Source: Bigstock

Are the Irish racist? Do they eat potatoes, bacon, and cabbage every day, play the fiddle, and reject all change, as a controversial new school textbook put out by their government claims? I bloody hope so.

As a Brit newly settled in Ireland, I was kind of banking on it.

I howled with laughter at Steven Tucker’s deliriously entertaining piece about Ireland facing a possible loss of its identity as the woke get to work on it, but also I have a lot riding on the serious point he makes.

Writing from my home in West Cork, having rearranged my entire life to move here, I can say that I, for one, hope the Irish are racist, or everything I love about Ireland is done for. Now the E.U. no-borders project is coming for it, and the global elite are attempting to force through a new multicultural agenda prioritizing falafel and the call to prayer over singing “The Foggy Dew.”

If the Irish are not racist, the E.U. is about to ruin Ireland by funneling record numbers of migrants here while questioning Irishness and promoting anything more ethnic—which means, as Steven Tucker points out, using a new school textbook to shame children if they are in an ordinary white Irish Catholic family. Pictured all red-haired and in woolly jumpers dancing a jig on a farm is the Irish family in this textbook, while the stylishly dressed multiethnic family is visiting the Colosseum in Rome.

Will this brainwashing work? Not if the Irish are still the fighting Irish, and not if the Irish still prefer the Irish as much as I think they do.

Are the Irish racist? It’s only conflicting to think about because racism as a word is associated with small-mindedness, and the Irish are obviously not that. But they’re not not racist either.

Having come to live in the south, and having once worked as a reporter in Belfast, my view is that, north and south of the border, the Irish prefer the Irish. And why wouldn’t they after so many generations of fighting to get hold of their country?

While enjoying the company of people they call “blow-ins,” and while supporting foreign causes like Palestine and other freedom fighters like them, and while treasuring their American links, the Irish only welcome outsiders to settle here so long as we don’t try to change anything, or avail ourselves of the same rights the Irish have. Are they stuck in the past? You betcha.

I went to a bar the other night and a guy stood up and sang, to uproarious applause, a song about a woman having an affair and her husband finding out when she had a black baby.

We went to a horse fair the other weekend where people tethered horses for sale in the street next to power tools and bed linen.

Yes, Irish traditionalism in all its potato-eating glory is improbably still dominant, but will it be strong and defiant enough to deliver the Irish from the woke global madness? Only if the Irish prefer the Irish as much as I think they do.

My experience since moving here is this: If you want planning permission you better be Irish; if you want the council not to fine you for burning rubbish in your farmyard you better be Irish; if you want to complain about something you better be Irish…

The Irish “aren’t racist” because they fly the Palestinian flag and support those who resist occupation as the IRA once fought the British. The Irish “can’t be racist” because they are so hospitable and sociable. They like the craic.

But the Irish “are racist” in that the Irish put the Irish first. Is that so bad? As someone on the wrong end of that, I’m happy to say I don’t think it is.

Ireland feels to me like a two-tier society: The Irish are on the top tier, and anyone from anywhere else is on a lower one, and that’s not to say the other tier isn’t very nice; it’s just not the same.

This is the opposite to how it works in “multicultural” societies like Britain where for decades the meek Brits have gotten used to the idea they are dirt under the shoes of immigrants and must accept they are at the back of the queue for services, while newcomers are pushed to the front.

Here’s a howling irony: I left Britain because I was fed up of this, and arrived in Ireland (one of the few places in the world I can get into without a long application process) only to find the reverse system in place there, so I’m not in the first tier anywhere I can get to legally and easily.

But I do love it here. So leaving my anger about what’s been done to my nationality aside, will Irish racism—Ireland for the Irish—stop the E.U.’s attempt to force into Ireland record levels of immigration and the promotion of other cultures more interesting to the E.U., such as Islam?

Ireland is a nation of emigrants, not immigrants. Its people set sail for America traditionally, and today they seem to send many of their young to London and New Zealand. Meanwhile, back in the bog, the farmers get E.U. grants galore.

Part of me wants to argue that the Irish should now pay their bill and take their fair share of immigration, like the Brits have had to. If fair share isn’t quite the right phrase, then “take one for the team” springs to mind.

The current E.U. formula is that the nation with the highest GDP and lowest population must now take the most immigration—seems fair, no?

That being said, I regret that this means Ireland may eventually be ruined (the stabbings “that aren’t terror-related” have started already) and that this may happen while I’m still alive and trying to live here—as a slightly second-class citizen but very much enjoying the lovely countryside and the comedy singing in the bars.

