Tag Archives: ireland

December 24, 2025

BEYOND BELIEF: my complicated life as a practising (lapsed) Catholic

By Darragh McManus

First published in the Sunday Independent on December 21st. It was cut a little for length so I’m throwing up the full version here…

We may, as is often claimed by pompous commentators, live in a post-religious western world, though the extent of that transformation is open to debate. At Christmas, however, it’s a whole other story.

The season to be jolly is also the season to be holy – kind of. Whether believer or not, most people still engage with the religious side of Christianity’s second-most important festival, to some degree anyway, both during the “twelve days of Christmas” themselves and in the weeks-long lead-up.

Singing carols. Midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Visiting the crib in your local church. Putting up your own crib in, well, your own crib. Placing an angel on top of the tree. Religious-themed Christmas cards. Choral services. Saying grace before “the big meal”. Lighting candles for good intentions. Advent calendars (edible or otherwise). Seasonal charitable endeavours.

The whole ambience of kindness and altruism and communal goodwill that suffuses society for a few weeks, and which is deeply influenced by Jesus’ principal tenet of “love thy neighbour as thyself”.

So even if you don’t consider yourself Christian, you will assuredly be celebrating a Christian festival through the expression of many Christian traditions and conventions.

I don’t consider myself Christian either, as it happens, at least not in the sense of believing in God (in a broader sociocultural sense, absolutely, my ethnic identity would be “Irish Catholic”). I definitively do not have any religious faith.

I did once, after a fashion. As a kid in the late 1980s, when Ireland had 90% mass attendance and everyone believed in God (or claimed to), I was only going under grumpy protest and seeking evermore inventive ways to skip it – or, if not possible, endure it by surreptitiously eating sweets – without my parents finding out.

But here’s a strange thing: now that Catholicism is on the wane in this country (though not everywhere) – indeed despised and almost proscribed by the moral arbiters of modern Ireland – I find myself more engaged than ever with the religion; more, probably, than most believers. This is despite not having faith in God for over 30 years.

My family joke about me being a practising non-believer. Maybe I’m just a born contrarian. Or maybe, in fairness, it’s complex.

I was raised Catholic, obviously, and believed in it all just fine throughout childhood. Prayed at bedtime, monthly confession, attended Novenas, did my stint as altar-boy. One of my earliest memories is seeing the Pope in Limerick: rising at dawn, a long walk carrying a folding stool, a quick glimpse through this funny periscope-shaped distance-viewer someone had given me; the vaguest awareness of what we were doing and why we were doing it.

That probably expresses my depth of engagement in general. I did believe in Jesus, Mary and the saints, but how sincerely, or completely, I don’t know; it was fairly vague. You sort of believed because you’d been raised to do it.

By my late teens I didn’t have faith anymore. I was never atheist, more agnostic. Atheism always seemed too close to a belief-system in itself. There was too much off-putting “I know this to be true!” surety, without the balancing comforts of feeling there’s a benevolent deity watching over you – worst of both worlds.

My Catholicism lapsing wasn’t some big drama; it just happened, over a few years. Later, for reasons now forgotten, I attended a meeting of some atheist/agnostic society where we “shared our stories” of leaving religion behind (Catholicism mostly).

I was amazed that all these people claimed to have a clear moment of what we might call anti-revelation. Really? How narrative-convenient. For me it was far more gradual: water trickling from a tipped-over vessel. Eventually, the last few drops fell, then there was no more.

Once, I believed. Then, and still today, I didn’t and don’t. There was no seismic “that was the day I knew God didn’t exist…” That seems stupid and arrogant to me. How can I know if God exists? I don’t personally believe it to be true, but by definition, can’t know.

I’m open-minded about virtually anything, unless proved one way or the other, and you can’t prove God. That’s one thing I find bemusing about religious people: when they logically argue their faith. There is no argument, for or against. God is beyond words. Faith is like coolness: you have it or you don’t, and that’s fine. (Funnily enough, I have lots of the latter and none of the former.)

Similarly, I don’t believe in telepathy or aliens among us – but who knows? There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in Horatio’s, or anyone else’s, philosophy.

The universe is incredibly weird and incomprehensible. Quantum mechanics, for instance – very real, proven repeatedly for over a century, used daily in all sorts of practical ways – is a whirl of phenomena and behaviours a thousand times more strange, counterintuitive and mind-meltingly unfathomable than the concept of a supernatural entity standing outside time and space.

