Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Ireland Has Become a Sick, Sick Place
Many people ask me how has Ireland fallen so badly. Whilst there are many reasons, this picture summarizes at least an example of it.
This is the Twitter account of 32-year-old Simon Harris, a vain, egotistical, power-hungry mediocrity who somehow managed to become Health Minister before he reached the decade of puberty. Take a long look at this photo.
Harris is in many ways, like Conor McGregor, the poster boy for modern Ireland. Insensitive, greedy, drunk on fame and without any sense of Catholic morality. By the way, Simon was initially pro-life but somehow did a complete u-turn on the subject in the months leading up to our constitutional vote on ending the right to life. He now spends a lot of his time on Twitter either berating Catholics, pro-lifers, and anyone who opposes him.
Take another look at the screen. All the smiling happy faces. They are happy because now they can abort their kids. He actually tweeted that. He will get no blowback from the media for such an image. Thousands are suffering and many are dying in Irish hospitals, but he rarely receives any bad press. They have given him a pass as he got abortion for the liberals. How sick is that? No surprise he did a course on being a journalist in university.
Harris is a modern Ireland man to his fingertips. Oh, and his wife is pregnant too. Yet he isn’t the least cringy about the above. Sick. Pray for Ireland that we suffer under such deluded people.
Update: Ireland’s abortion law has now cleared the Oireachtas. All it needs now is to be signed by Michael D. Higgins and it becomes law. Oddly, Ireland is now under torrential rain through Saturday. This isn’t the first time this year that weather has matched up with the climate of abortion. May not be the last either. Oh Ireland, what has become of you, my old country….
Published in General
It’s amazing that leftists the world over have no sense of irony…..or shame.
Leftists have worked long and hard to totally eradicate shame.
The photo’s a bit grainy, or maybe it’s because the signs in the photo are in Gaelic. What do they say?
Aside from that, yes – it is disgusting to see cultures once influenced by Christian ideas now falling back into the paganism of infanticide. As an American, I would know.
The Irish appear to have been secularizing at the same rate as other Europeans for some time. There is also a larger dose of anti-clericalism than most anywhere else.
Post-Christian pagans have not come to grips with the fact that their new creed really does not value personhood. Feelings, pleasures, group labels and self-expression do not give rise to a coherent philosophy of justice and dignity. It is an ethos of power and the first to fall will always be the most powerless.
My heart breaks for you and your country Paddy. It is up to you and your fellow faithful Catholics to restore the greatness of Ireland. We will keep praying for saints to rise up to accomplish this task.
Still praying, and grieving with you, Paddy!
It is is entirely possible that Ireland’s white population will be a minority in 2050 or so because of EU immigration. I loathe the alt-right, but I have to ask what will become of Ireland when it is no longer white or Catholic. Will is still be Ireland?
In America, whites becoming a minority doesn’t matter much to me if we can get rid of the toxin of identity politics. But Ireland has been defined by religion and race for centuries. What is Ireland when it isn’t Irish? Douglass Murray, who properly loathes the alt-right, has asked questions like this repeatedly and the response is a loud silence.
What was it before it was white and Catholic? Well I guess it was always white (at least by modern reckoning of what white is), but it wasn’t always Catholic, yet Ireland still it was at least geographically. I guess once Italy was Rome and France was Gaul, but were they white and Catholic? Certainly not Catholic but I guess white.
Let me be starkly unsentimental and overly dramatic for emphasis.
What happens to Ireland doesn’t matter. It never did, it never will. The narrative of its history will be retrofired to suit the vanity and needs of the people who will live in the future. And those today who think of that future will be dead and so unaffected by the change. There is no Ireland that endures outside and beyond the memory of people, and that memory is fragile and temperamental, but ultimately meaningless. Ireland is and was whatever we pretend it is. It is a mental construct like all human culture.
For years we were told that the Constitution was the wrong instrument to deal with abortion- that it should be dealt with in the Legislature where it could be debated and the nuances and minutiae could be teased out.
Then the Pro-Life Article 40.3.3 was deleted in the Referendum and when the Government’s proposed legislation was put before the Legislature there was shock and horror that Pro-Life legislators would dare to propose even the mildest of amendments coupled with derision and contempt for the 33.6% who voted to retain Article 40.3.3. And less than 10% of legislators voted against the legislation. Now there’s a democratic deficit!
As for Simon Harris- his triumphalist carry-on since the Referendum and his fetishistic zeal for the task of introducing “free, safe, legal” ( no mention of rare) abortions are nauseating to most decent people notwithstanding the blind love the Irish media hold for him.
Not to Max @maxledoux – Can the image be shown much larger so that we can see it? Thanks.
Rather a nihilistic point of view. Have you no love for your own culture? That’s just a mental construct, too.
I think that Valiuth is absolutely correct in his analysis, if you start with the premise that there is no God.
Not that this is news. Valiuth is essentially paraphrasing the early portions of Ecclesiastes.
Yes. I wanted to “like” @Valiuth’s comment, not because the situation he describes makes me happy, only because it made sense and will probably be what happens.
That is all so very wrong, especially to say that human culture is a mental construct.
When one thinks of Ireland one thinks of Catholicism. And bound up in Catholicism is an incarnational Catholic culture. God came in the flesh – he isn’t a mental construct. Catholicism is not only incarnational but sacramental – God using form and matter as conduits of grace.
We are composite beings, a unity of a spiritual soul with a material body, and our body serves as our ordinary means of perception. And it’s often the smells and bells, the sights and sounds, in addition to the sacraments that God gave us that helps us to draw closer to him.
