THERE have been a lot of articles on the cultural and social shifts in Ireland, many of which have focused on ‘wokeness’. The Irish political and media elite have enthusiastically embraced many of the positions most people would consider woke, such as claims of a concern for social justice, support for trans activism and LGBTQ+ rhetoric, and the championing of immigrants, open borders and asylum seekers.
The last in particular has caused massive impacts, leading many to consider Ireland a basket-case example of lunacy on mass immigration. While annual totals of immigration are significantly lower than the UK (Ireland’s peak gross immigration figure came in 2007 with 151,000 arrivals and the UK’s came in 2023 with 1,469,000) the impact is huge on the small Irish population of 5.3million (which includes recent arrivals).
Proportionally speaking, Ireland takes in more refugees and asylum seekers as part of its population than almost anywhere else, and the negative effects have been felt and seen. Ireland has a housing shortage which immigration has compounded. A migrant tent city has become a permanent fixture around Mount Street in Dublin. Footage online has shown large groups of migrants queueing for housing which Irish natives aren’t offered or can’t afford. The Irish police and government deny a link between immigration and crime, but do so while refusing to record or share the background, ethnicity and origin of criminals. While hearing their leaders state that no such link exists, Irish citizens can view footage of physical assaults from Ireland involving migrants attacking native Irish citizens, including children.
At the same time there’s been a reaction to this. The MMA fighter Conor McGregor for example has opposed Ireland’s immigration policies and been welcomed to the White House by Donald Trump. Large scale protests against immigrant settlement and equivalents of the UK’s asylum hotels have occurred, together with ethnic street tensions between arrivals and working-class Irish communities. In October 2025, following the alleged sexual assault of a ten-year-old girl by a 26-year-old asylum seeker at Dublin’s Citywest Hotel, crowds of up to 2,000 protesters clashed with police. Prime Minister Micheál Martin condemned the violence, stating there was no justification for attacks on law enforcement, while of course not addressing the cause of the riot.
Just as in other countries affected by mass immigration, questions have arisen over what constitutes Irish identity, and a stark cultural and ideological divide has opened regarding the answer.
On one side, the Irish Establishment, the elite voices in the main political parties and the government, whose propagandistic take on all this is that they and ‘Ireland’ generally represent a modern, pluralistic, multicultural, multiracial, EU-aligned, progressive nation concerned with equity, inclusion, diversity and social justice and that these are things to be proud of. Such a view of the nation treats nativist responses to demographic change and migrant crime with undisguised revulsion.
On the other side a much more disaffected, disillusioned, unhappy and largely working-class group who see this modern Ireland as a betrayal of their unique identity, culture and ‘Irishness’, focus much more on preserving Ireland as a Catholic nation with a native Irish majority that is familiar with and proud of its unique characteristics.
All this is familiar to most Western nations today. But the two groupings are also both reflective of Ireland’s tortured history and, as I’ll explain more fully below, Ireland’s long links with radical leftism, political violence and the poisonous effects of victim ideology. Ironically this is true for both offended elites ignoring their populace and disaffected nativists responding to that elite betrayal.
It’s clear that while the same kind of battles and issues exist throughout the Western world, there is some reason why the battle-lines are more obvious in Ireland than elsewhere. I’ll try to describe why that is the case, but should probably begin by defining what woke means, since the first criticism raised against the use of the term is always that the thing can’t be defined, or is used only by people who don’t know what they are expressing.
Here, then, is the original meaning, the populist understanding of that term, and my (I hope) definitive summary of what it is. Woke began as a term used by Cultural Marxists, critical race theorists, and leftist progressives to describe themselves. Their meaning was that they were ‘awake’, aware of social injustice, and able to spot and comment on inbuilt racial, sexual and gender-based prejudices, injustices and disparities that run throughout Western law, politics, history and culture. When defending themselves, woke people will reference versions of this original meaning and assert that ‘woke’ simply refers to a good person with a social conscience who cares about justice, equality, kindness and empathy.
What the term came to mean and to be used to mean by populists was often a short-hand way of saying hard left, crazy, stupid, unpopular or self-destructive, particularly in ways that harm Western civilisation and particularly relating to imposing fresh or hypocritical injustices on ordinary people.
