Confessions of an Anglo-Fetishist

In the most recent edition of The Village magazine, Irish historian David Burke published a fascinating article on the relationship between British intelligence services and Charles Haughey on the one hand, and Garrett FitzGerald on the other. Burke is without a doubt Ireland’s leading authority on the spooky happenings that were taking place behind the scenes in recent Irish history. His work is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of Irish politics because, the truth is, these spooky happenings have had far more influence on the trajectory that the country has taken than any election campaign.

What were the motivations of the British state in undertaking these operations? Unless the archives are ever opened in London, we will never really know. We can only guess. The optimistic reading is that the British state wanted to contain any violent paramilitary activity that was taking place on the island and ensure the security of Northern Ireland. This would almost certainly be the goal that representatives of the British state talk about publicly. The pessimistic reading is that there has been an ongoing campaign to engage in the “soft” capture of the Irish state. This would not mean a reabsorption of Ireland back into the United Kingdom. Rather it would mean capturing all the real levers of power in the state structure, in the police, in the judiciary etc. to ensure that London has de facto control over the country.

If the pessimistic reading is correct, then we should expect attempts to influence Irish politics and capture the state accelerate in the coming years. America, which has been a counterbalance against the British in Ireland for decades, is pulling back from Europe. The Irish political class has become addicted to this American presence. When it gradually pulls back, they will find themselves like a dependant infant whose mother has left them alone left to an open window. It is hard to think of a more ideal situation for any hungry coyotes on the prowl.

English Dreams in Irish Gardens

But this is not the topic of the present article. Here I want to focus on what motivated people like FitzGerald and the pro-British contingent in Ireland more generally. I can speak to this directly, because I am one of them both in temperament and by family background. Or, at least, I was one of them until I began to realise that nefarious forces might be at play, which could have a very negative effect on Ireland moving forward. FitzGerald’s generation is, of course, dead. The baby boomer protégés of this generation are still alive and still have a great deal of influence over Irish politics and culture, but soon they will be replaced. I was born into Generation X. We are old enough to have grown up around the time of the Peace Process when many of the goals of the British contingent came to fruition.

What was the appeal of Anglo-Fetishism for these people? First, there is the honest evaluation that Irish culture, especially Irish elite culture, is a variation of Anglo culture. Denying this is ridiculous, the province of the more crankish, delusional forms of nationalism. This is simply the truth, and Irish nationalists should come to terms with it. But recognising this is not enough to turn you into an Anglo-Fetishist like FitzGerald and the chaps. To better understand the niche appeal of Anglo-Fetishism we need to take it generationally, starting with FitzGerald’s own generation through the baby boomers that they spawned and then down to the remnants of this ideology amongst the Gen Xers.

FitzGerald himself is best understood as a liberal Catholic. He wanted to purge the Irish state of Catholic influence and liberalise laws that he viewed as religious, like those on contraception and divorce. FitzGerald may have thought of himself as a liberal Catholic, but if we judge a man by his fruits he is quite obviously better described as a liberal Anglican Protestant. These were not the views of FitzGerald’s Anglo-Fetishist milieu, however. That milieu was mainly the highly educated segment of Dublin society that gravitated around Fine Gael. They mostly worked in the legal profession which, in the days before the Celtic Tiger boom, was the elite segment of Irish society. On average, these people were far less liberal than FitzGerald. They would have seen his attempts to “Protestantise” Irish society and make it look more like Northern Ireland as morally controversial. Nevertheless, they were FitzGerald’s contemporaries because chaps stick together: the Anglo-Fetishism that bound this group together was a stronger glue than theological disputes were a solvent.

The attraction of British culture for the Anglo-Fetishists of this generation were the conservative rituals and aesthetics of British life. These people wore London fashion, like tweed jackets and mackintosh raincoats. They lived in Victorian homes with ornate gardens in the English style decorated with Victorian antique pieces like grandfather clocks and chaise longues. In the evenings they would invite their friends over for tea, which was served out of fine porcelain: in the winters by the fire and in the summers in the conservatory or in the garden. On Sunday, after mass they would serve a roast and listen to BBC on the radio.

