The Irish Are Losing Their Way

Sinéad Murphy

Driving home after Christmas, we pulled in at the last toll plaza on the M8 to Cork. It had been dark for hours with ‘Storm Gerrit’ still pelting. As I lowered the window to hold out my card, a voice struck through the dark and wind and rain, screaming over the heavens and the engines:

WELL, AND WAS SANTY GOOD TO YE?

I hadn’t heard ‘Santy’ in years – not since my grandfather used to ask the same question.

Then, handing back my card and still screaming:

NOW LISTEN, IF I DON’T SEE YE, HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

If I don’t see ye? The absurdity of it was matched only by its conviviality, astonishing triumph over heavenly wrath and earthly hell.

Imagine this man, who goes every day to a grey place on a hill on the last leg of the finest motorway in Europe, built at public risk for private profit down the back bone of a tiny green isle, artery for no more than a trickle of traffic sucked in and around and out of Dublin’s M25, banked by rock on which the planting has not yet taken, decked in Public Art to still the soul that was purchased for sublime sums by the Public Art Budget and looks strangely akin to the many configurations of 5G mast.

Imagine this man, trussed up in a grey metal box, who spends his day at what must surely be the most precarious job on the planet at the edge of which AI capabilities crouch at the ready, flicking his laytexed wrist to bridge a tiny and shrinking gap between robotic people in robotic cars and the contactless card reader stuck to the side of his cabin, realising the affectless consent of those who, between Rathcormac and Watergrass Hill in the county of Cork, submit to being scalped by one of the handful of global conglomerates that occupy what used to be our lives.

Imagine this man, whose tenuous subsistence is relentlessly summarized by ‘Why not get a tag?’ messages emblazoned on the electronic screens at his front and rear.

Imagine this man, to whom a stranger was a neighbour notwithstanding, who he might perhaps meet again before the New Year but to whom he should extend the best wishes of the season just in case.

This man really still exists. This man is not yet a dream.

His power, startling now in its rarity? He has not quite forgotten how to live.

Pinned in by the infrastructure of anonymity, obscured by an unlikely combination of filthy fumes and clinical PPE, commissioned for a pittance to do the bidding of distant masters, still this man remembers how to live, with that assuredness which carries all before it and comes of being part of a living, breathing culture.

True, his voice is all but drowned out. And his encounters are fleeting and clogged by a paltry transaction. No doubt many who pay their toll do not hear him over their stereo, or do not heed him in their ennui. And, of course, some have already got the tag.

This man must strain now, and ever more implausibly, against a mighty opposite force. Transnational ambitions of technocratic domination are pitted against him, against vernacular cultures everywhere and their gift of knowing how to live.

The control-by-expert that is the globalist vision for our future requires that we forget how to live – forget so completely that life is recast as a series of problems demanding a series of solutions, digitally enabled, surveillance soaked, data extractive solutions.

We are bombarded now by these solutions: how much to drink, how often to eat, how to keep our friends, how to raise our children, how to stand properly, how to sit well, how to breathe. Yes, they have gone so far as to solve the problem of breathing.

We reach for these solutions as we lose confidence in our native ways and means, and they are promoted so relentlessly that our confidence wanes further and we scramble for the latest expert strategies and hardly recall how to catch our breath.

Knowing how to live: of all things what must be got rid of for the human landscape to be cleared of the characteristic self-reliance of vibrant cultures, and replanted with ever-updating top-down solutions for which we crave in our new dependency.

*

In a book from 1982, Ivan Illich claimed that there is one thing that all human cultures have had in common: gender.

In fact, according to Illich gender is what has made human cultures – whatever customs of dressing, working, eating, talking, playing, celebrating, dying have distinguished one culture from another have been gendered customs of dressing, working, eating, talking, playing, celebrating, dying.

The myriad ways in which men have been men and women have been women are the myriad ways people have known how to live.

Illich does not argue that this is how cultures should be, only that this is how cultures have been.

We need no longer wonder at recent decades’ concerted and relentless attack on gender.

To clear the world of human cultures as the vision of global governance demands – to reset human life as comprising uniform possibilities to be administered from above and on a massive scale – it is necessary to clear the world of what has made human cultures. It is necessary to clear the world of gender.

The mechanism for this clearance has been simple and apparently unobjectionable: promotion of the virtue of equality.

Appeals to equality reframe the gendered ways of vernacular cultures as regrettable instances of what is called ‘sexism’ – inequality based on sex.

But sexism is possible only where primary and secondary sexual characteristics are taken to be the most signficant difference between people. Already to allege sexism is to implicitly redefine people as primarily biological beings.

Human cultures throughout history have been the milieux of men and women, not of biological males and females. Human cultures, for this reason, cannot be sexist. To interpret them as sexist is to unsettle their foundations by obscuring the mode of being of their people.

Just amplifying the seeming virtue of sexual equality undermines native cultures, wrongfooting their people and readying them for subjugation by technical solutions.

