If you needed proof of what an infantilised, frivolous country Ireland has become, one which repeatedly gets hysterical about the wrong issues, the Mary O'Rourke affair provides it. For if the stalwarts of Fianna Fáil are so infected - as the nervous-nelly reaction to the O'Rourke remarks about "working like blacks" among party delegates showed - it is profoundly worrying, writes Kevin Myers
Fianna Fáil was founded by a man who asked the primary questions of any political state. Eamon de Valera might not have been right in his answers, but the questions were spot-on. What is the future of Ireland, of the Irish people as people and their culture as culture? Moreover, he was an adherent of a phenomenally confident and visionary Irish church, one which - as Mary Kenny's brilliant, and extraordinarily prescient Goodbye to Catholic Ireland shows - actually believed it could convert the world to the one true faith.
Nowadays, we are a state with almost no faith and no vision. Instead, we get angry - almost every week - about non-issues, the primary purpose of which is apparently to satisfy our own demented desire to win a morality race in which we are the only competitors. This is merely a Hibernian form of the European-wide, EU-sponsored, self-hating political secularism, for which the US is partly responsible.
For US gold, US guns and US generosity protected Europe - and Ireland - from communist tyranny for half a century, thereby absolving us all from asking the questions which should preoccupy all mature peoples. How do we defend ourselves now? And how do we ensure our own survival in the future? Instead, the EU created an effete and morally phoney ethos, with "free" medical health, abortion, gay rights, early retirement, paternity leave and lesbian adoption as the primary characteristics of our civilisation. Meanwhile, amid the welter of welfarism, labour laws and 35-hour working weeks, native European birth-rates plummeted.
In Ireland a particularly virulent cultural hybrid took root, combining chronic European dependency with Ireland's single contribution to 20th-century political thought: ideological neutralism, the concept that if you have no army, air force or navy, no one will attack you. (Tibet tried the same experiment, and not having the Yanks to protect it, look what happened.) Our desperate defensive stratagem of 1939 became elevated into a defining national virtue, which of course entitled us to scold our protectors about the immorality of their weaponry.
This Hibernian hybrid has recently mutated into a post-Catholic and venomously politically correct state, supervised by a self-appointed liberal priesthood. These secular clerics have recently created a hierarchy of language licence. Thus Pat Rabbitte's recent remarks about immigration, if they had been uttered in this space, would certainly have prompted his posturing, preening colleague Michael D. Higgins to denounce me for "racism".
This same hierarchy of licence caused the National Refugee Council to exonerate Mary O'Rourke - herself no slouch at joining in our weekly condemnation-circuses - because she had previously been sympathetic to what it called "refugees". (In reality, most of that self-proclaimed species are, as we know, economic migrants.) Thus the rules: left and pro-immigrant groups have freedom of speech, plus permission to blunder, but sceptics and conservatives have not.
Our PC priests are supported by an informal but potent thought police in the print and broadcast media, the NUJ, journalism schools and university campuses, all dedicated to enforcing the doctrinal agenda of our new, sinisterly frivolous liberal hierarchy.
This hierarchy wants us to focus on multiculturalism, queer studies, equality in the workplace, a woman's right to choose, and so forth. Its censors seek to prevent us dwelling on far larger issues, such as the one which Mark Steyn raised recently in the Wall Street Journal - namely, rapidly shifting global demographics. In 1970, he reported, developed countries had twice as big a share of the global population as did the Muslim world: 30 per cent to 15 per cent. By 2000, they were the same - each had about 20 per cent: equality in just 35 years.
Much of this Muslim increase has actually taken place in Europe, which has accepted at least 20 million Muslim immigrants. And if you thought those immigrants had integrated, think again. Opinion polls have found variously that 60 per cent of British Muslims want Shariah law in Britain, 40 per cent support al-Qaeda, and 27 per cent actually approved of the attacks on the Twin Towers. So which do you prefer: 100,000 immigrants from Catholic Poland, or 100,000 immigrants from Muslim Algeria? You didn't like that question, no? Well, that's the point about the big questions. They make us feel uncomfortable, and the thought police would definitely prefer we didn't ask them, and instead deal with trivial matters, especially if they're anti-American ones, which make us feel so morally superior.
So, do our political classes worry about a coalition defeat in Iraq, the major issue in world politics today? No they don't. Instead, they fret about the relatively minor issue of rendition through Shannon - backed, of course, by those sanctimonious fools in the Council of Europe. But what was the burning issue for de Valera in 1944? The conditions of German POWs being rendered to Canada? Or the Allied slog to the Rhine? Don't say, "The German POWs weren't passing through Irish ports". That's finicky point-scoring - another characteristic of the smug and egotistical mass debating that passes for public dialogue in Ireland. What really counts is the result: that's what we should be looking at, not the process.
Instead, we prefer moral superiority to moral outcome. We play word-games, and some Islamists play world-games. That's the difference. Over time, it could be a fatal one.