Being agnostic, I keep my options open. And I’ll always identify as Catholic, ethnically. For one thing, in an increasingly homogenised world and multicultural Ireland, it’s part of who I am, for good or bad; I have the right and obligation to preserve that.

And you’re always a part of that global community, the big old club. You never really lose the lingering desire to see into the heart of the Vatican, or that little flicker of communality or familiarity when someone else turns out to be Catholic too. I once interviewed Frieda Pinto, for example, upper-middle-class Indian movie star, and it was there: she was raised Catholic as well.

I’ve always appreciated the good things about Catholicism/Christianity: sense of community and belonging, comfort in the face of death, moral guidance, structures for ordering and making sense of life. More-or-less all the human rights we now know and cherish have Christian roots.

In particular, I love church architecture, art, literature and, most of all, music. They’ve hugely enriched human life for centuries. Any trip to a new city or country, it’s straight to the churches and cathedrals. I once queued for an hour in broiling heat to visit Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris: it was worth the near-heatstroke.

This is one area where Catholicism soars above rival creeds; no other comes close to the magnificent breadth of art. People always claim theirs as the one true faith; I don’t know about any of that, but I do know Catholicism, not the Devil, has the best tunes (and pictures, buildings etc.). Aesthetic beauty, man-made or natural, is a core part of its tradition. Aquinas wrote of “wholeness, harmony and splendour” combining to create something which is pleasing to the senses but also conveys a deep truth; Goethe wrote of God “implanting the sense of the beautiful in the human soul”.

The best part of a press trip to Israel in 2016 was going to many of the seminal, historic creation-sites of Christianity: Jaffa, Capernaum, Sea of Galilee, and especially, the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, with Jesus’ tomb and the Hill of Golgotha. Places so profoundly embedded from an Irish Catholic childhood, and you’re physically standing there: it felt mind-blowing, something otherworldly made three-dimensional reality. (I also made sure to bring home many bottles of water and oil from the Holy Land.)

I also don’t care that much about bad stuff from the past. Whatever awful thing religious people did would almost certainly have been done anyway if religion didn’t exist; that’s human nature, unfortunately. People are wicked sometimes, they don’t need God to encourage them.

“But what about the Inquisition!?” hardliner anti-deists will screech. What about it? No different to torture and murder in concentration camps and gulags, and those monsters hated religion. These were all dismal people, wallowing in the weakest, most warped part of themselves.

All that said, I don’t believe in God, Christian or otherwise, and don’t feel I ever will. But I’m not closed to the possibility; should I be struck by some Road to Damascus-style moment of revelation, seeing the face of God in a burning bush or whatever, I won’t run screaming from it. In fact, all things considered, I think I’d be quite pleased.

Faith seems to make people happier and more content, stronger and more resolute. It gives a deeper sense of who they are and where they fit in in the world. It affords greater perspective on life, the universe and everything. It comforts them when trudging through this vale of tears and amplifies the good times, making them feel blessed, in every sense of the word.

And it’s a way into something above the mundanity of life and self. There’s a sense of the mysterious and transcendent, something divine and unknowable. Yet, at the same time, the individual is a central part of this grand symphony. Faith, in short, can give meaning and purpose to existence.

I envy people their faith, and really envied it during the lockdown lunacy. When you feel like one of the last sane people in a world gone mad and bad, it’s tough without the solace that God, at least, has your back.

Two online voices of sanity during that surreal, awful time – both American guys, Catholic and Jewish – have particularly stuck with me. Belief in, and surrendering to, God gave them such strength, courage and defiance: the “armour of God”, as per Ephesians. And an abiding calm: they were impervious to everything, all the stupidity and viciousness and mindlessness. They had faith and the “still, small voice of conscience”, which was all they needed.

I envied that, and wished I had it too. Unfortunately, you can’t make yourself believe, no matter how hard you try; if anything, that would be inauthentic, an impersonation of faith.

In the meantime, I am that lesser-sighted species, the practising non-believer. Our children are being raised Catholic: baptism, communion, confirmation, the whole bit. Their full names include one of the seven archangels; they go to mass every week and I tag along every other week, either because their mother (a practising Catholic) might be away or to show a good example – and, by the by, enjoy being part of the community and sit in healthy contemplation, forcing the mind to shut the hell up for 45 minutes.

