The colonisation, decolonisation, and recolonisation of Ireland
1. Colonisation
‘Strategies about how best to turn conquest into profit, to marshal, mobilise and control natural resources, especially land and labour, varied from empire to empire but the often grim reality of everyday life did not change and provoked a wide variety of responses ranging from acceptance, accommodation, assimilation and innovation, to resistance, rebellion and deadly colonial wars.’ [1]
I had a pretty standard upbringing for a child growing up in my part of the world – the North of Ireland. I was brought up by two working-class parents, who, through upward mobility, raised us in a fairly dull, but comfortable, middle-class milieu. I passed through all stages of school, from crèche through primary to grammar, where I sat dutifully facing the teacher absorbing all the prescribed rote they fed to us. Occasionally the school would receive a visit from some thrilling working adults, like firemen, who’d arrive in their truck, and if we were lucky we got to sit up front in the cab. Or maybe the police, who’d come to talk to us about something pertinent to children our age, like bicycle and road safety, or something equally trivial.
I was raised Catholic, which meant weekly visits to church, communion, and that other abomination, the confessional booth. At around thirteen or fourteen my parents opened a savings account for me in the building society, and every week would deposit five pounds, and if I’d done a little work and earned a few quid, I would hand it over to the teller, and every few months was delighted to see some interest (free money!) accrue there.
I remember every evening after I’d finish my homework we would have dinner, and after dinner my parents would make a cup of tea and turn on the news to see what was happening, both in our city and in the wider world. Growing up in Belfast at that time, the news was often dominated by stories of bombings or shootings, and while I was familiar with organisations like the IRA and the UVF, I didn’t understand their import except on a superficial level.
All of this I now understand, looking back at it as I close in on fifty years, was a very subtle, brilliant, and insidious form of ideological conditioning into what Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’[2].
Ireland (and I’m talking here about the island as a whole) is not naturally a part of Europe, nor was it ever naturally a part of what was once called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Ireland, up until very recently in its history, could be considered part of what we now call the Global South. The island was not developed, even if it did have rather complex social structures. It was tribal in nature and governed mostly by petty kings who measured wealth and status in gold and cattle, and even well into the 1800s the island survived on mostly an agricultural economy. Compare it to ‘modern’ Ireland where the biggest companies (and employers) on the island are Google and Meta, Pfizer, KPMG, Blackrock, Apple, Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson – all the big names of a creeping corporatocracy.
How did it come to be so? How was Ireland, over the course of around three hundred years, turned from an agrarian economy with a fierce and determined nationalist resistance into a staunch and loyal outpost of Global Gangster Capitalism?
Very simple: The British Empire, having its hooks in the country for some three hundred years, retreated, but left the architecture of empire behind. The soldiers packed up and departed, but we were left with the conditioning imposed on us over centuries.
3. Recolonisation
“The Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.”
Yiannis Varoufakis
Incredible as it may seem, Ireland is currently undergoing a process of recolonisation. In fact (and I’m not savvy enough to say for sure, but) that process may well have come to maturation.
Ireland is (and has been since the early 2000s) a tax haven for multinational (read ‘a-national’) corporations. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is ridiculously low, therefore Dublin is the go-to city if an American corporation wants to plop down a headquarters so it can evade paying taxes in the US. Aside from those companies listed above, other US corporations headquartered in Dublin include AirBNB, X, Amazon, IBM, Intel, Adobe and eBay. The list is huge. And this is by no means a matter of shame for Ireland’s political establishment. In fact, the message is: ‘Come on in. We’re open for business’. Even if that business is deleterious to the country as a whole.
Where Ireland’s love affair with global predatory capitalism is most dangerous is perhaps its relationship with the vulture funds that are fast taking control of its land and property resources. Blackstone holds one of Ireland’s biggest property portfolios. Blackstone is a company whose main investors include the unholy trinity of Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, as well as their subsidiaries. The effect of international vulture funds on the domestic housing market cannot be understated; these companies are making it difficult, sometimes impossible, for Irish families to put a roof over their head. A 2021 report by the Irish Independent stated that:
‘Freedom of Information requests reveal that throughout the 2010s there were dozens of meetings between the Department of Finance and representatives of international property funds and after that you get this sequence of investment funds that are declaring quite high profits in the Irish market with very low taxes.
Effectively you can legally separate a parent company from a secondary company. The secondary company buys the property, makes the profit, and pays interest to the parent declaring the interest as a cost and then uses that as a deduction. They then began to partner with existing developers in Ireland and on many occasions they held onto the land because they wanted to artificially increase prices, what they effectively did was hold back supply in the State.’
It can’t be overstated how frightening this should be to the Irish, who, due to artificially created market conditions, are being reduced in their own country to dependence on a rentier class. Those who know their history will see parallels with British occupied Ireland, when 8 million acres of Irish land were forcibly transferred from Irish to British hands, and the native Irish became a tenant population on their own land. The only difference this time is that the colonising force is an a-national island of floating capital, which can merely be positioned over Ireland in order to suck up all its resources, that capital then secreted into the undisclosed coffers of the vulture funds.
2. Decolonisation
“If you remove the English Army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”
James Connolly
Ireland never decolonised.
First time round, even after the British had left, Ireland remained subservient. The enemy packed up their bags, yes, but as Connolly warned, they left the architecture of empire in place, which meant that Ireland continued to be a willing servant of, through ‘acceptance, accommodation, and assimilation’, the British capitalist system. All of that architecture – the education system, the economic and financial systems, the prison system and the judiciary, the political system, the social and cultural conditioning, the psychological conditioning – remained, meaning that to this day, Ireland has never been architect of its own destiny.
Ireland is walking into a new nightmare at the hands of a gangster capitalist elite, of which the country’s political system is a merely a pawn, and the reason it is happening so easily is that Ireland’s population is still captive to its former colonisation, even one hundred years after the colonisers left the country.
It is time to wake up out of the long captivity.
[1] https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2023/how-ireland-served-as-a-laboratory-for-the-british-empire/
[2] https://psi412.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Althusser,%20Ideology%20and%20Ideological%20State%20Appartuses(1).pdf