Many of these people spoke with received pronunciation, accents that they picked up from their time at British boarding schools. Those that had gone to school in Ireland spoke with a heavily Anglicised Irish accent, like FitzGerald himself. It would have been extremely hard for anyone outside the Anglosphere—or even an American—to tell the difference between these people and their English counterparts. The only real difference was that they went to Catholic mass on Sundays and were far less liberal in their social views than the average English person. In fact, it is hard to even refer to these people as “Anglo-Fetishists” because this was their culture there was nothing aspirational or pretentious about it.

From Boomer Rebellion to 86INK

The baby boomers were a different story. In many ways, FitzGerald himself was the first Irish Anglo-Fetishist baby boomer even if he came from the previous generation. The baby boomers mostly left behind the conservative rituals and aesthetics of British life. Instead, what attracted them to Britain was its liberalism. This was the generation that grew up hearing rock and roll coming from London and were told that the Irish state had banned them from watching Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” because it scandalised the Christian religion. They might best be described as “liberal conservatives”. They were conservative insofar as they were horrified by the violence of the republican movement; they were liberal insofar as they wanted to bring the swinging sixties London culture to Ireland and clear the priests out of public life. FitzGerald was much more moderate on this question publicly but often it is better to judge the true intentions of the mentor with what is produced in his students. Judged on this basis FitzGerald was a cultural radical.

Some of the baby boomer Anglo-Fetishists decamped to London and became involved in politics and journalism. Some of them are still active today. The ones that moved to London tended to be more radical than their Irish counterparts. They tended to actively hate Ireland and see Ireland as a priest-infested theocracy that stifled their freedom to live as they pleased. Watching some of them still write about this today is amusing for those of us who live in Ireland. It seems to us that they are describing not just a different country, but a different planet.

Finally, there are we Gen Xers. We came along at a very strange time. The culture we grew up in was still one of Anglo-Fetishism—its beating heart being Trinity College—yet this Anglo-Fetishism was soon to become anachronistic as the millennials embraced American political culture. We were the odd man out. In the early days we could still vaguely complain about the influence of the priests and the church—often this seemed the extent of our Anglo-Fetishism. You see this in our cultural products, like the ‘Father Ted’ series created by Irish Gen Xer Graham Linehan and produced in Britain. But by the 2010s continuing to do so seemed out of touch. Many of us would try to emulate British culture, by reading Evelyn Waugh, for example, and posturing about unionism. But it all seemed much like what would today be called a ‘LARP’. We were the true Anglo-Fetishists if there ever were any.

What kept us going? I think we were trying to cling onto something that was aesthetically and culturally superior to the American culture into which the country was sinking at the time. From the outset, the influence of American culture in Ireland induced a stupefaction in the population. Whereas British culture felt like it had a place in the history of the island, American culture did not. It had a slop-like quality that seeped into every aspect of Irish life. When it transformed itself from pure culture into political culture around the time Obama was president it became actively intolerable. But the woke wars that resulted led us Gen X Anglo-Fetishists to forget all our Anglo-Fetishism. This is not surprising because at the same time as this was happening this same American political culture dissolved British political culture altogether. The Gen X Anglo-Fetishists and the British conservatives found themselves fighting the shadows of the American culture war. This is best seen in the “cancelling” of Graham Linehan himself for speaking out about the transgender issue.

That brings us to where we are today. The woke wars are over and America is pulling back from Europe. Naturally, us Anglo-Fetishists would be expected to revert to the positions of our forefathers. Now that the Americans are gone, we can get back to forming book clubs at Trinity College and reading Evelyn Waugh. But if we are honest, this does not seem desirable or even possible. We look across the Irish Sea and see that, while we were all distracted by the woke wars, Britain has been transformed into the “Yookay”. We look around Ireland, and we see that the new influences coming from Britain to Irish shores via immigrant communities and the “drill rap” scene. Britain no longer wants to Anglicise Ireland. The Yookay wants to turn Ireland into “Eyeland”. If you thought that some of the early American cultural influences in Ireland were bad, wait until you listen to Irish drill rap group 86INK.

The grim reality is that Britain appears to be collapsing at just about every level. Its political system is completely unstable, with the two major post-WWII political parties about to collapse. Its economy is on the brink of collapse. Its culture is degraded and only becoming more so. There is nothing attractive there. Ireland has its problems, but Britain is increasingly become one giant problem. Hitching our train to this wagon would just pull Ireland into the political and cultural whirlpool off the coast to the east. What are we today, we Anglo-Fetishists? I am not sure. But we cannot become Eyeland and we cannot allow ourselves to get pulled into the gravity well of British collapse.