All posts by Ned Gubbins

How to Stop an Irish Boriswave

What Happened and What's Next? Right-wing condemnation abounded online this week upon news of the signing of a new cooperation agreement between the EU and India with explicit mention of steaming migration between Europe and the subcontinent. In the works...

/ 29/01/2026

Imperial America: Ireland and Washington’s Expanding Biometric Border Regime

The rupturing of transatlantic relations continues to define the diplomatic calendars of both Iveagh House and European capitals with scant attention being paid to moves by Washington to hoover up the biometric data of EU citizens. Referred to by policy...

/ 23/01/2026

Simon On Substack: Will the Tánaiste’s Dog whistling Bury Right-Wing Populism?

Asylum: The Centre Strikes Back If centrist and centre-right promises to hem in mass migration had ever carried real policy weight, London would today remain overwhelmingly native-born thanks to Tory and New Labour promises. Readers should assess Tánaiste Simon Harris’s...

/ 10/01/2026

Maduro in Chains: How Should Ireland React to the End of Multilaterialism

The liberal multilateral world is ending not because it was defeated by a rival vision, but because it could no longer reproduce the conditions that made it believable.

/ 04/01/2026
© European Union, 2025

Babiš and Bertie: Why Fianna Fáil Didn’t Follow Their Czech Counterparts into Populism

Prague’s Populist Paladin The boom could be back in Prague with Czech voters opting to return neoliberal businessman turned populist kingpin Andrej Babiš to power despite desultory claims of Russian interference. A Slovak who made his fortune creating the agri-chemical...

/ 17/12/2025
Houses of the Oireachtas from Ireland

The O’Callaghan Compact: Is Ireland Already Reneging on the EU Migration Pact?

If the state succeeds in scaling its systems, reception centres, and so on, Ireland could stabilise its asylum regime and integrate smoothly into the EU’s new migration framework. If it fails, the country risks slipping into an uncomfortable halfway house...

/ 10/12/2025

Justizposse! Bogus Shoplifting Case Dropped Against AfD MEP as State Lawfare Intensifies

A long-running criminal case against former Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) MEP Gunnar Beck has collapsed in spectacular form at a German district court, bringing an end to a series of accusations that had shifted dramatically in scope over two years. ...

/ 03/12/2025

Migration Pact: Dáil Expected to Sign Ireland Down to EU Asylum Budget

Three motions with one unmistakable policy direction dominate Wednesday’s Dáil schedule, as the coalition moves to opt Ireland into a trio of EU multi-annual funding programmes underpinning the Union’s migration, security and justice agenda. The first motion locks Ireland into...

/ 25/11/2025
Attribution: Sheila1988, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Abbeyleix Affair: Are Gardaí Tipping the Scales in Ireland’s First ‘Far Right Terror Plot”

Across Europe nevermind the United States and the toxic culture of FBI entrapment the same choreography repeats, German security services caught running paid neo-Nazi informants within the NSU network or inventing a fictitious coup attempt in 2022, British “Prevent” cases...

/ 12/11/2025

What’s Behind the ICCL’s Data Commissioner Offensive?

To the casual observer, the DPC is a sleepy bureaucracy. To the informed, it is the Republic’s regulatory crown jewel—a node of transatlantic leverage that determines not only data flows but, increasingly, the limits of digital sovereignty. As the Trump...

/ 06/11/2025