I’m often in church for various other things: candlelight vigils, marriage-blessing ceremonies, Christmas hymns, Easter ceremonies (I love the Passion with, well, a passion). We had our house blessed when we moved in. When asked to do godfather for my nephew, I took seriously what this duty entailed, secular and sacred.

We visited Knock this summer – some beautiful art and architecture that was surprisingly moving, even inspirational, to this man of no faith – and climbed Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday, one of the most fantastic things I’ve done all year. The craic, buzz, sincerity, authenticity…the sheer joy of it.

And the mad variety of pilgrims: folks we knew from home, buff young American guys doing it barefoot, Franciscan monks in robes, groups of East Asians taking countless photos, Travellers in full make-up, ould boys in semi-formal Sunday clothes, Brazilians saying the rosary in Portuguese, young lads who looked like they were still up from the previous night’s drinking and not a bother on them because they’re young. Can’t wait to do it again.

I permanently wear a rosary-bead bracelet received as a gift. A cross pendant hangs from my man-bag. There’s a serenity prayer on the desk (the single best, most practical piece of advice anyone has ever devised) and a beautiful Orthodox-style icon of Virgin and Child on the shelf. I use a magnetic St Anthony bookmark, and a St Michael blessing card as an improvised bookmark. I even have a holographic Jesus mousepad. (Very trippy if you move it around in front of your face for long enough.)

I bless myself if I get a bad feeling while driving and light candles for good intentions. It must be St Anthony if in a church – accept no substitutes. At home I’ve got great use out of this massive candle I bought in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière in Lyon in 2023.

And I know my theology, scripture, catechism etc., if not quite backwards, fairly well; you really don’t ever forget this stuff drummed into your head in childhood. (I invariably get annoyed every Easter when they omit, for some reason, these lines from the denouement of the Passion: “Into your hands I commend my spirit” and “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” This stuff is gold!)

I can quote the Bible and other Christian prayers and aphorisms to beat the band; the full King James is on my list of “books you have to complete if you’re a serious reader”. Part of Paradise Lost – “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light” – was my WhatsApp sign-off during the nightmare of lockdown.

So, in all these ways, I’m more of a Catholic than, I would suspect, most actual Catholics – certainly in self-conscious, insecure, infantile modern Ireland, where people don’t know who they are and seem petrified of appearing traditional or old-fashioned or not “progressive”, whatever that even means anymore.

Yet I don’t believe in God. Will I again, some day? I have no idea. As I say, I’m keeping my options open. I don’t think God will mind, anyway, if he does exist. I think he’d be patient and understand the complexities of our hearts and thoughts.

For now, I suppose, being a practising non-believer is good enough – and it is pretty good.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Uncategorized

September 22, 2025

Comhaltas: think global, act local

By Darragh McManus

First published in the Irish Examiner, June 2025

“Think global, act local”: the phrase was coined in the 1970s, gained new currency in the ‘90s and remains relevant today. Think global – in other words, big picture, broad view, the important things – and act on an individual and community level.

Its original authors meant it environmentally, but it can apply to all sorts of things. Irish arts and culture, for instance.

As with every other indigenous culture, especially smaller nations’, our music and dancing and language have been essentially under siege for decades in an increasingly homogenised, connected, corporatised global village. It’s further exacerbated, now, by the huge demographic and sociocultural change of mass immigration.

This isn’t to get into the rights or wrongs of that, just to state an obvious fact: indigenous arts and culture are diluted, everywhere and every time, the more non-indigenous people live there.

This is a depressing situation; whenever the world loses any of its remarkable range and richness of traditions is depressing. But that’s what we might call “global” – what about local? What can you or I do about it, here and now? How can we help Irish arts to survive and thrive?

I give you Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. The kind of rare people giving words like “organisation”, “bureaucracy” and “non-profit” a good name.

Comhaltas was founded in 1951 by a group of musicians, concerned that Irish trad was in decline. They now have 400+ branches around the world, promoting and preserving our music, dancing and language.

They run weekly classes, periodic events and celebrations and sessions, and annual competitions. We’re currently gearing up in Clare for the County Fleadh, from Sunday June 8th. Do well in that and it’s onto the Munsters in Cork in July, and who knows? Maybe All-Ireland glory in Wexford this August. As the song goes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Comhaltas have branches in places you’d expect – US, UK, Australia – and some you mightn’t: Colombia, Singapore, Patagonia, Japan. (Irish trad is massive in Japan especially, thanks mainly to Comhaltas. How’s that for thinking global?)

