The Irish had been fighting to keep Ireland Irish for more than a thousand years before the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, when Irish sovereignty and identity finally seemed assured. Now, Ireland is threatened again, not by Norse raids or English invasions, but by massive Third-World immigration. Unwanted by the majority of Irish, the migrants have caused problems throughout Ireland, especially in several Dublin neighborhoods, and are straining Irish social services to the breaking point. Foreign-born residents now account for nearly 25 percent of Ireland’s population.

It’s almost impossible to believe this is happening, considering Irish history. For 200 years, the Irish battled Norse raiders and the coastal settlements they established before finally crushing the Norse in the epic Battle of Clontarf in 1014. The leader of the Irish forces, High King Brian Boru, was killed during the final moments of the battle, ending the possibility that the unity he had achieved among all the feuding Irish clans would continue.

The disunity and feuding that followed Boru’s death allowed the Normans to gain a foothold in Ireland a bit more than a century and a half later. Their conquered territory grew over the next hundred years and Norman castles sprang up over various parts of Ireland, as they had in England a century earlier.

However, an ironic twist was occurring at the same time. The Norman nobles were taking Irish wives and within a few generations the Norman families had become Hiberniorus Hibernis Ipsis—more Irish than the Irish themselves. Back in England, there were laws passed aimed at preventing this assimilation, but in Ireland it was too late. Norman blood had disappeared into the Irish gene pool and Gaelic had become the first language of many sons of mixed parentage. Their loyalty was to Ireland, not Norman England.

It wasn’t until the mid-16th century that wars began again when Queen Elizabeth, worried that Ireland might be used by Spain or France for an invasion of England, sent her forces into the Emerald Isle. Irish resistance was fierce and even Elizabeth’s one-time favorite, the Earl of Essex, suffered defeats. She later had him beheaded for rebellious behavior.

Despite their victories over the English, the Irish lacked unity. Unlike the hired mercenary armies of Elizabeth, which included professional soldiers from various countries in Europe, the Irish armies were raised from local volunteers, who could fight only for brief periods before they had to return home to harvest crops or practice their trades. Ultimately, England prevailed, which led to confiscation of land in rebellious portions of Ireland and to many leaders of the old Gaelic order sailing for the European continent, an exile known as the Flight of the Earls.

Following England’s victory, settlers from England and the Scottish Lowlands, presumably loyal English subjects, were planted in the most independent of Ireland’s provinces, Ulster. The Irish were not subdued, though. In a rebellion that erupted in the 1640s, the Irish regained control of most of Ireland, only to be finally crushed in the early 1650s by Oliver Cromwell and his forces. After emerging victorious in the English Civil War, Cromwell, a religious zealot, turned his fury on Ireland. Through slaughter, starvation, and deportation he reduced the Gaelic Irish population by two-thirds. Most of those deported were shipped to the West Indies as slaves.  

Minor rebellions continued intermittently for another 250 years, punctuated by the great Rising of 1798, which saw a good portion of those presumably loyal planted Ulster settlers join with the Gaelic Irish in an attempt to end English rule, and the Young Irelanders rebellion of 1848, which saw several of the leaders, including Thomas Francis Meagher, captured and sentenced to be “hanged, drawn and quartered.” An international outcry caused England to commute their sentences to “transportation for life.” Meagher was shipped to Tasmania. He eventually escaped and arrived in the United States as a hero to Irish Americans. During the Civil War he rose to brigadier general and commanded the Irish Brigade.

At the same time the Young Irelanders were rebelling, the potato famine was devasting Ireland, particularly in the west of Ireland, the most Gaelic-speaking region of the island. Well more than a million Irish died and well more than a million emigrated during the famine, leaving great swaths of the western coastal counties depopulated. The decline in Ireland’s population continued until the turn of the 20th century, when it was little more than half of what it had been in 1840.

It seems impossible that after such devastation any will to resist English control could be left. Nonetheless, violent conflicts and disturbances continued throughout the second half of the 19th century, especially with English landlords, which led to the formation of the Land League of Ireland, largely supported by funds from Irish in America. Actions of the Land League resulted in a new word entering the language—boycott. American money also helped fuel the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood, dedicated to establishing a free and sovereign Irish Republic through the force of arms.   

