In today’s Ireland, resplendent with its new generations of parchment holders, it never ceases to amaze how the dream of a college education for all people of all classes of the nation’s people, has yielded such little benefit to the nation in recent times. Dr Domhnall McGlacken-Byrne published his opinion on Journal.ie about how he knows what Irishness is, while all others have got it wrong. Moreover, he councils that by controlling the opinions of our children, we can create even more self-loathers than the nation already has.
Dr Domhnall, ventures beyond the hospital gate into the realm of ‘political science’ without realising its pitfalls. His purpose is to tell the Irish people what it means to be Irish, how he knows what it is, and how you haven’t a clue.
I have long been a critic of academic Sociology and Political Science. It’s a discipline that has no basis in science. Furthermore, the use of the term science is there to lend to it a false credibility. It is a discipline that is deemed to be a ‘rational discourse’, because science requires proof by experiment, but experiments cannot be carried out on a society. However, the lack of quality control, as evinced by an incompetent and non-existent peer review system, has unleashed a cascade of bias and prejudice that sometimes masquerades as academic theory.
The reuse of invalid theories has a strong purpose, as they can lend credibility to one’s own prejudices that in turn can be used for the persuasion of others. Finding people who have opinions that match your own prejudices is psychologically comforting. However, science demands that you find other opinions that challenge your own, which is psychologically discomforting. Additionally, without it, confirmation bias reigns supreme.
Dr Domhnall’s opinion relies on many of the auld Irish anti-Irish prejudices. Halfway through his article, he destroys his own credibility by ranting about how backward the Irish nation was in the 1980s.
In my generation, the self-loathers used to claim that the 1950s was the pinnacle of Irish societal backwardness. I have noticed that the point that the nation stopped becoming backward is nearly always timed with one’s own arrival on the planet. Accordingly, this prejudice seems to have a strong link with immaturity, as it can also be observed that it lessens with age.
Dr Domhnall has no idea of what Ireland was really like back in the 1980s, so his opinion is reliant on prejudices that were born on a barstool. As many of the barstool bores have acquired university parchments, the dissemination of prejudice has become the main product of sociology departments.
Dr Domhnall has little realisation of the complexity of defining a nation, but has a solution. He is going to control the opinion of his children and councils that all should do the same.
It is totally naive, and as any recalcitrant teenager will tell you, it is doomed to failure, but do we need more self-loathers in Ireland. Is that the answer to all our political problems?
It appears that Dr Domhnall has not invested much energy in exploring the definition of Irishness or in analysing the evidence that might yield a valid conclusion.
For example, he completely ignores the issue of Irish people who scorn Irishness and who adopt a British identity. Perhaps if he looked at the stereotype that their prejudices are based upon it would form a valid part of the big picture. What about people with Gaelic ancestry and Gaelic surnames, why do they hate Irishness. Is it something to do with ancestral vanquishment that happened centuries ago, causing prejudices to run down through the generations. Could identity have anything to do with social pretentiousness? I wonder?
So, we ask the question, were the values instilled in Dr Domhnall by his Gaelic ancestral families, the McGlackens and the Byrnes, still the source of his opinions? Certainly, self-loathing, the hatred the native Irish have for the Irish, hence the term, does appear to be from his heritage. However, as many a parent can testify, the influence from peers can thwart attempts to give children opinions that match those of their parents.
Dr Domhnall is of course merely sneering at the anti-migration movements that have sprung up in Ireland in recent times. Sneering at others is one of the traits of Irishness, particularly Gaelic Irishness, but it does nothing more that give a false sense of superiority to the sneerer.
However, any Irish person who questions the government’s competence to deal with the issue of migration is subjected to ridicule and labelled ‘far-right’.
The issue is solely one of government incompetence. Ireland had the longest hospital waiting lists in Europe. Thanks to a succession of governments promising action but were made to look like total fools through civil service incompetence. How do you think the Irish government tried to avoid the fool’s label? They took in 100,00 refugees, give them free medical care and that turned diabolical farce into the world’s greatest farce. Add to the 100,000 most generously welcomed guests in Europe, the tens of thousands of illegal migrants, also with free healthcare, and the chaos becomes that of a war zone. The war zone description has been applied to many hospitals in recent times along with the revelation that medical professionals killed 3,000 hospital patients in one five-year period. Last year’s total of 106,967 was the highest of five years recorded, up from 94,422 in 2018.
When granny has been made to wait two years for the knee operation and when she complains that the hospital system is clogged up with migrants, she is labelled a far-right supporter. The competence of the government’s health service to deliver competent healthcare was in question for years before the migrant issue hit the country. The incompetence has not gone away, and the waiting lists, including those for children in chronic pain, have doubled since 2019.
It is an awful pity that medical doctors cannot propose workable solutions to the chaos without resorting to the old canard of blaming a lack of resources. A culture of decades long of incompetence cannot be rooted out overnight, but it has nothing to do with a lack of resources.
When the far-left sneers at the far-right and vice versa, it is for reasons of personal social anxiety that can be expressed in the company of a herd of such sufferers. It is futile and often escalates into violence. Egging one side on above the other is only to create an internal sense of excitement, like a pornography for prejudices.
G-wan ya by ya!
EJ
https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/ireland-says-no-6477474-Sep2024/