The idea that Michael Collins fell at Béal na Bláth and countless others died to liberate Ireland only for it to be ruled by a foreign power called the European Union that funnels in whomever—and says “nothing to see here” when a child is knifed—seems fanciful on the face of it.

When Dublin rioted recently after a group of children and their nursery worker were stabbed in the street by a man who spoke in court only in Arabic through an interpreter, I thought, “Uh-oh, here we go. The fighting Irish are not going to have it…”

But those Dublin riots were soon quelled, and the people fell back into line once the politicians called on them not to go against the official E.U. narrative and shame Ireland by rioting against immigrants stabbing children.

Why do the rebellious, fiery, volatile Irish people toe this line?

Because, as I have observed of my neighbors, they still love the E.U. and their government’s support of the E.U. because the E.U. has given them so much cabbage (as in money) that it’s going to take a while to shift that warm feeling.

Crucially, however, the grants are drying up since Brexit. There aren’t the same subsidies floating round. The farmers bordering my land are getting restive.

The feeling here is, hang on a minute, if we’re not getting generous grants to keep cattle, then we’re not sure we do like being run from Brussels.

And further to that, when asylum seekers are seen in the village, the Irish whisper and say they’re not sure they like that either.

We have had, since I moved here last October, fifty fighting-age Ukrainian men billeted in our local inn. At first this was accepted without argument, because they were put there after being accused of “trashing” a previous hotel in Kerry, and the locals here said shame on Kerry for making such a racist allegation, we will have them.

But after a few months, and especially when the government announced Irish men would be sent to fight in Ukraine, bad feeling grew.

“Why should we send our boys to Ukraine when their men are hiding here, and we’re paying their rent?” one elderly woman said to me.

The asylum seekers’ living allowance was recently cut from hundreds of euros a week to barely subsistence in response to anger at the amount of public money being spent.

An article in the local newspaper then lamented that a yogurt producer had had to fire some Ukrainians because they no longer came with a generous grant for their rent. Oh, well. He’ll have to dig into his pockets and pay some Irish people to work for him, won’t he?

Are the Irish racist enough? They’re certainly careful enough about money when the system doesn’t work as well for them financially.

Here is an anecdote in which lots of these strains come together:

Last winter, we burned some tree cuttings in our farmyard, not realizing that, technically, you can’t have a bonfire in Ireland, and we didn’t realize that or look it up because we see entire hillsides regularly burning with all the farmers setting fire to their waste.

One of our neighbors, a farmer, rang his mates at the local council to get us into trouble, and an environmental officer came to our gate.

After waving a warrant card and threatening us with a 5,000-euro fine, he told us he would let us off this time if we wrote him an apology—a power play designed to put us in our place, I suppose.

When we asked who rang us in, he said: “I’ll tell you who. Them Polish c***s.” And he pointed up a driveway to our lovely Polish neighbors, who had been nothing but nice to us, and most definitely did not ring us in.

The farmer who did then put in for planning permission to build a second house on his land. No notice went up until the day the application was granted, when a brand-new one meant to have been there for months was nailed in place. When I rang to complain I was put in my place again. Get yourself a lawyer and go for judicial review if you don’t like the Irish system, was their response.

I accepted this, because on balance I like it here.

I could find it galling that the Irish bad-mouth the British for being racist, calling us small-minded for leaving the E.U. after years of being turned into something we don’t recognize, while it’s them singing about black babies in the pub and calling Polish people rude names.

The E.U. is only just getting started on the Irish, so let’s see how they like it.

If you ask me, the mild-mannered Brits aren’t racist, or if they are, they certainly aren’t racist enough to have done themselves any good, strategically. The Irish just might be.

The Ukrainians here wander this deserted, windswept cow-farming landscape looking bored and confused.

Who really wants to live in Nowheresville, Ireland, being shouted at by irate farmers and council jerks, aside from an eccentric English writer like me? My theory is, it won’t come to a rebellion.

The remoteness of Ireland will be its saving grace. The lack of services in Ireland will rescue it from permanent invasion. The rudeness of its indigenous people, their ruggedness and the harshness of the landscape (oh, the endless rain), will be its biggest asset.

The Brits apologize for existing. But your average rural Irishman is so belligerent, so tough, so hewn out of the rock of the mountainside he came from, you can’t shift him, on anything.

I’m happy to go to the back of the queue behind the Irish for everything. But a lot of people crossing the Channel won’t like that idea.

If you define racism as preferring your own kind and your own way of life, then the Irish aren’t just racist. They’re racist enough to save themselves.