And they’re fantastic in what they do, the definition of “volunteer spirit”; they’re making the world a better place, one local step at a time, without asking or needing to be paid. Though that makes it all sound so worthy and po-faced, and getting involved in Comhaltas really isn’t like that at all.

It’s fun. It’s craic. It’s meeting people and doing things. It’s hefting chairs around a hall for the grúpa cheoil to assemble. It’s handing out wristbands for the Fleadh.

It’s WhatsApp groups and FaceBook photos and driving to rehearsals. It’s toting a harp case through a crowd and hoping to Jesus nobody bangs off the instrument, these things cost a lot of money…

It’s reuniting lost fiddle bows with their owner and waiting nervously with other parents for competition results. It’s negotiating complex timetables so you can watch your kid’s U15 group and still make the finale of the senior sean nós dancing.

It’s realising that sean nós, contrary to preconceptions, is an absolutely kick-ass style of dancing and how did this brilliant artform elude your attention until now?

One remarkable feature of Comhaltas, and traditional arts in general, is how it brings genuine superstars of the genre to the grassroots level – globally renowned names and local involvement.

In my own case, for example, the Kilfenora Céilí Band were formed 30 minutes from where I live. In trad terms, they’re megastars: they’ve played abroad (including the Glastonbury festival), been on the Late Late Show several times, performed at the National Concert Hall and other prestigious venues.

And I know several of them for years – just through normal life, and engagement with Comhaltas. They live local. They teach my kids music and/or steer groups through competition. They’re neighbours and friends. Our children play sport together. One is a teacher in a nearby secondary. (Another is Sharon Shannon’s brother, incidentally; he’s in a neighbouring branch, and there’s great friendly rivalry every summer.)

And it’s mad, you’re chatting to these people about the humdrum stuff of day-to-day and then they might say something like, “Sorry, we have to head off, we’ve to be in RTÉ by seven”. I love that. It’s what life should be about, really: incredibly talented artists, but also regular people who’re deeply engaged on a local level.

It’s the kind of thing you only really get in “roots” music. The rock equivalent would be The Edge teaching your kids guitar at the community hall, or Taylor Swift administrating a WhatsApp group called “Under 12 County final 2025”.

Funny, I was never a trad person growing up, and in fact still today am far more likely to listen to, or (badly) play, rock music or electronica or almost anything else, really, on CD or radio or YouTube.

But there’s something amazing about trad music and dance, when it’s live and in person; when you’re involved to some degree, not just passively consuming. It’s global, it’s local, it’s magical, it’s Comhaltas.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Uncategorized

August 21, 2025

Play your tune loud

By Darragh McManus

First published in the Irish Independent, August 19th

How do you define Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, the annual extravaganza of traditional Irish music which came to a rousing crescendo last Sunday in Wexford Town?

It’s kind of like an All-Ireland final, in terms of craic and excitement, community and bonhomie, nail-biting tension and exultation. Only better than that, because there’s music involved. (Sport is great, I love sport, but let’s face it: music is the soul speaking, it reaches far deeper.)

So the Fleadh is like a great gig. Only better than that too, because it goes on for a full week. And unlike a gig, with its inherent separation between performer and consumer, this is much more – pardon the buzzword – interactive.

Run annually since 1951 by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, the Fleadh is a mad, whirling carnival of concerts, All-Ireland competitions, buskers, pub sessions planned and spontaneous, classes, workshops – and, this year, the gimmicky but fun “biggest céilí in history”. There’s even an actual carnival, down by the beautiful quays.

So you can step into the Fleadh, engage with it, from many perspectives: musician or dancer (whether professional or hobbyist), casual audience member, tourist, party-goer, trad aficionado, competitor, supportive/nervous parent, or a combination of the above.

If you’re “in the game”, as we were last Saturday (Under 15 grúpa cheoil final; we won!), Fleadh whizzes the best of sport and music into an intoxicating cocktail of artistic satisfaction and competitive edge.

It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old: the Fleadh, as with trad/folk in general, is very cross-generational. The atmosphere, walking around the streets of Wexford into evening-time, was almost overwhelmingly genial, relaxed and peaceable.

