
His writing is often crude and simplistic.
I rarely like his humour.
- Sometimes he is good.
When he is serious, and talks about atheism, Islam and religion, I like his stuff.
See:
Why the Israeli people have finally had enough, January 5, 2009:
"But there's a bigger picture here, something which Israelis have been trying to broadcast to the world, but which, thanks to their spectacular inability to accurately and sympathetically portray their point of view, has not been properly transmitted. It's this - Israel is the front line of the war between democracy and Islamic fascism."
- But he also writes some awful stuff, especially when he's trying to be funny:
-
Here, February 9, 2010, he laughs at the most brutal child abuse
of a 4 year old girl,
and (for comic effect) congratulates the abuser.
- It's an especially emotional story because the girl has a grandmother who loves her.
See here
and here
and here
and here.
"She wanted to go back to [her grandmother].
When we let her talk to [her grandmother on the phone] she was so excited she was crying."
- I wrote a
letter to the editor, 9 Feb 2010, expressing my disgust at O'Doherty's "joke".
It was not published.
- Irish Times
- Tony Allwright
- John Waters
- Niall O'Dowd
- The Irish Times has unfortunately become a left-wing echo chamber in recent years.
Though always spinning its news to the left,
it always had a bit of diversity in opinion.
But that is now gone.
- It had
Kevin Myers for many years,
but he is gone.
- Then it had the brilliant
Mark Steyn (syndicated),
but he is gone.
- Then it got
Charles Krauthammer (syndicated),
but he also is gone.
- Instead we get regular syndicated columns by
the Obama-worshipping, Bush-hating
Garrison Keillor.
- The Irish Times now has an extreme lack of diversity.
It is in danger of becoming a liberal-left echo chamber.
They need to do something about this.
If they are looking for an intelligent home-grown non-leftist,
who can really write,
I suggest they employ
Richard Waghorne.
- Sunday Times
- Sunday Tribune
- Magill
- The Irish Daily Mail
- The Observer
- Henry McDonald
-
Silence the bleating Left
- He predicted in Sept 2001 that
"Like the IRA in the Second World War who supported Hitler, the Irish
Left through its sullen paranoiac anti-Americanism will soon find itself
today objectively siding with theocratic fascists who throw acid in
women's faces just because they want to go to work or be educated."
And he was right.
To many people's surprise, the left did side with fascism.
-
Killer peaceniks
- on the "anti-war" marches in Ireland.
- Liberals lead to freedom at home, but are disastrous abroad.
Only conservatives understand how
the world outside Ireland works.
USA
Israel
- Irish blogs
- NATO and Ireland
- You might think that
the hard left-wing, anti-secular, pro-Islamist site
"Islamophobia Watch"
serves no function, but you would be wrong.
It provides an ongoing link service to (mostly)
sensible writing in the UK and Ireland
about Islamism and Islamist terror.
For example, its section on:
- Likewise the leftie
Neocon Europe site
run by Prof. David Miller
has a section on:
George Dempsey, former US diplomat in Ireland,
has become one of the better critics of the Irish left.
- RTE
"Questions and Answers",
17th Sept 2001
and broken
- This program is Ireland in a nutshell.
The American
George Dempsey is the lone voice of reason, logic and evidence.
The Irish audience are brainwashed with the Irish media's view of the world.
Despite the existence now of the Internet,
they make no attempt to read
foreign views - such as the neo-con or the Israeli views.
The Irish panel is little better.
Garret Fitzgerald's hostility to Israel.
Brian Cowen's tolerance of Arafat,
and endless waffle about the primacy of the UN.
Sean Donlon's utter lack of understanding of
the cause of Islamist terror.
- And nobody on the show - not even Dempsey
- utters the most basic truth:
that this is the start of a war against
Islamism.
-
From the Embassy: A US Foreign Policy Primer,
George Dempsey,
2004.
- It's America's War,
by David Gelernter, attacks the Irish Times
for one of its typical anti-American headlines:
- "The moment we saw those pictures [of prisoner abuse]
we knew (every last American knew) that
the punch in the gut is on the way.
People who never cared a damn what Saddam did
to his prisoners would be choking back tears of outrage.
... We could all anticipate headlines like the one that appeared in the May 8 Irish Times:
"The shaming of America. George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers
in Iraq rings hollow now.""
- "The hell it does. Anyone who equates Saddam's bloody decades of torture and mass murder to the crimes at Abu Ghraib is the same kind of fool who once preached
the moral equivalence of America and Soviet Russia,
or of America in Vietnam and Hitlerism.
Imbecility is eternal, perpetually reincarnated."
- One of George Dempsey's main points can be parodied as
"The Irish Times and RTE are to blame for 9/11":
-
The majority of Americans agree with Dempsey and me.
71 percent of Americans agreed that negative media reporting in Iraq damages troop morale.
60 percent agreed that negative media coverage
damages prospects for success in Iraq because it encourages terrorists.
At a time of
war in defence of the west
like this,
it is hard to know what to read in Ireland.
If you live your life in the left-liberal universe, you may
find it hard to think
of dissenters from that world as anything other
than
caricatures.
-
You may think I am like
Rush Limbaugh, for example,
or Bill O'Reilly,
or Sean Hannity,
or Ann Coulter,
or Michael Savage,
or Glenn Beck,
or G. Gordon Liddy,
or Pat Buchanan,
or Robert Novak,
or Richard Nixon,
or Henry Kissinger,
or Jerry Falwell,
or Pat Robertson,
or Ralph Reed.
-
Or you may think I am like
Geert Wilders,
or Oriana Fallaci,
or Filip Dewinter,
or Jean-Marie Le Pen.
-
Or you may think I am like
Peter Hitchens,
or Richard Littlejohn,
or Julie Burchill,
or Robert Kilroy-Silk,
or Will Cummins,
or Peter Oborne,
or Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
or A. N. Wilson,
or Simon Jenkins,
or Alan Clark,
or Garry Bushell,
or David Irving,
or Chris Brand.
-
Or you may think I am like
Conor Cruise O'Brien,
or Mary Ellen Synon,
or Richard Lynn,
or Justin Barrett,
or Niamh Nic Mhathuna,
or Aine Ni Chonaill.
If these are your references, then
you should read a bit wider.
I am not like any of these people above.
For some of them, I disagree with everything they say.
Some of them are simply the enemy.
For others, I agree with some things they say, but they go too far,
or are too simplistic,
or they are just somehow not my style.
None of them are really me.
If you're still confused as to who am I like,
I'm like these people:
Writers on politics that I like.
If I had to pick a single person
I think like,
I would pick:
Victor Davis Hanson.
Return to
The modern right.
Since 1995.
