Eire of sorrows

It doesn’t matter who wins the Irish elections – the country will remain an outpost of Brussels

Dublin


There is something tragically irrelevant about the elections taking place this weekend in Ireland. In recent months, Ireland has felt less like a country and more like the first acquisition of the Reborn Frankish Empire, after the Central European Bank and the IMF in effect took over day-to-day management of Irish affairs. The effect of this is to so reduce the significance of the general election that it’s more like appointing the staff of a small post office, in which the Taoiseach is actually just a shop steward negotiating tea breaks. The incoming Irish government will be merely administering the country as a satrapy of Brussels and the European Bank.

The timing could hardly have been more exquisite. Over recent weeks, local groups across Ireland have been celebrating the anniversary of various IRA ambushes of British forces in 1921. That the so-called ‘British’ were usually Irish police officers, who were slaughtered in carefully planned assaults, does not seem to have diminished the grisly frivolousness of these celebrations. The outcome of the violence was Irish independence — which was going to be granted anyway, once the Irish had stopped killing one another.

So, just as Irish self-destructiveness was the prelude to Irish independence, so was it also the prelude to the formal end of that self-government, when Irish banks borrowed billions from the world in order to buy and rebuy from one another what they already owned. Budding empires like the European Union have seldom found would-be colonies with such an agreeably suicidal disposition.

The architects of this idiocy, Fianna Fail (a cod-Arthurian title meaning ‘warriors of destiny’) are widely expected to face electoral ruin under their new leader Micheál Martin, although they might well take a quarter of the vote.