You see mammies and daddies enjoying a beer while the kids have an ice-cream, or maybe batter away at a few jigs for extra pocket-money, and think: now, this is civilised. As someone texted me afterwards, watching Fleadh coverage on TG4 was like watching Glastonbury “but with normal people instead of assholes”.

There’s a great volunteer spirit too, as with GAA or Tidy Towns or communities pulling together in the face of tragedy. How nice it was, how heartening, in a cynical and hyper-monetised world, to see armies of people wandering around, bright orange tee-shirts reading “VOLUNTEER – HERE TO HELP”, giving their time for no reward except the pleasure of making someone else’s day a little better.

On top of all that, Wexford itself is a spectacularly charming town and county. No wonder record crowds 800,000 flocked to the sunny south-east for this year’s lollapalooza – finding accommodation was a nightmare! – among them an up-and-coming young singer called Ed Sheeran…

But the Fleadh, and Comhaltas events at county or provincial level, are more than fun and music. This is, very specifically, a celebration and continuation of Irish culture and traditions. It’s age-old, primal, and as vibrant as ever. The ghosts of the past don’t just walk among us, they pick up a fiddle and encourage you to join in.

(Incidentally, not that it matters, but all involved aren’t necessarily Irish – people come from all over to watch and participate. Japan, especially, has an incredibly strong connection, and sends competitors every year.)

You could say the Fleadh showcases the very best of us, in many ways. That’s a term often used, by people with every sort of social or political agenda; often, though, they’re talking about things which are general to humanity as a whole.

Friendliness, warmth, generosity, humour, strong sense of family or community: all wonderful, but you find them around the world. They’re not specific to here, whereas Irish music, dancing, singing, lilting, Gaeilge and storytelling, the Fleadh’s bread and butter, by definition are.

The place is changing, at a pace that feels uncontrollable at times. We have no idea how it will wash out, but one thing is inarguable: the more multicultural any country gets, the more diluted become indigenous arts and heritage.

That’s obvious, regardless of where you stand on immigration and demographic change. It happens everywhere, inevitably; there’s an arrogance in this exceptionalist thinking that Ireland, somehow, will be different.

You mightn’t have a problem with this; some people have zero interest in trad or GAA or Irish bardic poetry or whatever. Personally, I think it would be tragic for the genuinely ancient, globally unique culture of a tiny nation to weaken or disappear.

Again, no Irish exceptionalism here: I’d feel the same at Icelandic or Vietnamese or Inuit traditions being in an equally parlous position. The world is poorer without any of them.

Irish culture is precious, and needs to be protected. Not just by the likes of Unesco, who’ve recognised hurling and camogie as part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”, but by ourselves.

Yet here’s a funny thing: even as Official Ireland seems evermore hell-bent on selling it out – or at least allowing it wither on the vine – for economic gain or a pat on the head from a transnational “elite”, at grassroots level our culture is more robust than ever. The amount of young people learning trad, dancing sean nós, speaking Irish and playing GAA is astonishing, and growing all the time.

It’s like Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The more that technocrats and internationalists try to smother the thing, the harder the people push back, through some marvellous instinct of rebellion and identity.

Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I sound my barbaric yawp across the roofs of the world.” The Fleadh is the sound of that in an Irish context. Corporate Ireland hates all this “local” or “indigenous” stuff; they really do think it’s barbaric.

But Whitman meant the word in a positive way, and so do I. Play your tune, folks, play it loud, let the whole world hear it.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Uncategorized

August 21, 2025

Ireland’s weird attitude to our own flag

By Darragh McManus

First published in the Irish Independent, August 11th

On a recent car-trip around the Six Counties, I passed through a few of those small unionist towns that are festooned with UK flags. Presumably there are other Northern towns similarly bedecked in the tricolour, I just didn’t happen to be in them.

A decade ago my reaction would have been to castigate all this Union Jack pageantry. I’d have taken great umbrage, firstly, on vaguely defined nationalist principles – how dare these interlopers demonstrate hostility towards the inarguable truth and rightness of Irish unity?

I’d have sneered at them, at how performative it all felt, how showy – take notice of us, we’re British not Irish! – and how, ironically, a brash exhibition of confidence often betrays profound insecurity underneath.

