https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1892696074759893292?s=46&t=eZ5H4jRAS8CxCACHKd2FKw
I didn’t click that link but given the amount of applause emojis you’ve included, I presume it’s news that Ireland has renounced its independence and is rejoining the UK?
John McGuirk with a home run here. Shows up the utter hypocrisy of the open borders brigade……
Like most of the living, I don’t think a lot about the inevitability of death. At the back of my mind I know that one day – assuming I live a natural life uninterrupted by errant busses or falling anvils – I will be lying in a death bed, knowing that the end is nigh. But I don’t think about it. Or I didn’t until yesterday, when I heard the news that the longest-living person on earth is now British, and lives in a care home in Surrey.
Edith Caterham is older than the Irish state. She was born in 1909, some seven years before the Easter Rising, and is the last living subject of Edward VII, the final Monarch to have spent his entire reign as undisputed King of Ireland. She met her husband, a Lt. Colonel in the Army, in 1933. They had two daughters in her 43-year marriage, before Norman Caterham died in 1976. That was 49 years ago, meaning that she has been a widow for many more years than she was a wife. Her last surviving daughter died in 2020, at the age of 82. An extraordinarily long life can be both a blessing and a curse. Mrs. Caterham has known more joy and sorrow than most of us, simply by virtue of having been around for as long as she has.
Nevertheless, I wonder what she would make, this child of the revolutionary era, about Micheál Martin’s claim about the 1916 generation this week. The Taoiseach, on Monday, said the following:
“The message of the 1916 proclamation is an inclusive, internationalist vision, not one that is narrow.
“It never had at its core a narrow nationalism. It was very internationalist. It was inclusive, it was open.
“And that’s the spirit which Fianna Fail will be continuing – and that’s a very important point.
“We don’t believe in a narrow nationalism, and we are part of modern European society, members of the European Union since the early 1970s and that’s brought great transformation to the country.”
It is perhaps to Mr. Martin’s advantage that Mrs. Caterham is a nice English lady from the Home Counties who probably did not pay too much attention, in her youth, to the writings of Mr. Pearse or the speeches of Arthur Griffith, and therefore probably feels no need to contradict him. Had she a surviving Irish equivalent, Mr. Martin might not be so fortunate.
I have been thinking a lot, this week, about Irish nationalism in the context of both Mr. Martin’s comments and the ongoing “controversy” about Kneecap, the Belfast rap trio who find themselves in hot water over their comments on Israel and Palestine. Because there is, of course, an enormous contradiction.
The Irish empathy for the Palestinian cause is based on what we might call a “blood and soil” interpretation of nationality and nationalism. In short, it says that the land of Gaza, and the West Bank, belongs to the Palestinian people by right, that it is their homeland, and that Jewish settlers in the West Bank in particular are foreign interlopers with no right to be there. Indeed far more Irish people than we admit would go further and say that the entire state of Israel has no right to exist at all, which is the position of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the two entities subject to Kneecap’s later recanted “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” remarks.
*This has echoes of the Irish nationalism of 1916 and since: That the land of Ireland belongs to the Irish people who should have their self-determination within it. Neither 1916 Irish nor 2025 Palestinian nationalism is “internationalist or inclusive”. *
It is not based on property rights or a framework for legal immigration: Ireland, per our mostly agreed national story, was planted by foreign settlers to change our population and replace truculent tribal subjects with less truculent feudal subjects. This was illegitimate. That is the historic view of Irish nationalism, and broadly the current consensus Irish view of events in the Middle East.
But Ireland’s approach to its own people has changed dramatically, and is much more in line – at home – with the Israeli view of the middle east, even as we staunchly oppose the Israelis based on our own history.
*There is irony, is there not, in the fact that the Irish Government will ferociously oppose Jewish settlement in the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, if you are a settler) while at the same time actively facilitating the settlement of migrants from overseas across large swathes of rural Ireland and into many poorer urban communities? *
When it comes to the legitimacy of foreign settlement and the mass migration of large bands of interlopers into communities, the Irish Government is for it at home, and against it on the West Bank of the Jordan River.
So, too, are Kneecap. And many of their “republican” sympathisers in Sinn Fein and the wider left-republican community. The Israeli position is that arrival and possession is nine tenths of the law. The Irish position is that arrival and making an asylum claim is nine tenths of the law. The differences are miniscule and meaningless in effect.
