So what can Irish people say about immigration? When Conor McGregor swaggered into the White House and told the world’s media that Ireland is so ‘overrun’ with migrants it’s at risk of ‘losing its Irishness’, he was condemned as a hatemonger. Yet when the Irish comic and musician, Garron Noone, took to TikTok and gently suggested there is indeed ‘an immigration issue in Ireland’, he got so much flak he closed all his social-media accounts. So you can’t uncouthly blurt your dislike of mass immigration, but nor can you delicately question mass immigration. What can you say, then? Nothing?
Noone is a kind of anti-McGregor. He’s best known for his absurdist clips on TikTok and Instagram, where in his rich Mayo accent he makes fun of Irish culture and cuisine. Where McGregor’s adjective is ‘Notorious’, Noone’s is ‘Delicious’. ‘Follow me, I’m delicious’ is his slogan. He’s beardy, pudgy and wears outsized lumberjack shirts, whereas McGregor’s never seen in public without a Savile Row suit that’s three sizes too small and a Rolex that cost more than your car. Ireland’s cultural establishment likes Noone (‘very funny’, says the Irish Times), but it despises McGregor (‘far-right agitator’, says the Irish Times).
Yet it turns out McGregor and Noone share something in common: both are worried about immigration. A couple of days after McGregor’s babbling in the White House, Noone did something unusual. He went on TikTok not to bemoan Ireland’s ‘cunt of a grey sky’ or make fun of ‘mental Americans’, but to make a serious comment on immigration. ‘I don’t think [McGregor]’s a good person’, he made clear. But he does think McGregor has a point. ‘There absolutely is an immigration issue in Ireland’, he said. It’s a testament to the strangling of free discussion in Ireland that it felt borderline surreal to hear someone like this – a creative, a liberal – say a critical thing about immigration.
Yes, he said, Ireland should ‘take the refugees we’re able to take’. And people should feel able to ‘come here for better opportunities’. But ‘the systems that we have in place are being taken advantage of’, he said. Many Irish folk feel that ‘our towns and especially our cities are becoming much less safe’, and if you can’t see that ‘then you have not left your house’, he continued. Then came his killer line: ‘The government continually does not allow people to express their concerns about [this].’ He ended with his usual sign-off: ‘Anyway, stay delicious.’
I was struck by how much Noone’s views chime with mine, and many other people’s too, no doubt. I, too, have a pretty generous disposition on immigration. I, too, think genuine refugees should be given sanctuary in countries that can take them. I, too, support the legal flow of people looking for ‘better opportunities’, and the welcoming of them by nations in need of their skills or muscle. As Dublin’s commentariat has been saying, more than a little haughtily, millions of Irish migrated for ‘better opportunities’. It’s true, my parents included.
Yet, like Noone, I feel that immigration is currently out of control. That in Ireland, and other nations, the borders have been relaxed primarily as a statement of the ruling elites’ hyper-virtue, as a means for them to demonstrate their fealty to the globalist ideology of post-sovereignty. Nationhood itself feels sacrificed at the altar of the whims of a gold-collared superclass and its insatiable need for cheap labour and even cheaper virtue. And Noone’s right: talking about it feels risky. Witness the swiftness with which the smug of Dublin slammed McGregor. Public angst over immigration is awash with ‘far-right tropes’, say Ireland’s sniffy scribes.
Yet no sooner had I nodded along with Noone’s sensible intervention than it had disappeared. He deactivated his social media following a ‘very large backlash’. He’s back now, and suitably chastised. He promises that that vid was ‘the last time’ he will ever ‘discuss this particular topic’. Well done, everyone. Another decent voice silenced, another government critic gagged. Dublin’s devotees of correct-think can breathe a little easier.
The Noone storm has shaken Ireland’s cultural elites, for it shatters their self-flattering delusion that the morally upright love mass immigration and only wrong’uns worry about it. Noone confirmed something many of us already knew: that there are swarms of good Irish people out there who are not far right, and not opposed to all forms of immigration, and yet who think the immigration system has become absurd, unruly and expressly geared towards boosting the moral standing of Ireland’s elites with not so much as a passing thought for the impact it might be having on everyone else.
Ireland is reaching boiling point on the immigration question. And with good reason. Around 20 per cent of Ireland’s current population was born outside of Ireland. That is unprecedented in Irish history – leaving aside the Plantation of Ulster, perhaps – and yet people are told they can’t talk about it.
Every time the media elites try to dispel ‘immigration myths’, they end up confirming what a huge social quake Ireland is experiencing. The Irish Times fact-checked McGregor’s claims that Irish natives have become a minority in some towns. Ackshually, it said, migrants aren’t a majority anywhere. So in the town of Ballyhaunis in Mayo, for example, just 37 per cent are non-Irish. And in Ballymahon in Longford, it’s 33 per cent. And in Edgeworthstown, also in Longford, it’s 31 per cent. Okay, but that’s a lot, no? Ballyhaunis is a country town with a church, some shops and around 2,700 people. That hundreds of migrants with different languages and religions have arrived in the past decade is significant. And Mayo people, like Noone, should be free to say what they think about it.
Tensions are bubbling in Ireland. From McGregor and his manosphere fanboys to Noone and his millions of chuckling followers, vast numbers of Irish people are asking questions about immigration. The angst is mostly peaceful, but there have been explosive moments, like the Dublin riots of 2023. Everyone – surely – wants to avoid a repeat of vile scenes like those. My advice, then, is to let people talk. Let them TikTok. Let them say they don’t like what’s going on. Put a lid on people’s feelings and you don’t make those feelings go away – you just turn good-hearted criticism into simmering resentment.
Here’s the truth: immigration is the issue through which the people of Ireland most keenly feel their powerlessness, their exclusion from public life. It makes them feel like the playthings of a distant elite, of a ruling class ensconced in leafy Dublin that radically overhauls small towns and then tells the inhabitants of those towns to shut their racist mouths. Nationhood is a recent accomplishment in Ireland. People don’t take kindly to seeing the sovereignty their own great-grandparents fought for being sold off so cheaply by a Dublin elite that cares more for globalist diktats than it does for its own people. It’s not racism, it’s that.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