For me the two meanings do refer to the same thing. I give woke people the benefit of the doubt in terms of accepting that most of them genuinely do believe they are advocates for ideas that are good and kind. I give their critics a position that does not require the benefit of the doubt because it is in line with objective reality: woke views do indeed inflict more harm than good. Put together we get this:
Woke refers to a set of hard left social attitudes and policies focused on victim culture, identity, race, gender and wealth disparities and grievances. It entails support for State led interventions and adjustments claiming to address these disparities and to provide social justice. It claims to be anti-authoritarian, anti-racist, and open, inclusive and just, but demands the reduction of the rights of the majority in favour of the rights of groups it champions. It asserts that since injustice pervades Western culture, history, government and morality, only radical and forced measures to provide equity represent real justice. It considers itself rebellious and transgressive in a positive way, but demands conformity and obedience, with ostracism, censorship and legal restriction all applied to views opposed to its own. It is anti-authoritarian by declaration and self-image, but deeply authoritarian in practice. It will claim to be addressing racism by adopting racist measures, or defending democracy by denying majority votes. The contradictions of Woke are made possible by the fact that it is a radical ideology adopted by an entrenched Establishment who hold the power to enforce these radical views and present them as respectable and moderate while doing so.
Ireland’s elite are not at all unusual in becoming Woke and embracing these malevolent hypocrisies, and that they have done so has been very clear to multiple observers.
Brendan O’Neill, the most successful luminary of the Spiked stable of writers, has offered an insightful series of comments on the Irish descent into woke-influenced and increasingly rabid anti-Semitism, which like the UK’s explosion of Jew hatred is tied to the Cultural Marxist rhetoric of identity politics, anti-colonialism and Woke concepts like intersectionality, allyship and reductively moronic classifications of all groups (usually by skin colour) into permanent camps of ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’.
Summaries of O’Neill’s position on Ireland’s descent from traditionalist Catholic stronghold to hyper-modern bastion of Woke Jew Hatred can easily be found online, since he has made this one of his main areas of discussion in recent years, including in his 2024 book After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, which critiques the Western academic and activist response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.
For anyone rational, the absurd contradictions of both Wokeness generally and of Irish attitudes in particular are especially glaring when it comes to the simultaneous embrace of open borders and mass migration alongside the targeted hatred towards Israel and to Jews (the most persecuted minority in history). A movement which claims to be anti-racist is built on racist attitudes to both whites and Jews which are foundational to all its current political postures. Neill’s discussions of this are helpful in terms of exposing hypocrisy and hint at why Ireland’s elite have fallen for woke ideology harder than almost anywhere else.
On the surface, Ireland is somewhere that should be resistant to very modern ideas that encompass self-hatred, worship of foreign institutions, submission to globalist agendas, and radical leftist absurdities on family, gender, and race. Catholic faith traditionally is family oriented and socially conservative, with strong religious objections to gender confusion, sexual extremes and the undermining of family values. Ireland is also a relatively young nation, formed by a strong nationalist impetus very conscious of its uniqueness. Sinn Fein means ‘ourselves alone’, for example, and Irish nationalism was so committed and fierce that it was prepared to embrace generations of terrorism. How do nationalists who killed to throw off the supposed shackles of English rule and were desperate to assert their separate uniqueness, become keen advocates of demographic replacement and mass immigration? How is it that Ireland, which once perceived Jews as fellow sufferers of mistreatment, now supports Palestinian terrorists killing Jewish women and children in the most obscene and brutal ways imaginable? And how are Catholics aligned with abortion, Islam and trans activism all at the same time?
Surely the answer lies not in contradiction of Irish history but in the continuation and triumph of the worst strain of it, especially among its elite. While Anglo-Irish history has indeed been complex and tortured with atrocities on both sides, the Irish nationalists might be considered the precursors of Woke hypocrisy particularly in terms of identity politics and the politics of victimhood narratives based in large part on lies. The Irish had a self-mythologised victim identity suffused with violence justifying propaganda long before the formation of modern Israel and the part KGB-determined creation of a Palestinian victim identity in response to that. In 1990, the brilliant historian R F Foster gave an illuminating account of how false myths of victimhood (as much or more than real oppression) formed the core of Irish identity in the modern age (The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland).
It’s victim identity, and a Marxist oppressor-victim narrative, that explains why the Irish elite, inheritors of national myth-making suffused with deliberate dishonesties that justified violence, embraced the sheer mendaciousness and false victim narratives of both wokeness and Palestinianism. What makes the Irish truly great storytellers or charming and romantic convivial companions (the ‘blarney’) becomes incredibly dangerous when they encounter narratives of historical distortion and embittered deception. These may be sweeping national characteristic cliches, but they are built on real ground (the long history of victim mentality and the excuses it gives for unpleasant behaviour). This is why the Irish elite went woke, even to the extent of betraying the Irish people who, years earlier, they said they were fighting for, and indeed now doing everything in their power to destroy actual Irishness in exactly the same way that their ideological counterparts in America attack American exceptionalism or the way British progressives attack our history, culture and identity too.
The particular irony in this is that real patriots in Ireland and England now find themselves genuinely oppressed by the same kind of anti-nationalist, anti-traditional, arch-Woke elites and leaders. Irish patriots who are not suffused with Jew hatred, and British patriots of a similar decency, may find they have a lot more in common than they think.
