Sir,—I’ve spent much of my career studying the forces that caused people to emigrate from Ireland to North America. From the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Irish people from mostly poor rural backgrounds, especially in the West of Ireland, found themselves pitched into the world’s most advanced (and, some said, ruthless) industrial economy, where often they experienced great hardship and prejudice.
And so it is dispiriting to say that, yes, your editorial ‘If it quacks like a duck …’ (HI 32.4, July/Aug. 2024) is surely correct that ‘the far-right phenomenon’, so obscenely obvious of late in the US, UK, Germany etc., has reached Ireland and in increasingly virulent and violent forms. And for the same reasons. Global capitalism has produced soaring inequality, collapsing public amenities and ecological catastrophe, and a tiny, corrupt élite controls both traditional and new media that give little or no space for the articulation of policy alternatives.
So, in Ireland as elsewhere, the dispossessed and downwardly mobile—the men and women of no property—are frightened, angry, alienated and confused. No wonder that some have proven easy prey for well-funded and unscrupulous manipulation to ensure that they vent their frustration on immigrants and refugees, themselves the victims of capitalism and imperialism, rather than work with them for common goals. Indeed, so much of this sordid machination emanates from beyond Ireland’s shores that one must wonder whether its architects’ short-term objectives include undermining Irish opposition to both Palestinian suffering and NATO membership, countering resistance to the baleful influence of the tech trusts, and perhaps even disrupting progress towards Irish unity.—Yours etc.,
KERBY MILLER
Curators Professor Emeritus
University of Missouri