Gerard Howlin’s Boomer Moment

The blood had scarcely scabbed over on Capel Street’s recent Islamist attack when the media launched into an engineered scare regarding a supposed spike in anti-Indian hate crimes. With the Garda Press Office and Coimisiún na Meán both fumbling the ball in locking down the video and the nationality of the Pakistani assailant, the press pack moved on to ginning up fears of an anti-racist panic through a sudden and largely confected string of anti-Indian hate crimes.

Statistically dismissed by Gardaí and stitched together by a string of allegories of racial hatred (most likely petty delinquency spun as ‘hate’), the anti-Indian hate crime spree of August 2025 has nonetheless been shameful, as it was indicative of a growing Indian caucus ready and willing to pull the heartstrings for PC brownie points. 

Having surfed the tide of Irish politics since the 1980s, Fianna Fáil, the PDs, back to Fianna Fáil again, former government advisor during the Bertie years, Gerrard Howlin, added his voice to last week’s Indian scare with a pro-censorship column in the Irish Times op-ed pages.

To read Howlin, one would think the great problem facing Ireland is not Islamists stabbing people on Capel Street (or beheading homosexuals in Sligo for that matter), not spiralling assaults, not the slow displacement of Irish communities, but rather that ordinary citizens are talking about these things online. 

Howlin’s article is the perfect example of boomer brain: still stuck in the 2000s, still pretending mass immigration is a quirky lifestyle accessory rather than a tectonic event tearing Ireland apart week to week.

His central line is that online speech must be reined in so Gardaí can do their jobs. But it’s not TikTok memes stopping Gardaí from policing Capel Street, it’s the fact that they’re overwhelmed by communities they neither understand nor control, as the state and society in general are left to pick up the tab on the migration system. The knife in someone’s gut wasn’t wielded by an “algorithm.” It was wielded by a Pakistani migrant. Pretending otherwise isn’t wisdom; it’s wilful blindness.

Howlin calls for policing the internet so the state can police the streets. The truth is the reverse: the state cannot police the streets because it dismantled the nation that gave it legitimacy. Without shared identity and loyalty, without borders, policing becomes impossible. His solution, the digital gagging of Irish citizens, shows not wisdom but desperation.

Castigating the tribalism over our coethnics over the Atlantic, Howlin is scathing at Irish-American racism. Indeed, just like the sectarian trials of Ulster, Irish America’s history is the unspoken counterexample. Our cousins learned, through blood and brawl, that multiculturalism is not a song but a struggle. They protected their neighbourhoods against socially engineered attempts to destroy them with busing with the prerequisite toughness. 

Ultimately, Howlin’s policy demands collapse under their own contradictions. You cannot police the internet into producing a safe Ireland, because Ireland’s problems are not digital. They are demographics.

The truth is that Ireland’s mass migration experiment already resembles a Soviet-style cock-up—an elite-engineered social project imposed from above, celebrated in slogans, and collapsing in practice. Like the USSR’s five-year plans, it looks orderly on paper but produces shortages, chaos, and fear on the ground. Housing has imploded, crime has risen, and the state now spends more energy silencing dissent than solving problems. 

Censoring Irish people for noticing the chaos won’t make migrants integrate, won’t stop Islamist attacks, and won’t fix housing shortages. It will just deepen the sense of betrayal—that our rulers imported the crisis and now want to gag the ruled from saying so.