These days, I still think there’s something a bit sad and needy about it: we get it, you’re loyal to the Crown, no need to labour the point. Also, my inner sceptic/non-conformist automatically recoils from any situation where literally everyone is onboard. What if you’re a proud unionist but don’t feel like sticking a flag on your house: is this allowed?

That said, though, I’m not nearly so hostile towards all the Union Jacks nowadays. If nothing else, it shows a people who know who they are, whether anyone else likes that or not. And unlike some in modern Western Europe, they don’t agonise over it, self-doubt, apologise or explain.

I respect that. It’s normal, psychologically, to not feel shame or self-consciousness about expressing who you are. Proven by the fact that Ulster unionists are in the large majority, globally, on this.

We have this stupid misconception that only jingoistic Americans or warmongering Russians are like this, but that’s not true. Across Asia and Africa, the Americas, Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe, most people don’t have any problem displaying their national flag with unabashed pride. Even lovely liberal Sweden is replete with that blue-and-yellow standard.

It’s all quite straightforward; they don’t overthink it. I’m Japanese, I fly the Japanese flag. I’m Polish, I fly the Polish flag. Why wouldn’t I?

It’s only in a few Western European countries that you find this bizarre cultural cringe (and only in some of us, it should be noted). In our case, you’re more likely to see a Palestinian or Ukrainian flag than that of the Republic of Ireland.

That’s not exaggerating for effect; drive around any part of this country and your eyes will provide the evidence. Here’s a recent example from my own experience: climbing Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday – an Irish Catholic pilgrimage of very longstanding tradition – and seeing a Palestine flag outside a café at the bottom of the mountain, and more than one hiker wearing it as a cape…but not a tricolour in sight.

Does this seem normal? It doesn’t to most non-Irish people I know – they’re utterly baffled by it, and must think the natives are suffering some sort of collective identity crisis – and doesn’t to me.

Why do Irish people cringe at the thought of flying their own flag outside their house, but have no problem with that of a Middle Eastern nation 3,500 miles away? Why do Ulster unionists not cringe in the same way? Why do they know who they are and we don’t anymore – or is this being unfair?

Let me pre-empt some of the arguments against what I’m saying. Flying a Palestinian flag, it could be said, is an understandable human reflex, showing sympathy for the civilians killed and maimed over there. Fair enough.

But the current situation doesn’t explain why it was being flown well before the bombardment of Gaza began. Or why Islamist flags – Hamas, Hezbollah (who killed Irish soldier Sean Rooney in 2022) – are seen in demonstrations on our streets.

Besides, shouldn’t we have also raised the Israeli flag, in solidarity with 1300 people from several countries – including two of our own citizens – who were raped, tortured, killed and kidnapped in October 2023? Would this not be a natural human response too?

Despite what people tell themselves, flying any non-Irish flag is a political choice and statement, not a personal, emotional act. If it was solely about sympathy for victims of war, Ireland would be weighed down under the flags of Yemen and Western Sahara, Sudan and Somalia, Central African Republic and all the other forty-plus countries currently suffering armed conflict.

People will also say that the tricolour has been hijacked by “far-right” extremists. But this isn’t the argument it appears to be.

For one thing, you’re talking a tiny minority, despite hysterical over-exaggeration. And national flags have always been co-opted for nefarious ends, around the world. Does that mean the reasonable mass in the middle should reject them entirely? If anything, it should make people fight to reclaim the tricolour.

The whole point of our flag’s design, after all, was to promote reconciliation, not division: orange and green, unionist and nationalist, brought together, the white of peace between them.

I’m not some raging republican – all that stuff cools down or even fades away as you get older – and I’m not even saying that Irish people should fly their flag. But I am saying that being ashamed of it, while hoisting those of others, is childish, illogical and psychologically weird.

And I do know who I am, I think, and don’t feel remotely embarrassed about it, and really wish that more Irish people felt the same. It’s possible to love a nation with little sense of itself, but it’s very hard to respect it.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Uncategorized

June 20, 2025

Ireland, Israel and Bloomsday

By Darragh McManus

I wrote about my country’s inexplicable and depressing hostility to Israel for Spiked Online: give ’em a click here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/16/how-dare-official-ireland-bask-in-the-glory-of-bloomsday/ This is a longer version of the piece, which was cut for length etc.

Today (Monday) is Bloomsday: the annual fandango when Official Ireland gathers to pat itself on the back, as if anyone like them could ever make the slightest contribution to creating immortal art such as James Joyce’s Ulysses.

