Charles’s kingdom set to shrink: Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for first time.
The census results are another clear indication that historic change is happening across this island, and of the diversity of society which enriches us all. We can all be part of shaping a better future — a new constitutional future and a new Ireland.”
Paisley-Orange Protestantism may have died and so too, inexorably, will this fake nation. The “diversity” eulogised by John Finucane of woke Sinn Fein, however, will be far more spiritually destructive than The Troubles. That is already obvious in the Republic.
Ireland is a failure.
Just like Scotland.
Exactly nfa. Straight down the globalist Esg drain hole to the detriment of their own citizens that they don’t give a shit about.
You all voted for it now suck it up.
Ditto OZ
Maybe the Irish will have to move north.
My impression is that Dublin is increasingly of another faith entirely.
The concept that because there are Catholics in Northern Ireland in 2022 that they want to be part of the almost totally un–Catholic Irish Republic makes about as much sense as counting those Catholics in Northern Ireland as all Catholic because I bet, like here, the vast majority have never set foot in a church.
I still maintain that it was less about denomination and more about terrorism funded by Soviet agitators
That’s true, ar. I wrote an essay on that subject at Old Cat.
The more devout the Christians – Catholic OR Protestant – the more sceptical they are about being subsumed within the Republic and, ipso facto, the heathen-communist EU.
Many Catholics in the north want nothing whatsoever to do with Sinn Fein – which is now an ultra-woke party of urban luvvies.
It is a nuanced situation.
However, a growing ‘Catholic’ majority is thought by many commentators to presage an eventual disintegration of even that coalition of sceptics.
Bringing a whole new meaning to the historical term, “Black Irish”.
There’s another, mostly peaceful, religion in Ireland these days. Long gone are the days of the ginger school kids.
In a sense, Northern Ireland has never been really been part of the UK. The best option would have been unity with Britain getting a 30-year lease on the ports including a naval base on the West coast. The present situation proves that there was never any need for violence.
I must admit that it wouldn’t surprise me if those sadistic psychopaths that control the IRA now claim credit for the catholic birthrate.
I confess to being a catholic from the Falls Road. It was there, as a child, I had the happiest days of my life surrounded by a small army of musically gifted relatives. Even though I am now a very old man none of those memories have faded or ever will.
Thanks, Gerry. The Falls Road must have been a tight-knit community. I hope you’ve shared those memories with family.
It’s ironic that Catholics and Protestants ended up in the same situation vis-a-vis an external power whose intention is to dilute and destroy their culture.
How do you see the Republic these days? It comes across as a bit Year Zero – manic about obliterating the past.
It’s the way of the world, C.L., that people die and families disperse as when children grow up and marry, even the street I used to play in has been demolished. That was not a bad thing considering the state of the housing. I was particularly close to my cousin Kathleen. She is now 84 and lives in Birmingham. I ring her up occasionally for a chat. Unfortunately, the day will come when there will be no one to pick up the phone.
Regarding the Republic, none of the people I knew as a young man would recognise the place. It is no longer Ireland. The unthinkable happened because there was little resistance to the cancerous left, origins of which are to be found in corrupt universities. The same insidious process is happening in Australia.
Without wishing to cause offense, which some people will find hard to believe, Australia’s right has done a ghastly job. You cannot defeat the left without directly confronting it. For that tactic to succeed you have to be prepared to recruit and support everyone who is able and willing to do the job, whether you like them or not. Aggression pays dividends. Any other approach is a recipe for defeat. And, unlike the US, defeat is what is facing us right now.
I think the last man who really understood that organisational key to success was Bob Santamaria. After seeing off the communists from the trade unions, he switched attention in the 1970s to what was happening in culture – especially in schools and universities. He was right. Everything that has happened subsequent to his retirement and death proves it. His great talents were spotted as a young man by Daniel Mannix, the country’s greatest ever churchman.
As for the “Australian right,” I don’t think there is one, really.
Santamaria did excellent work, apart from his dreadful economics. Anybody who was around in the sixties who debated lefties and wasn’t smoking weed knew that something not quite right was taking root. That thing has now grown into a full scale assault on our civilisation.
I understand what you mean about our so-called right. However, I see the right as a small group of ineffectual self-professed conservatives occupying places in certain magazines, newspapers and ‘think tanks’ whose principal aim is to ensure that no other voices are heard. Why else do we seem to see the same faces year in and year out? The same goes for economics, They refer to Hayek but not one has read Hayek on economics. Not one read Mises on central planning. Mention Austrian economics and you cease to exist. And don’t get me started on economic history.
As far as I’m concerned, the left couldn’t ask for better allies.
I’ve always wondered why Hayek in particular wasn’t considered companionable to Catholic economists. A market order inhering in nature is elegantly consonant not merely with evolutionary science but also Christian anthropology.
The Acton Institute in the US has been fighting this good fight but in Australia the ‘social teaching’ tradition of Leo XIII and his successors has predominated. Santamaria was more at home in this school of thought than anything remotely Hayekian.*
‘Social justice’ economics, of course, ends up being Beveridge/Keynes/Whitlam interventionism with a splash of Jesus-was-nice.
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* To be fair, though, his allegedly Luddite/autarkic view of industry and trade doesn’t look quite as silly right now as it did in the 80s and 90s.
Virtually all Catholic economists are Keynesians.
With respect to Catholicism and economics one should look to the School of Salamanca, sometimes referred to as the Spanish scholastics, the teachings of which are strongly free market, the very opposite of what Santamaria preached. I challenged the man on several occasions to defend his economics. Peter Westmore told me in person that Santamaria had no intention of stepping into the ring with me.
So-called social justice is a dangerous fiction as is distributive justice, environmental justice and any other kind of ‘justice’ leftists conjure up. Justice is commutative. Full stop.
Although Hayek is in the Austrian School his economics, in my opinion, were for some time vitiated by Friedrich von Wieser’s influence. He blundered badly in his 1932 exchange with Piero Sraffa, a blunder caused, I think, by the fact that he chose the productivity theory of interest as against Böhm-Bawerk’s pure time preference theory. Nevertheless, I think he won it in essence. He inadvertently muddied the debate on central planning in such a way that for some time socialists were able to claim success. Even today we get so-called conservative economists repeating Hayek’s Wieserian error. His approach to the trade cycle is such that critics used it to discredit Austrian trade cycle theory.
I don’t want to be too hard on Hayek. Economists in the Austrian school dismally failed to refute Sraffa’s appalling 1960 book the Production Of Commodities By Means Of Commodities. The whole thing was an indirect attack on Böhm-Bawerk’s production structure analysis approach by way of the fallacious reswitching concept. The attack was so effective that Austrians agreed that it was theoretically possible. Time and time again one encounters a blogger parroting the belief that reswitching refutes Austrianism. Yet a proper reading of Böhm-Bawerk’s three volume work will reveal that it demolishes Sraffa’s regressive economics.