The reason that the Palestinian conflict is so intractable is that in that blighted corner of the world, two opposing “blood and soil” nationalisms are in conflict: The Palestinians claim that the land is theirs based on history and occupation; the Israelis that it was theirs first before they were dispossessed of it by Romans, Ottomans, and Arabs. Both sides feel that the land in conflict is their home, and that they have no other.
But in Ireland, there is no such dispute: The nationalists of 1916 and the nationalists who marched in Dublin last weekend would both agree that the land of the Island of Ireland belongs to the Irish people by blood right. That it is ours, and that Irish people alone have a claim to it and the sole right to govern it (however badly and ineptly, at times).
It is Mr. Martin – and indeed Kneecap – who disagree.
*The one clear advantage of a long life is that you bear witness to more of history than most of us will ever see. *
Ethel Caterham was born in 1909, when Kaiser Wilhelm and the German Empire bestrode Europe like a colossus, and the Model T Ford had been on the production lines for just six months. There was no independent Israel, no Palestinian State, and Ireland was a relatively contented (compared to what came later) constituent nation of the United Kingdom.
She will die in a world unrecognisable and unimaginable to those who lived through that year.
Indeed, the past is unrecognisable to us today, which is presumably why Mr. Martin felt that he could so comfortably and easily distort it to his own political ends. Say what you want about those who died in the 1916 rising and the subsequent war of Independence (and this writer is not as misty eyed about them as others) but they were not “inclusive internationalists”. They were no more “inclusive” than Gavrilo Princip was, when he started the first world war by shooting the Archduke of Austria for the cause of a free, Serbian, Serbia. They believed in an Ireland that was gaelic and distinctive and free.
One hundred years on, the third of those goals has been accomplished for 81.25% of the island, with the other 18.75% of the land remaining stubbornly in the comforting bosom of the Crown. As for the other two – the Gaelic and distinctive bits? Well, they are hanging in the balance, leaning towards outright and total failure.
So perhaps, having failed to create a distinctively Gaelic and free Ireland, it suits our leaders to pretend that this was never the goal or the objective at all: Why, Irish nationalism was never anything more than inclusive and welcoming and internationalist, and it was always the intention to create a little economic aircraft carrier from which Starbucks and Intel and Facebook might launch their invasions of the continent.
Perhaps this, more than anything else, explains the national affinity for Palestinians. That there’s still some part of our national character that yearns for blood and soil nationalism, and admires it in others, even when the cause is hopeless and the enemy looks much more like modern Ireland than we might dare to admit.
Have a wonderful bank holiday, and enjoy it. Because unlike Ethel Caterham, most of us won’t be here that long.
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You’re supporting Israeli settlers like John now? You gobshite.
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I support neither Israel nor Palestine.
A load of absolute blather.
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It’s a great read. Shows Meehole up for the plank that he is.
i can see why you support that scab football team
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He is some shoneen all the same.
Headbanger says that headbanger has written a great article, that’s a shock 
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I see elsewhere today Gript were championing the “cause” of a woman who is closing a beauty salon on Dorset Street. She and Gript claim it’s because of street violence by them pesky immagrints innit.
They neglect to mention she nearly killed a woman with Brazilian Butt Lift injections.
They also neglect to mention she’s the ex-partner of Malachy Steenson’s son.
Immigrants causing her to close me feckin’ hoop.
I’d say Johnny Arse wishes we were still under British rule.
Headbangers would welcome the English back in tomorrow, bend over for them if it would annoy the Wokies 
These fuckers have nothing else to be getting on with
@headbangers I don’t want immigrants in the country
@headbangers but the Brits aren’t really immigrants.
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That’s what the girl who got the Barazilian butt lift said.
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Everyone is a headbanger to you. You see everything as black or white, not in shades of grey as many things are.
No reasonable person is stupid enough to say that our economy doesn’t need a certain amount of immigration. But controlled immigration, with people who can bring their skills to the country - nurses, doctors, mechanics.
Those economic migrants who enter the country under false pretences (claiming asylum) and without documentation, should not be entertained. The majority of the country agree with this.
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Not everybody is a headbanger to me, or a leftie.
Most people are similar to myself, most people here don’t get involved in this type of stuff,
When somebody promotes a headbanger agenda I’ll continue to call it out, I had to give up on that ‘great ‘ article you posted because it was such a steaming pile of shit
You don’t understand what he wrote so.
You’d also need want to be some cunt not to support the children being sniped, bombed and starved against the ones killing them.
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Any right minded person would not support the killing of children and other innocent civilians, neither do I.