Based Shatter? Why Ian O’Doherty Shouldn’t Legitimise Zionism or Alan Shatter

Recent attempts by Alan Shatter to position himself as a critic of woke culture appear politically convenient rather than principled. The anti-woke movement is increasingly the optimal entry point for charlatans seeking new political life, and with that, the former Fine Gael from Terenure steps up to bat again

Thus, with a sun tan reflective of the sunny climes of Florida, where he is now primarily resident, Shatter sat down with Indo journalist Ian O’Doherty to chit chat about the terrible state of wokeness in Ireland as well as his career of ‘public’ service.

The interview was insightful in the questions not asked, as Ian O’Doherty suspended reality for an hour to softball the disgraced minister.

To state the obvious, Shatter is the man who turbocharged not just mass migration but the secularisation of Irish family law and spearheaded the legal recognition of every conceivable domestic arrangement short of polygamy. 

By his own boasts, he helped lay the procedural groundwork for Ireland’s descent into abortion through support of the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, whereby the pro-life absolutism of Bunreacht ended and the barbaric reality of 10,000 abortions per annum began to materialise.

Fabian, in his approach to hacking apart Bunreacht’s Thomistic foundations, Shatter’s role in harmonising our laws with ECHR rulings and EU norms made not just abortion appear inevitable but created legal barricades future patriotic governments may spend decades deconstructing.

Beyond the abortion issue, Shatter’s broader agenda, redefining family, promoting multiculturalism, and sidelining religious tradition, eroded the philosophical framework that had upheld not just the pro-life consensus but Irish national life as a whole.

Shatter was the primary architect of the Children and Family Relationships Act, imposing the most radical redefinition of the family in Irish legal history. 

Shatter walked so TENI could run with the 2015 act, bringing in the required fluidity to enable gender mania that we see today. Furthermore, Shatter supported and still supports robust hate speech laws and anti-discrimination frameworks that restrict expression. The only difference between him and the current Cabinet is that he wants Zionism as a protected category.

On the migration front, Shatter did more to invite the dangers of radical Islam in the door than Hamas could have dreamed of through his intentionally lax migration outlook when in Justice.

When in the DoJ, he dramatically increased the speed and volume of citizenship approvals. During his tenure, over 100,000 people were granted Irish citizenship. Defending IDF offensives in Gaza in tandem with citizen ceremonies on the Quays, it is strange that such hypocrisy was never raised by Ian O’Doherty in his one-hour stint with the ex-minister.

Shatter was and is not the Svengali of Irish liberalism and certainly should not be scapegoated as its Dreyfus, but the trendlines are obvious to see.

Shatter didn’t need to shout; he merely built the scaffolding like a generation of progressives from the 1980s on. Through family law reform, naturalisation acceleration, and EU alignment, he embedded irreversible changes into the system.

He didn’t declare war on Catholic Ireland; he (and many others) slowly displaced it with parallel structures (civil ceremonies, non-marital parenthood frameworks), until the old order became legally irrelevant.

The Fine Gael politician embedded his ideological goals in dense legal frameworks, family court rules, administrative protocols, and EU-compliant reforms. Shatter’s legacy survived not because of populist appeal, but because it was built into the legal and procedural DNA of the Irish administrative state at a time Catholicism and our republican ethos had lost their nerve.

He is proof that the permanent bureaucracy of liberalism can accomplish more than five elections’ worth of slogans. Alan Shatter’s career is a case study in how liberalism colonises through legislation, not revolution, and that the nationalist or Catholic right loses not in elections alone, but in committee rooms.

Today, Shatter returns to the political plinth not out of a Pauline sense of righting his wrongs on but to challenge the heartfelt opposition Irish people on the left and right have regarding the actions of the Zionist state in Gaza. Having weaponised human rights jargon against the Irish nation for decades, Shatter now takes umbrage with the same ethical vocabulary being applied to Israel as they vaporise the Gaza Strip and break every humanitarian norm set this side of Treblinka.

While his affection for the family of Private Rooney appears genuine and Dublin’s Palestine fetish borders on the absurd, Shatter evidently has the well-being of another state as his primary concern in his return to the public eye.

Until October 6th, 2023, Shatter was a vocal defender of multiculturalism and anti-discrimination legislation, framing Ireland as a modern, open society, implicitly out of spite to its Catholic heritage. His appearance in the ‘anti-woke’ ecosystem speaks to a wider issue of subversion around the corner as the woke wave of the 2010s begins to plateau and begs questions about the ‘grift right’ in Ireland.

“Anti-woke” is an ill-defined catch-all for grievances rather than a coherent worldview. This ambiguity naturally attracts figures who have no real cultural or moral convictions, but sense an opening to rebrand themselves as contrarians or rebels.

As the anti-woke current in Ireland gains momentum, some are attempting to fold Zionist narratives into the tent, painting them as allies in the fight against liberal excess and cancel culture. This is not just incoherent, it’s intellectually dishonest, morally compromising, and strategically self-defeating.

Ireland’s moral instinct sides with the colonised, not the colonisers.

Letting Zionist figures claim space in anti-woke discourse alienates Catholics, republicans, social conservatives, and the anti-imperialist left, many of whom are quietly drifting toward post-liberal politics.

This contradiction will be exploited by both the republican left and the liberal centre to paint anti-woke politics as hollow and morally bankrupt, and the reds would be right in doing so.

Many anti-woke figures Ian O’Doherty, focus on surface-level symptoms (e.g., pronouns, statues, university censorship) without addressing deeper cultural decay, never mind economic realities that produce it.

Charlatans thrive in shallow intellectual waters; they can posture about absurdities without ever challenging the rootless liberal modernity that produced them (and which they often helped build). Anti-woke politics offers a convenient jersey for failed liberals and political opportunists looking for a second bite of the political apple.

The anti-woke script is easy to memorise: ridicule absurd academic trends, mock pronoun rituals, cry “free speech!” and post a meme. 

But without a deeper sense of cultural loyalty to Ireland, historical memory, economic/class analysis, or metaphysical grounding, this is just a performance often by people who have no intention of rebuilding anything real.

If we are honest, leftist voices (may Allah forgive us) are right that anti-woke discourse is often tolerated or even promoted by the system, because it keeps people venting but never building or looking to more radical right and left alternatives. That is not to ignore the caustic reality of ‘woke’ and its institutional backers.

In the case of Ireland, it has invited the lowest of the philosophical low, zionists, anti-national revisionists, and West Brits. 

If Shatter wants to critique woke politics, fine, but he’ll have to reckon with the liberal institutional legacy he helped build and the contradictions of holding up a foreign ethno-state as a moral model while scoffing at the idea of Irish national assertion. 

Until then, his position isn’t conservative. It’s just incoherent and frankly insulting to our collective intelligence. If you let Alan Shatter into the conservative or populist tent, you’re not moving things forward, you’re laundering the legacy of the man who helped dismantle Ireland’s moral, cultural, and demographic foundations.