And those solutions have followed fast, a veritable avalanche, as the vacuum left by manufactured contempt for gendered ways of life has been filled with technical and endlessly refreshed centralised strategies.

It turns out that the great epochal project of ending sexual inequality is hardly more edified than the project of making a society which has just been framed as sexist into a non-sexist society.

The first signal of the encroachment of technocratic control is the deliberate construction of problems that must then be given their solutions. The allegation and then mitigation of sexism is a calamatous example of this.

*

The second signal of the rise of technocacy is the splintering of deliberately constructed problems so that the requirement of finding solutions to them is multiplied without end.

It is in this context that we can place recent and ongoing dismantling of the biological categories of male and female.

Notwithstanding that openness to the so-called ‘fluidity’ of biological sex is abroad as an indicator of the liberality of our age, its effect has been to advance the subjugation of people through the further undermining of gendered cultures.

After all, if the enterprise of making the tasks, tools and talk of a society available and effective more equally for males and females is ongoing, then that of establishing equality for the many biological and quasi-biological orientations and identifications that are being named and claimed at bewildering pace is truly without end.

With the fragmenting of biological sex, the great project of equality is in the mode of permanent escape, wrecking the last vestiges of human cultures with artifical and transient solutions that are in the process of failing even as they promise success and that are clamoured for all the more helplessly as a result.

‘Progressive’ hyperinflation of the perception of sexual inequality is the enemy of cultures and the friend of technocracies.

And the ‘conservative’ push-back against it, which insists that there are only two sexes, only males and females, in fact buttresses technocratic control as actively as does the ‘progressive’ narrative.

What both ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ obscure is that, before the reframing of human cultures as sexist, men and women were only tangentially defined by their biology; men and women were gendered beings, cultured beings, part and parcel of ways of life.

This vital historical fact is denied both by those who defend the binarism of biological males and females, and by those who argue that biology is fluid.

The ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ fight it out on terrain that was marked out for them, and it hardly matters much who wins.

The real battle ought to be waged against the characterisation of people as primarily biological entities, against the remaking of human life as a technically convenient bare life.

How ready we are to line up against one another on either side of a line that was drawn for us. We should abandon this staged fight which is not of our making and does not serve our interest.

We are not biological beings. We are cultural beings. That is what has made us human. The assault on our culturedness by the promotion of sexual equality is a direct attack on our humanness.

It may sober our overheated flailing at the battle lines of technocracy to consider that it is this attack which makes us vulnerable to the technocratic endgame already seeking to realise itself and promising a dystopia the like of which we can scarcely conceive:

Certainly, the phenomenon of transsexuality has been a most effective tool of the technocrats, unsettling people’s implicit recognition of men and women on which their way of life has historically been founded with an explicit experience of hyper-biologised beings.

However, as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ bickering over the plausibility of changing sex further embeds the remodelling of people as defined by their biology, the way is smoothed for another and far more significant mode of transition: transhumanism, when we are so reduced to our biological elements and processes that the introduction of robotic components is hardly a game-changer, when we are directly programmable and therefore totally under control.

*

For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.

Among the many prongs of the offensive against Ireland, the assault on gender has been consistent and startling.
It is indicative that, during our Christmas visit, the country was full of talk of a man called Enoch Burke, a teacher who had been suspended from his job and was now in prison for refusing to use the preferred pronoun of one of his students and refusing to stop protesting against his subsequent dismissal.

As with so much of public debate of transsexuality, both the tos and the fros on the fate of Enoch Burke served only to buttress the base-line position of the technocracts, for whom people are tethered to their biology – whether fliud or not, it hardly signifies.

Meanwhile, with so much achieved in the decimation of Irish culture, the craven men in their Dail seats are emboldened.

On 8th March, the Irish government is to hold a referendum, in part to gain support for its removal of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ from Article 41 of the constitution.

It is of course not possible to summarize the complexities of a given culture, the infinite ways in which its men and women know how to live.

But it is possible to observe at least this: if the Irish man, still lingering in the M8 tollbooth, was characteristically hardworking and playful, drawing people into the social fold with a dignity that derived from the effect it produced rather than the gravitas of its methods; then the Irish woman, typically in the home and mother to the kinship group, commanded a respect that is difficult to capture for us who are inured to the smear campaign that has dismissed domestic life as subhuman drudgery.

This Irish woman had a seriousness about her that in other cultures can be the preserve of men. She was in charge in a manner not always explicit, but present in the number of confidences she invited and received, and in the influence she held over the fate of young people.

The Irish government’s referendum seeks only to establish what has already occurred, that is true. The Irish mother in the homestead, support for all around, is as ailing a figure of Irish life as is the Irish man in his place of work effortlessly constituting a lively social scene.

Yet, there is something so objectionable in the openness now with which they pursue their agenda, in the boldness with which they act to erase men and women as shameful vestiges of human history…

…and then to promote men and women as garish exhibits in the theme park societies carelessly under construction on the ruins of human cultures…

Ireland has just enjoyed its first ‘Brigid’s Day,’ a new government-santioned holiday for the Irish people and the first national holiday named in honour of a woman.