As Jeff Mirus writes:
And that is why what happens to Ireland matters.
What is happening in Ireland is downright revolting. To me old Ireland was a beautiful place where the people couldn’t be beaten into not believing in their faith. Isn’t it amazing that when it finally resolved its sovereignty, it became the same godless place they were fighting against? It hurts me to read about this new Ireland. My prayers for a return to faith,
Paddy – this is so deeply sad. I think of Ireland as one of the most deeply religious and moral countries left – the time it took to turn it on its ear was short. This is a time of moral and spiritual persecution. Shame on this man.
That is a post.
Yes Paddy – get in there and expose it – shame them if you have to –
More like the Book of Revelation…
I did make a point I was being overly dramatic for emphasis, so it does sound nihilistic I agree. But I also think there is some wisdom, not in nihilism, but rather detachment. I am no atheist (though maybe I have some agnostic inclinations), it seems to me though that theism does lend itself to encouraging a certain level of detachment from worldly things. One can put their faith in God and know that in the end all works to his will. And in the moment the will of God can seem harsh and unfair to us. I don’t know how you strike a good balance between a heavenly perspective and the stark reality of the present. But, then again men have been struggling with this since at least the Book of Job, and if far holier and wiser men don’t have good answer why would I?
I do love my culture, I practice it every day. But I am not so in love with it that I think I can preserve it in amber. I accept that it will change both while I am alive and certainly after I am gone. Truth endures because truth is real. Whatever aspect of Irishness is true will endure because it has to. Everything else in the fullness of time will be swept away. I don’t view this as lamentable because I choose to believe there is such a thing as enduring and eternal things created by a loving and eternal God.
And before it was Catholic Ireland was pagan, and at one time France was Catholic too and now it is a temple to secular Enlightenment, and England was Catholic and then became Anglican and Anglicanism became a glorified form of agnosticism (sorry to be harsh my Anglican friends).
Catholicism does not require Ireland to persist. Before there was the Ireland you refer to there was the Catholic church all around her civilizations have risen and fallen and will rise and fall again. Some of these civilizations will embrace her or reject her, or do one and then the other.
V – How do “you practice your culture that you love?” “Truth endures because Truth is real?” What is truth? In today’s culture, it is relative – whatever it means to you. That would eliminate God and put you in charge of truth. Or do you mean the Truth that comes from God?
Civilizations rise and fall indeed. Does Catholicism need Ireland to persist? No, but I believe Ireland needs Catholicism to persist.
I live it every day. We all do, don’t we? You learn its history, read its stories, watch its movies, listen to its music, make and eat its food. And if for some reason you did not like the culture you were born into you take steps to live a better culture you do like.
Well people may think truth is relative but, if it were relative it wouldn’t be Truth. Our own ability to recognize the truth doesn’t have an impact on it. But it does make this complicated for us. We may know it is out there, but that doesn’t make it any easier for us to either see it or accept it when we do see it.
@paddysiochain Thanks for posting this. I live in Ireland and I’m one of the third of the electorate who voted against the repeal of the 8th. I am so grateful for any commentary which highlights the injustice of what has happened.
Let me describe to you all what it was like in the leadup to the referendum. Pro life people were accused of telling lies, inventing statistics, scare mongering lacking compassion, and most disgusting of all, following Catholic teaching. This was coming from our government, the opposition and most of the media. The Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, made a statement the week before the vote saying women would die if it wasn’t repealed. People became vicious online under their own names, one Michelin starred chef demanded that any one going to vote no should unfriend his Facebook page immediately. One by one most of public figures came out in support of repeal. There was just so much rage.
After the referendum we witnessed the most shameful disgusting display of celebration, people drinking to the deaths of the unborn. It has chilled many of us more than we can say. And of course as it’s now the end of the year, RTE, the great collaborator, is presenting this as a thing to celebrate in the yearly news round up.
The bill has been signed and as of next Wednesday, the killings are set to begin. But what the Irish media have been reluctant to cover and the politicians determined to quash are the conscientious objectors in the medical profession. They aren’t going to give up and the rest of us will be right behind them. I appeal to you all, don’t forget about what’s happening in Ireland. We need your attention, your outrage and your criticism of our political class and media. Apart from a handful of Catholic publications there is barely any mention of the issue at all, as in the eyes of the establishment the matter has been ‘settled’. Please remember this when Varadkar visits your White House next March.
Have Irish people not adopted the label, “pro-choice?”
Pro choice unless your choice is to conscientiously object to having anything to do with an abortion. A doctor who objects to providing the service must refer to someone else who will. Nurses, midwives, pharmacists and other medical workers were given no mention at all.
This is how they push conservatives aside, they claim the issue has been “settled.” Don’t give in. Coordinate, protest, resist. Make the voice of the minority heard. This is worth fighting for. Ending abortion is my most passionate issue. Here in the US we have turned the tide and after many years of protesting and supporting the right politicians we have gained the upper hand. It may take a while but I can see it happening in Ireland. In the end the side aligned with Truth wins. My heart breaks for Ireland but I have faith that some day that innocent human life will not be trivialized.
@manny I found Ricochet in the weeks after the referendum, when I was desperately searching for alternative commentary to what gets served up to us in Ireland. I’ve since talked to other people who did the same. It’s very reassuring to us to find online communities like this and we follow what is going on in the US very closely. I heard Kristan Hawkins speak in Dublin last October and what has been achieved by the pro life movement in the US gives us hope. Thanks for your words of encouragement.