There they’ll be anyway, politicians and artists and sundry other “public figures”: smugly self-congratulatory, vicariously basking in the glory of this classic novel (and pretending to have read it in the first place). They’ll wear boater hats and eat pigs’ innards, and someone will surely read aloud.

Joyce, you feel, would have laughed at all this, found it absurd. He was a proper artist, citizen of the world and the word, and never struck me as an Official Ireland type. He famously left the place at a young age, writing Ulysses in exile. His contempt for the 1930s Establishment sings off the pages; it’s eay to imagine the same response today. The Establishment never really changes in character.

For that alone, these gurning philistines should have the good grace to cancel Bloomsday. If they had the slightest shame or self-awareness, they would. But there’s a better reason: Ireland’s unremitting hostility to Israel.

Ulysses centres on one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, who is half-Jewish. From my recollection of reading, his ethnicity isn’t the most important element of Ulysses, or Bloom himself – Joyce was too good a writer, too interested in the complexities and mysteries of humanity, to be so didactic and reductive – but is significant enough.

So here we have Jewish Leopold being celebrated and honoured by the kinds of people who have spent decades waging metaphorical war on the only Jewish state on the planet: a tiny scrap of desert surrounded by dozens of Muslim Arab countries – their great historical enemy – and within those, scores of millions of people who want them dead.

Not all Muslim Arabs feel this way; not all Muslim Arab nations are bent on the destruction of Israel. (Bizarrely, the likes of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now less hostile to Israel than Ireland is. We’ve truly gone through the looking-glass.) But enough do and are.

Oh, but “anti-Zionism” does not equate to antisemitism, Official Ireland will argue. Except it does, by definition, if the only country you ever protest about is the only Jewish country that has ever existed. If you not only ignore, but seem entirely unaware of, the far worse “crimes”, far higher death-tolls, of non-Jewish nations.

If the one kid in the schoolyard you pick on is Jewish, then you’re anti-Jewish.

Ireland is now globally notorious for its surreal levels of hyper-antagonism to Israel. It’s been so for as long as I can remember, though not quite this hysterical. We don’t even have an Israeli embassy anymore, putting us in the vaunted company of such renowned defenders of human rights and democracy as Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Qatar and Venezuela.

Irish people as a whole are blackened with this reputation, and I’m undecided as to how much we deserve it. On one hand, the public voted Israel second in Eurovision this year and last, which suggests some support, or at least lack of enmity. On the other, you rarely hear anyone expressing sympathy for Israelis, even after the off-the-scale horrors of October 7th.

Then again, you don’t hear Irish people supporting racist psychopaths like Hamas either. Every “river to the sea” protest is still a tiny fraction of the population. Ultimately, despite foreign preconceptions and Irish media’s Israel fixation, most people probably don’t think about it that much, or take sides either way.

But Official Ireland – politicians and artists, unions and media, academics and NGOs, the whole rancid cabal – certainly does. The shameful nadir was reached in January when that contemptible weasel, President Michael D Higgins – hot on the heels of making friendly with whatever extremist lunatic had taken power in Iran – insisted on wedging in Gaza whataboutery at a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony. This despite being asked not to, by actual Jewish people.

So we had the mindboggling sight of a Jewish woman, silently protesting Higgins’ nauseating grandstanding, being forcibly removed by security. From a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony!

That was the pits, but only one instance in a long, depressing tale. Virtually all Irish politicians concur on the veracity of “Israeli genocide” – as opposed to “this is war, it’s brutal and awful, but not genocide” – and immaculate rightness of the Palestinian cause. They call Israelis warmongers, Nazis and psychopaths and nobody bats an eyelid.

Very few bothered to condemn the mass rape, torture, murder and desecration of bodies on October 7th. Some cheered it on. One – a woman – called it “beautiful”. Which part was more beautiful: the rape, torture, murder or desecration?

Our government made Ireland one of very few countries to recognise Palestinian statehood in the aftermath of October 7th: how’s that for punishing mass terrorism? And, with a sophistry so brazen you’d nearly admire it, they pushed for the definition of genocide to be broadened, so Israel’s actions would qualify. Make the evidence fit the suspect – an inversion of all principles of justice.

