The New IRA, Irish Migrants, and the Breakdown of Social Compacts

You’ve probably seen the report over the weekend where the current iteration of the Irish Republican Army, the old Catholic militia/terror group from the long-running sectarian war in Northern Ireland and elsewhere in the previous century, has now given itself a new purpose…

Republican terrorists are plotting a campaign of violence to force migrants out of Ireland, intelligence officials have told The Mail on Sunday.

The plan by the New IRA — the successor organisation to the Real IRA — comes in the wake of the disturbances on the streets of Northern Ireland in June following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, allegedly by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum-seeker.

Security sources say that the dissident republicans, who continue to fight for a ‘united Ireland’, are feeding off local community tensions on both sides of the border over a spike in cases of harassment, sexual assault and violence, which has been blamed on migrants.

Fears have been raised that the New IRA campaign could spark a new wave of migrants fleeing from Ireland into the UK, particularly via the land border with Northern Ireland.

In a video posted last week on a far-Right social media platform, an unidentified man warned that the IRA would threaten migrants with violence if they did not leave Ireland. ‘They will take control, and they will give an ultimatum, not to politicians but to the illegal migrants who are in the country,’ he says.

Claiming that the British Army ‘respected’ the IRA during the Troubles for their professionalism and efficiency, the man adds: ‘It is now going to be time for civil war, and that is exactly what these guys are going to be doing — and can you blame them? This will be a major wake-up call for the authorities. These guys will show them how it’s done and give them 24 hours to leave.’

The Real IRA was formed in 1997 by disaffected members of the Provisional IRA, becoming the New IRA when it merged in 2012 with the vigilante group Republican Action Against Drugs.

Is this in any way a positive development? I wouldn’t say so. I would instead call it an inevitable development, because there is a not-small percentage of the Irish people who have had it with the wholesale importation of unassimilable foreigners from alien, if not hostile, cultures. Given the 200 years of Irish outmigration to North America and Australia, among other places, it isn’t like that country can withstand much of a mass in-migration without losing its culture and politics. And given how seriously the Irish take both, and given that Irish politics does carry a whiff of violence to it, I don’t know how anybody can be surprised by the idea that the IRA would resurface as an anti-migrant group attempting to squeeze the foreigners off the Emerald Isle. (RELATED: Belfast Is Burning, and the Media Won’t Say Why)

But this brings back something I’m noticing again and again, and particularly in the context of domestic American politics.

The thing to understand about the IRA is that it isn’t really signatory to much of the social compact people in Ireland and the U.K. have bought into, in the sense that you aren’t supposed to use violence to reach political or policy goals you might have. As we’ve settled on in the West, those should be brought about through means of a legal system, or through little-d democratic political process, for example. The IRA came about through the rise of people who weren’t happy with the results of politics and law to solve problems and decided to see whether bombings or assassinations would bring a more definitive outcome.

That didn’t particularly work for them, but then again it might be that the goal was too ambitious. If you’re a Protestant in Belfast, are you really going to be OK allowing the Catholics who are shooting at you to take over your town? Probably not.

But if the goal isn’t to kick Irish Protestants out of Ireland but rather to squeeze out decidedly non-Irish people — Bangladeshis or Ugandans, for example — you might find more support for such an endeavor. At least until you do something so horrific in pursuit of that goal that it turns the public wholeheartedly against not just you but the side you’re espousing.

But here’s the problem: to enforce a social compact, you have to actually have one.

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One of the benefits of the modern Western social compact is that, done correctly, it allows people to come to a sober, reasoned consensus about certain issues having vetted the sides through honest debate and full, transparent examinations of the facts. This is certainly better than allowing the New IRA to slaughter migrants in the streets of Dublin and Limerick until they all decide to go home.

Assuming having the Third World go home from Ireland is the preferred outcome for most of the Irish, which might or might not be the case. The Irish did elect the terrible governments which have inflicted the current migration levels on that country, after all, though we’re told time and again that the Irish never voted to be swamped by foreigners. It’s not an impossible bet, after all, that most would agree to take in Afghans and Somalis in the tens of thousands if only they could make Rosie O’Donnell leave.

But here’s the problem: to enforce a social compact, you have to actually have one. And in Ireland and elsewhere in the West, we’ve allowed the definitions of that compact to become extremely fuzzy.

We spent four years under the Biden administration in this country with a federal government which openly refused to enforce our immigration laws when not perverting them by giving Temporary Protected Status and political asylum to people who certainly didn’t qualify for it, and as many as 25 million people came here uninvited as a result. (RELATED: One Way or Another: The Insanely Easy Choice Facing America on Immigration)

I sat there watching the dumb social-media debate over “$20 burritos” last week, recognizing a bit of truth on both sides, but what struck me is that if you spike your population by six or seven percent in four years and then you’re somehow surprised at how much everything costs, you might not have done a complete analysis.

This is an example of a frayed social compact.

We didn’t have a national debate over whether we should take all those people in. Nor did we get a consensus on the framing of such a debate. Instead, the migrants and their enablers did to us what the New IRA is proposing to do to the Irish immigration question — use means outside the social compact to reconstitute the facts on the ground, and then negotiate for alterations to the social compact based on the new reality they’ve imposed.

One word for this is villainy. Another word is warfare.

And once you’re in the realm of warfare rather than criminality — and the New IRA’s threats of terrorism to drive migrants out of Ireland can’t be adequately contained in the “criminality” box — it’s a different analysis, isn’t it?

You would assume, if the New IRA is going to start bombing migrant hotels or slaughtering foreigners on the streets, that the Irish government is going to do more than simply arrest people and put them through the courts. I imagine they’ll try to do that, but if they’re serious about stopping a full-on terror campaign, if that’s what’s coming, it’s going to mean soldiers on the streets as we saw in Belfast back in the day. It’s going to mean occupation.

Because Ireland’s government might well have been wrong to bring the migrants in, but any regime is going to fight for its own survival, and it probably should. Particularly if its leaders were elected.

What means are taken to ensure that survival, though, could make this analysis very complicated.

This question is the kind of thing you get a whole lot of when you monkey around with the social compact. Immigration is simply a glaringly obvious manifestation of those problems. And we’ve seen 60-years-plus in this country of just these kinds of shenanigans. If I had the space and you had the time, I could tie this into the mess at the WNBA, the Trump administration’s attacks on those drug boats, Cuban influence in American politics, which is manifesting itself within the Democrat Party… lots of things. It’s all related, if you consider that you’re trying to maintain a social compact when there are significant numbers of people who simply don’t buy in and won’t pull their weight to keep it going. (RELATED: When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers)

If they’re not actively trying to bring down the society altogether.

Once that happens, you tend to find that the institutions built to support that social compact start to break down. They’ve definitely begun breaking down in Ireland.

So far, the New IRA hasn’t started bombing mosques or migrant hotels. Other than a few buses getting torched a couple of months ago, most of the above is still theoretical. But it doesn’t take much of a leap from here before we see things come apart.