With the death and emigration of the majority of Gaelic speakers, it looked to England like one of the greatest obstacles to Anglicizing Ireland—a language that marked the Irish as separate and distinct from the English—was about to become a relic of history. However, a revival of the language began with the formation of the Gaelic League in 1893 by such figures as Eoin MacNeill and Douglas Hyde.  Dedicated to preserving Gaelic as the national language, membership in the league grew rapidly and soon included men such as Patrick Pearse, who would become the leader of the Easter Rising of 1916.  Demonstrating the power of language in contributing to identity, nearly all the leaders of the Rising were members of the Gaelic League.

It was Pearse who delivered the oration at the grave site of the prominent Irish rebel Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1915, saying: 

The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open.  They think that they have pacified Ireland.  They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

Nine months later, in late in April 1916, units of Irish rebels occupied several strategic positions in Dublin. The main force commanded by Pearse made the General Post Office its headquarters. Standing in front of the GPO, Pearce read the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic,” shocking not only the English but many of the Irish. The action seemed bold beyond belief. Fierce fighting erupted immediately. “A terrible beauty is born,” Ireland’s Nobel Laureate poet William Butler Yeats wrote in “Easter 1916,” which memorialized the dramatic event.

In Dublin, some 1,200 Irish rebels fought 16,000 British troops and another 1,000 Royal Irish Constabulary police. Bombardment from British artillery and a British ship left portions of Dublin in rubble and killed far more Irish men, women, and children than rebels. Out of food, medical supplies, and ammunition, the Irish resistance collapsed after a week of intense fighting. Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean MacDermott, Joseph Plunkett, John MacBride, Michael O’Hanrahan, James Connolly, and other leaders who survived the carnage were taken prisoner, given hasty trials by a military tribunal, and then executed by firing squads over a period of nine days. Connolly was so badly wounded the British couldn’t stand him against a wall but had to tie him to a chair before the firing squad. The executed men were already heroes. Now they were martyrs.

The British thought the executions would intimidate the Irish and put an end to thoughts of independence. However, the executions had just the opposite effect. Many Irish who thought independence could be achieved peacefully now abandoned the notion and joined with those who knew that only through force of arms would Ireland be set free. There were, of course, British loyalists who had been bought and paid for, but they were now becoming ever more isolated.

When the Great War ended in November 1918—ostensibly fought “so small nations might be free”—and Britain ignored Ireland’s pleas, the Irish War for Independence erupted. Irish forces were now organized into the Irish Republican Army. The IRA had learned well the lessons of the failed Easter Rising and would not attempt to hold ground at a prominent position such as the Dublin GPO, but would have “Flying Columns” attack British posts or strike British convoys in swift and deadly assaults before disappearing into the Irish countryside. Three years of this and the British were ready to negotiate.  This led to the establishment of the not fully independent Irish Free State in 1922 and finally, in 1949, the fully sovereign Republic of Ireland.

The consciousness of every American of Irish descent I knew growing up was shaped by the home country’s many centuries-long battle to reestablish Irish sovereignty and protect Irish identity. It was a regular topic of conversation in Irish-American households. A book often found in these households was The Story of the Irish Race, Seumas MacManus’s masterful study of the Gaels from the mists of antiquity down to the early 1920s.

Equally common was Edward MacLysaght’s Irish Families: Their Names, Arms, and Origins, which was especially fun for me as a kid because I could look up all my family names, see them in their Gaelic forms, learn their meanings, and read the history of those who bore the surnames. It all contributed to establishing a strong Irish identity. Then, too, it was common for Americans of Irish descent to take at least one trip to Ireland in their lifetime. It was something of a pilgrimage.

I was the last in my family to visit Ireland. Flying into Shannon airport in 1984, I looked down on the island and my first thought was not that it looked just like all the photos in coffee-table books I’d seen on Ireland—although it did—but that there really were 40 shades of green. A stunningly powerful tug to my heart came some minutes later when we disembarked. There was a throng of people waiting to greet those coming off the plane. I looked at all those faces pushed up against a plexiglass partition as we walked down a ramp and I thought I was looking at my own family and relatives. It was almost eerie. 