Lobby groups and NGOs want sanctions on Israeli goods. An Israeli woman was banned from running in local elections by one, performatively “progressive”, party. There was no outrage, no pushback, against this blatant discrimination, from anyone in public life, including media. Speaking of which…

As mentioned, our media is obsessed with Israel. TV and radio cover it almost as much as Irish events. Newspapers hive off whole sections. Most, though in fairness not all, commentators cleave to the “genocidal Israel/blameless Palestinians” line.

Meanwhile the National Union of Journalists demanded a young Israeli singer be kicked out of Eurovision – horrifically, this woman was a survivor of October 7th, having lain under her friends’ dead bodies for eight hours. Never was the term “tone-deaf” more sickeningly appropriate.

Irish artists and celebrities constantly stick their beak in. Sally Rooney wouldn’t allow translation in Israel, but had no problem selling the rights to China, Russia, Iran: a virtual rogues’ gallery. Actor Liam Cunningham was involved with Greta Thunberg’s recent publicity stunt. Kneecap have banners declaring “Fuck Israel”, because they’re cool rebels who swear.

Over 1500 Irish artists have signed a “Pledge to Boycott Israel”, something the organisers declare is “the first such nationally organised cultural boycott of Israel.” Makes the heart swell with patriotic pride, for sure.

Why are these people like this? I have no idea. Maybe it’s some bone-deep Hitler-esque hatred of Jews, though I doubt that’s the case for most. Maybe it’s class and cultural conformity, risk-free “stick it to The Man” rebellion, “guerrilla chic” cosplay and larks (the Thunberg ship certainly seemed that). Maybe it’s the misguided belief that Irish and Arab nationalism are the same – a view, ironically, that patronises both.

In any event, who cares why? All that matters are consequences. Absolutely none for the “Paddystinians” themselves, of course – that’s part of the attraction – but they give succour to fascist zealots around the world, and make things that bit harder for a tiny ethnic group in an existential fight against far bigger enemies.

Many anti-Israelites would have been Republican during the Troubles. Some would have supported the IRA. Ironically, it’s impossible to imagine them continuing that support had Irish guerrillas ever carried out the tsunami of horror wrought by Hamas in 2023.

They didn’t, either: the IRA, for all the bombs and shootings, never raped and tortured hundreds of women and children. Neither, on the opposing side, did the UVF or UDA. That would have been a red line, even for those violent, ruthless men – and their supporters.

Yet it seems, when it comes to Israel, some Irish have no red line at all. Nothing is too much. Anything is justified. Some, you suspect, feel the victims brought it on themselves.

Leopold Bloom would probably be cancelled today, if he was unfortunate enough to live in 2025 Ireland. (Although what are the chances? We have a tiny Jewish population, always did. The main reason there was never a pogrom is because there were hardly any Jews.)

“We’re not anti-Leopold,” they’d say. “We’re anti-Zionism! Anti-genocide!” With the unspoken appendix: “But they’re all kind of to blame, aren’t they? All the same, all to blame.”

Or “We just want peace and justice, an end to the carnage, no more dead children”. Admirable sentiments – who wants more dead children? – but not the full story. These people were decrying Israel long before the IDF started heavily bombing Gaza. Some were out on Irish streets, right after October 7th, before war began in earnest, waving Palestinian flags.

These ghouls didn’t even halt their gallop or question their allegiances when Irish-Israeli Kim Damti was murdered and Irish-Israeli Emily Hand – eight years old – was kidnapped for 50 days. If you can’t or won’t stand by your own, what use are you to anyone?

There’s a scene in Ulysses where The Citizen, a bigoted blowhard, is attacking Bloom in the pub. The Jews killed Christ, blah blah blah. I’d love if Higgins, Taoiseach Micheál Martin or anyone from Official Ireland read that part aloud for Bloomsday. Just to see if they could keep a straight face, if there is any level of hypocrisy and shamelessness these people cannot meet – if they have a red line of any sort.

Official Ireland is unworthy of Ulysses, or James Joyce. Them honouring a book about probably the most famous Jew in Irish literary history feels like a sick joke. Indeed, like something Joyce would have satirised in Ulysses itself.

There’s an old maxim about how everyone imagines themselves as the family who hid Anne Frank, whereas most are closer to the sneaks who sold her out. Official Ireland imagines itself as cosmopolitan, broadminded, generous-hearted Bloom. In reality they’re more like the narrowminded, vicious, bigoted Citizen.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Uncategorized