Ireland Will Miss Globalism When it’s Gone

Greenland. Gaza. Ukraine, Maduro, Iran. History is not so much “returning” as kicking in the door with a hatchet.

The geopolitical Goldilocks zone Ireland slipped into after the Cold War (the one many readers of this publication love to backtalk) is stuttering yet I think now is the worst time to start popping champagne.

The multilateral golden era of Ireland Inc., for all its failings, is approaching either its expiry date or a decisive fork in the road. Some on the right imagine this means a Soviet-style collapse of liberal governance: a dramatic unmasking or a moment of national rebirth. 

The reality is likely to be more banal yet more frightening for this island.

Firstly, some home truths are in order.

Liberalism works. 

Not perfectly, not everywhere but it works. It has worked in Ireland even with all the Whiggish mistruths and anglophile origins, and it has worked globally, with caveats that serious people can and should debate, race/ religion/ resources/ geopolitics.

Free (or free-ish) markets. Transparent administration. Capital mobility. The rule of law acting as a restraint on narcissistic, vainglorious nationalism or oligarchic cliques. The ability of the young and innovative to chart their own destiny.

Ireland is a textbook case of what happens when a small state plugs itself, intelligently, into a rules-based international system which in material terms acts as a counterexample for contrarian ‘right-wing socialist’ takes.

We went from an emigration-ridden backwater complete with a romantic nationalism grinding itself into the wall through car bombs in Belfast to one of the richest countries in Europe. Liberal revisionists lean on this point because, irritatingly, it is largely true and right-wingers serious about their trade on these shores should imbibe it-though clarifying that none of it would be possible without Irish independence or the positive legacy of social Catholicism.

Think you have it bad renting in Portobello on a €60k office job with two holidays a year? Your (grand)parents were laying tarmac in Birmingham.

Dislike Google, Apple, and Facebook propping up the Exchequer with tens of billions annually? Fine. But be honest about the likely alternative, which many in ‘Based’ Eastern Europe face: a gombeen-ridden parish economy that exports ambition and rewards scummy clientelist elites.

None of this means the liberalisation path Ireland took was the only possible route, or even the optimal one. That debate is legitimate. I won’t pretend that 10,000 abortions per annum, Aisling Murphy, or the genital mutilation of children is defensible.

What is not legitimate is the willful blindness of much of the contemporary Irish right to the national self-interest embedded in multilateral liberalism and to the real, material gains it delivered.

If and when multilateral liberalism fractures, it will be extraordinarily difficult to recreate its benefits.

A United States willing to flood your economy with capital, a security umbrella, while extending diaspora-driven goodwill.

A United Kingdom constrained from using Ireland as a post-colonial plaything by a rules-based order rather than raw interest over the North

A Northern Ireland where retrograde tribal bloodshed is neutralised by shared prosperity.

A European Union of CAP and open markets in Ireland’s corner over Brexit rather than the defensive geopolitical bloc it will now have to evolve into.

Ireland being able to pursue an impactful anti-Zionist position despite a dependency on the United States through proceduralism of the ICC, EU and UN.

These were not natural conditions. They were historical anomalies by Irish standards and conditions Eastern and Southern Europeans would hack off limbs to obtain even half of.

Twenty years from now, when a future Taoiseach is scrambling to replace the wreckage of the Silicon Docklands by hammering out deals in Doha or Beijing or offering free visas to New Delhi or Abuja, partners far less sentimental about Irish sovereignty than Washington ever was, it may be worth remembering how easy things once were in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.

Multilateralism was not moral perfection. But it was a machine that worked.

And that brings me to the fifth column nature of the Irish Right.

From cheerleading Irexit to the benefit of Brexitters in the 2010s, to Putin worship to recent overtures to the Trump administration in the hopes of smashing European unity never mind ridiculous alliances with street loyalism, (a sizeable percentage but not all) of the Irish Right constitutes a subversive current in Irish self-interest.

As a Fine Gael member, I will freely admit that Neale Richmond and Simon Harris are a lot of things, and God-fearing patriots not one of them, but ultimately operate more proximate to the self-interest of the state than renegade QAnon boomers who make up the ranks of this collective, licking their worldview off AI slop and Russian/MAGA talking points.

On migration, hands down the gravest failure of liberal governance, the answer is more prosaic than anyone will admit.

The Irish state already possesses, within its existing legislative and policy toolkit, sufficient latitude to resolve most of the demographic crisis without departing from liberal governance norms. 

Shut down the asylum racket. Defund and discipline the NGO complex that monetises dysfunction. Bleed the visa-abuse economy dry. Introduce explicit national preference in housing allocation for citizens. Enable free and open discussion about Irish demographic survival buttressed by employment protection for dissenters. At that point, the problem is already half-solved.

Mass migration is not some ancient, immovable feature of Irish life. It is a first-generation problem, managed primarily through a single international airport and a (solvable) land border with the North. For an island state, this is not an existential impossibility, it is a question of will and enforcement. Actually imposing the rule of law and strategically reinforcing it may be unromantic, but it does most of the heavy lifting and opens up further space down the line if and when remigration becomes viable.

On the question of U.S. capitalism, it is worth clearing away a common confusion. Neoliberalism was not the primary engine of Ireland’s social liberalisation. Irish life, Irish nationalism, and Irish Catholicism had, by the late twentieth century, accumulated enough internal contradiction and moral hypocrisy to function as cultural dams waiting to burst.

The NGO-driven moralism of the 2010s and the peculiar theatrics of Dublin’s professional liberal class were undeniably shaped and amplified by Americanisation. But the deeper forces that drove liberalisation were domestic. The ground had already shifted long before Silicon Valley arrived.

If you were educated, and in your twenties in 1980s Ireland, the demand for liberalisation was not an imported ideology but a rational response to stagnation and closed horizons. Wanting change was neither naïve nor treacherous and recent history largely vindicated those who did.

On abortion, the situation is bleaker but not wholly closed. Pro-life absolutism is, for the foreseeable future, off the table. But reducing annual terminations from roughly 10,000 to 2,000 through regulatory tightening and policy incentives is a pragmatic and ultimately achievable objective, one that would meaningfully arrest both the moral and demographic erosion of the nation.

This mirrors a broader reality Irish republicans are reluctant to face. A united Ireland, if it comes at all, will emerge not through romantic rupture but through bland realpolitik negotiated quietly between London, Washington, and Dublin. Migration policy will follow the same pattern. The decisive actors will not be street movements but technocrats.

Similarly, the urban protests against asylum centres over the past two years may have succeeded in jolting the political system into awareness. But they will not, by their prole-led chaotic nature, mature into a coherent political challenge. Any serious clampdown will be implemented, as ever, by men in suits inside the Department of Justice answering to FF/FG ministers.

This is the uncomfortable truth: the problems nationalists care most about will not be solved against the state, but through it. And that requires accepting the dull, procedural reality of liberal governance even while correcting its failures.

There is a reason many who lived through the Soviet collapse, without loving the system or excusing its crimes, still recall it with nostalgia. 

What followed was not freedom but institutional freefall where raw power rushed in to fill the gaps. 

The Irish Republic is likely to experience a milder but recognisable version of this dynamic when globalism finally recedes. And in that moment, many Irish people, including those who spent years deriding liberalism as decadent or alien, will realise that it was the system that allowed a small island on the edge of Europe to live and trade in relative peace.

The world of Brigid Laffan may be hitting the wall like the woman herself but you’re not gonna like the AI-powered Andrew Tate-infused multipolar era ahead of us.

Liberalism may be ending, but that does not mean it was all a mistake.