Saw this - so true 💔 - 'I lifted this from X because he articulates very well the type of smug bastard who have the country ruined.'
March 18th
I had an argument with one of them. A D4 centrist dad type, middle-aged, comfortable, utterly convinced of his own brilliance. The type of man who reads The Irish Times every morning, listens to RTÉ without question, and considers himself deeply informed, deeply moral, deeply superior to the unwashed masses who haven’t yet evolved to his level of enlightenment.
We got onto immigration—because, of course, we did. Because you can’t talk about Ireland now without talking about it. And when I told him what was happening, the scale of it, the numbers, the transformation of entire towns in just a few short years, he waved his hand dismissively, barely listening, already certain of his response. Ireland has always been a mix of immigrants, he said, that smug, tired line that every one of them repeats as if it’s some great intellectual insight. Look at the plantations.
I told him the plantations were tiny compared to what’s happening now. That they took place over a century, that what’s happening now is happening in one generation. That in absolute numbers, in percentage of population, in speed, in scale, there is no historical comparison. He refused to believe it. Simply refused. Not because he had any counterargument, but because if he accepted it, he would have to start asking questions that he wasn’t prepared to ask.
And then came the next part, the inevitable next move in the script. Immigration has been a good thing for Ireland. I told him, fine, in some cases, yes, but that’s not the whole picture. I told him the benefits have not been evenly spread. I told him people like him—people sitting comfortably in D4, far from the consequences—get the benefits, while the working-class Irish get the costs. He smirked. He smirked. Because of course he did. Because for him, it’s an abstract discussion, an exercise in moral posturing. Because for him, the housing crisis is a statistic, not his child struggling to find a home. Because for him, the overcrowded hospital is a headline, not his mother waiting 24 hours on a trolley.
And then the moment of revelation. The part where the mask slips completely. What does it matter if the Irish become a minority? He said it casually, like it was self-evident, like I was the fool for even raising it. The new Irish are as Irish as you or me, he said, with that same smirk, that same unshakeable confidence that he was on the right side of history.
And that’s when I knew. You cannot reach people like this. They are too far gone. Too invested in the lie. Too cushioned from the consequences. Too arrogant to imagine they could ever be wrong. These are the same people who cheered on the Celtic Tiger, who believed Bertie when he told those warning of disaster to go commit suicide. The same people who dismissed the housing crisis as hysteria—until their own children couldn’t afford to live in Dublin. And the funny thing? When this all blows up, when the crisis becomes undeniable, when the country spirals into something they can no longer explain away, they will pretend they never supported it. They will pretend they were always ‘concerned.’ That they were always ‘pragmatic.’ They will act as if they saw it coming all along.
And they won’t suffer for it. They’ll still be sitting in D4, untouched, unscathed, while the rest of us—who fought, who warned, who resisted—pay the price.
I walked away from that conversation knowing that there is no point arguing with these people. They are lost. The only thing left to do is outlast them. Because reality is coming, whether they like it or not. And when the reckoning arrives, when the country they smirked at collapses under the weight of their delusions, we will be there to remind them.