Some days later, I walked into a store in County Galway and spied the proprietor standing behind a counter. He looked so much like my father it was eerie. I told him he could have been one of my dad’s brothers. He was pleased with that and didn’t seem surprised. Since his surname was different, I asked him if his mother might have been a McGrath. He shook his head no and said, “Me mother was a Garrity from County Mayo.” That almost put me on the floor. Both my father’s grandmothers were Garritys from County Mayo. Moreover, Dad’s maternal grandfather was from the same area in County Mayo as the Garrity grandmothers.

Day after day, this kind of homogeneity was reinforced. Not that there weren’t different looks. There were, but only a handful, and then they repeated. This was a tribe. The Irish knew it and they were proud of it. The second night in Ireland we stayed with a Mrs. O’Leary. She asked us where our people were from. We told her, and in a strong brogue she said, “You’ve come home then.” I said it had been a couple-three generations. “No matter,” she replied, “you’ve come home.”

I think of the Irish fighting for centuries to maintain their identity and of my own experience with the distinctly tribal genetics of the people when I see tens of thousands of so-called asylum seekers and refugees pour into Ireland. Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Somalians, Nigerians, Iranians, and Arabs have flooded into the Emerald Isle against the wishes of the majority of Irish. It seems those who run things in Ireland allow this because they have been bought by the European Union. “This is what you have to do as a member nation, little Ireland,” I imagine them saying, “ if you want to continue to receive your trade privileges, and your benefits, and your agricultural subsides.”

Ireland joined the European Community—now called the European Union—in 1973. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. It’s proved to be a Faustian bargain. The promised economic benefits did materialize. From 1973 to 2018, €40 billion (US$44 billion) poured into Ireland from the EU, considerably more than Ireland contributed to the Union’s budget. Ireland was able to develop her infrastructure significantly, especially construction and improvements of roads and harbors. 

The money was of particular benefit to Irish agriculture. By 2020, 40 percent of Irish exports were going to EU countries, mainly agricultural exports. Although Ireland has suffered intermittent recessions, her overall economy is fairly strong and for several years now has been a net contributor to the EU.

However, Ireland is now seeing that EU membership has compromised her sovereignty. The euro replaced the punt in 2002 as Ireland’s currency, transferring a great degree of financial power and decision-making from Dublin to Brussels and Strasbourg. Moreover, there are a whole series of agreements that EU member nations must abide by, including ever-changing policies on so-called refugees and asylum seekers, both defined so broadly as to include essentially any and everyone. 

The political establishment in Ireland seems to care more about Ireland’s role as an EU member than about the Irish people, which is similar to the disconnect between the people and their governments throughout Western Europe. Most of those in power in Ireland have enough money to live far apart from the growing Third-World populations, and then condemn those Irish without power or means who voice their discontent. For daring to object to the immigrant invasion they are called “far-right,” “racists,” and “neo-Nazis,” when in reality they are simply working-class Irish who have seen their neighborhoods destroyed.

There have been several large protest marches and occasionally violence has erupted. The neighborhood of Coolock on Dublin’s northside has seen the most disturbances.  Residents there became outraged when their concerns over a closed paint factory being converted to housing for 500 migrants were ignored. In November 2023, the Coolock Irish took to the streets. Fights broke out with police and fires were lighted in the factory. The world champion MMA fighter Conor McGregor tweeted, “Ireland is at war.” 

Since then, there have been several more protest marches and rallies, fights with police, fires at the paint factory, and numerous arrests. It’s particularly galling to Coolock residents, who face a severe housing shortage, that the Irish government is building apartments for foreigners. This summer the Public Order Unit—special riot police—has been deployed repeatedly to Coolock.

For months now, Irish media and politicians have vehemently condemned not the policy of allowing tens of thousands of Third-World migrants into a small island nation, but those who protest the policy.

Early in September, though, a crack in the solid condemnation collective occurred when Mary Lou McDonald, a member of the Irish Parliament representing central Dublin and the leader of the opposition party Sinn Fein, said, “It is equally dangerous and debilitating not to listen to the real experience of marginalized and poorer communities on the ground.”

Before it’s too late, I hope the political establishment addresses the migrant problem rather than deploying the Public Order Unit to beat and arrest Irish whose only crime is wanting Ireland to remain Irish. ◆