‘Brigid’s Day’ has been hailed as a triumph for women’s liberation – ‘sweet victory for all Mná,’ as it is described by the organisation ‘Herstory,’ which ran the campaign for it with the usual virtuous catch-cries.

Silent while the erasure of the women of Ireland seeks to be given official flourish, ‘Herstory’ busies itself by selling back to their bewildered counterparts a glossy and inherently submissive version of what they have lost, putting in the service of Irish women skills honed by their CEO in her previous career advertising ‘iconic global brands.’

Poor Brigid, whoever she was, shamelessly pushed forward to distract from the evisceration of Irish women, whose faithful lives are to be hidden forever as a grotesquely rebranded ‘matron-saint,’ ‘pan-European triple goddess’ girl-boss, arrives on the scene to solve their problems.

Poor Brigid, if ever she was, coopted to remind us that we must ‘strive for equality,’ that we must ‘heal our inner feminine and masculine,’ exhumed to give a virtue-wash to the enslavement of her people, whose characteristic flesh and blood and heart and soul are recast as helpless clusters of hormones and secretions and neurons and synapses, to be administered by experts and instructed to feel freed.

*

Almost my last sight before leaving Cork at the end of the Christmas holidays was of the outside of a shop on Prince’s Street, a shop called Love Lisa.

Under typically soft Irish rain stood a forlorn young woman, overseeing the operation of a type of roulette wheel, hastily assembled and already beginning its collapse, to be spun by those about the enter the shop so as to determine the percentage reduction they would enjoy on the price of their puchases.

If the man in the tollbooth still peddles the appearance of a market place, though the market is rigged and the price and product don’t tally, the woman at the roulette wheel commands, if you could call it ‘commands,’ a casino. You don’t pay. You play. And, of course, the house always wins.

The man’s tollbooth is surely unforgiving – grey steel clouded in fumes, the inhuman infrastructure of an inhuman system.

But the woman’s jaloppy wheel hardly stands up or spins round, a cardboard sop to the analogue world, carelessly washed in rainbow tones. The real infrasructure of the casino is clasped in her hand, as it is in the hands of all the young women who enter the shop – the smartphone, hosting the tools that allow you to play…

…and the tools that prevent you from playing.

Betting is advertised everywhere now, with a fervour exceeded only by the promotion of applications to stop you from betting: technocracy on speed, tripping over itself in its eagerness to apply its solutions to problems it can hardly be bothered anymore to invent.

The clothes in Love Lisa are cheap. But the percentage off is still meaningful. In the spectacularly engineered ‘cost of living crisis,’ a ten percent reduction on €13.98 is not insignificant to young women with few means.
In reduced economies, playing to win takes on hues of playing to survive – will we notice when the music stops, and it’s no longer for fun?

And when it’s no longer for fun – in queues outside supermarkets, trading our digital ID not for ‘rewards’ but for rations – what of those tools they are so keen for us to download, the applications to ‘help’ us ‘press pause’? When all the world’s a casino, you can’t afford to press pause on play.

But, for the moment at least, it’s still for fun at Love Lisa, where your ten percent reduction will win you one stretchy garment or another as worn by the young women in the shop’s posters, clothing cut to accentuate bottom and breasts and accessorized with plumped lips, talon nails and eyelases larger than life.

How contemptuous, their biologising of people: young women, remade as garish constellations of inflated sexual tissue, spending their last pennies on cartoon versions of their lowest common biology, even surgically undergoing their own satire.

*

In 1990, Ireland elected Mary Robinson as its first woman president. In her victory speech, she made reference to Mná na hÉireann – the women of Ireland – who ‘instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system.’

Almost all the women who heard Robinson’s speech that day had rocked a cradle in the past, would rock a cradle in the future, or were, at that very moment, rocking a cradle. We listened to the disdain of our woman champion, another globalist shill.

The women of Ireland do still rock cradles, though the birth rate is now below replacement – but they hardly know how to any longer. They are not supported to do it, as Article 41 of the Irish constitution pledges.

And, in between delegating the task to the usual institutions, they consult the usual guides – technocratic bibles – on mothering, parenting, weaning, toddlers, teething…, scrambling for expert advice on what they used to know.
As for rocking the system, the idea would be laughable if it were not the greatest of travesties.

Mná na hÉireann: consigned to playing a too-serious game for increasingly meagre crumbs of whatever crass solutions are advertised to them with the lazy hypberbole of a total regime; sublimating energies previously expended on things they knew how to do by remaking themselves in the image of one or other corporate mirage – sexed Lisa or saint Brigid, cheap or worthy, vulgar or virtuous.

It’s all the same when you’ve lost your way.

Sinéad Murphy is author of Effective History (2010), The Art Kettle (2012), and Zombie University (2017), and co-editor of Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns (2022).