A Nation Is a People

The National Idea

Our guiding principle is the National Idea. The idea that everything depends firstly on the existence of the Irish nation and that all economic, cultural and social considerations should be subordinate. In other words, before we consider the welfare of the Irish people, there has to be an Irish people.

The Irish People

The Irish people are the nation. When we speak of nations, we refer to a broadly homogeneous people who share a history, heritage and systems of meaning, united by bonds of kinship, culture and the claim to a spiritual homeland. A people capable of seeing themselves as a people, conscious in other words of their own national existence and willing to defend it.

The Ties that Bind

We believe that a society must be capable of organising for its own defence, well-being and survival and that this requires a high level of natural solidarity. The strongest forms of solidarity are those of kith and kin. As such, the National Party recognises the basis of Irish society as the family, the parish and the nation. Without these bonds, there is no starting point, either for a cultural revival or an economic revival.

By Their Works, We Will Know Them

Institutions or bodies attempting to undermine that solidarity, or make that solidarity impossible, must be called out for what they are. Those who seek to dissolve the bonds of an Irish nationality must not be permitted to hide behind words like Diversity, Inclusion or International Rights. Neither must they be allowed to drape themselves in Republicanism, Nationalism or even Christianity. These are no Irish patriots or Irish statesmen. Those who cheer the loudest for a post-Irish Ireland must be exposed for the knaves and deceivers they are.

The National Spirit

By putting people in contact with their past, nationalism seeks to instil a sense of collective trial and orientate a people meaningfully towards the future. The identification with past and future generations, invests a society with a basic communitarian ethos. A people who see themselves as a whole, are more likely to sacrifice for that whole. And for the greater good of a given society. They are less likely to sacrifice for a society in which they have become mere tourists.

Sacrificing for the Future

The test of any society is the willingness of its citizenry to sacrifice for the future. The willingness to defer short term interests in order to secure long term goals. Above all else to have families and in doing so to create natural supports outside the crude mechanisms of the state. A country which is no longer willing or interested in making these sacrifices is a transient place. Nothing about it will last. It has no roots, no memory and no future.

The countries of Western Europe are outsourcing these responsibilities to foreigners. And they are importing still more foreigners to prop up the pensions, nursing homes and retirement plans they will need, because the less you sacrifice in the present the more it costs you in the future. Finally, this is unsustainable.

These immigrants have their own nationalities which they bring with them and it is for these nationalities and interests that they will sacrifice. The national impulse is the impulse to survive, to preserve, to pass on. The liberal mindset is to sacrifice the future for the present. The National Party would sacrifice the present for the future.

Ireland Is a Mother-Country

Ireland is a Mother-Country. It is the well-spring of a people and a culture. All nationality draws water from the past. And all nationalists stand sentinel against the destruction of that holy well.

The only guarantee to nationhood is the jurisdiction and claim over the national territory by a nationality of people. The burden of each generation is to secure or renew that claim, by homage, by sacrifice and by struggle.

The territory is not simply a landmass or a geographical location, not merely twenty-six counties or thirty-two counties, not merely the islands and territorial waters. It is the physical and spiritual existence of the Irish people themselves. It is also the Irish language and cultural inheritance. Physically, spiritually, morally, culturally, linguistically it is the ground upon which we stand. The goal must be to occupy as much of that ground as possible.

For every problem that Ireland faces, there is a national answer

Obstacles to National Unity

Neither the union with Britain, nor an independent Northern Ireland, are viable long-term options. Geopolitics, demographics or some combination of the two will one day force the issue or at least the question. For the moment, the existence of Sinn Féin as a political force makes the possibility of a successful referendum on the issue, highly unlikely. And even if such a referendum were to pass by a hair’s breadth, that would not secure peace. It would simply redraw the lines on a new era of political violence.

Administratively, the whole island would be at the mercy of whatever Europhile, left-liberal coalition emerged, whether an anti-nationalist Sinn Féin controlled government or a new centrist globalist combination. We would remain a compliant province of the European Superstate, perhaps subdivided into smaller administrative zones. The factors of mass-immigration and rampant neoliberalism would continue regardless.

Lacking a viable nationalist alternative, the whole exercise would be disastrous. We would soon find that a United Ireland meant little in a world without national borders. Far from a sovereign nation, we would be one drafty little island in which nobody had very much in common. And the bombs would be still going off.

National Unity

The National Party is committed to an All-Ireland nationalist government. This will be achieved through pragmatism and common sense, not through schismatic dogma or further bloodshed. We respect all genuine patriots who have struggled for Ireland in peace and in war. But the cause of Irish nationalism has lost its way.

Under a National Party government, a Constitutional Republic shall be enacted founded on natural rights and responsibilities. These rights and responsibilities will not be subject to the whims of international jurisdictions. They will be Irish laws for Irish people. Irish rights for Irish people. For only a people know best how to govern themselves.

We recognise the existence of a Protestant community in the Six-Counties. We recognise their claim to an ethnic and cultural tradition. We believe that a national government which respects the concept of ethnicity and tradition stands the best chance of accommodating the Northern divisions. No mainstream liberal party can achieve this. Only the National Party.

The European Superstate

There is no immediate prospect of Ireland leaving the European Union by popular vote. If we do leave, it may well be the consequence of larger outside forces, the ongoing ramifications of Brexit for example. So it may not be the nationalists who take us out of the Union, but a schism within the anti-nationalists. As such, we do not view Brexit as a template that can simply be repackaged in an Irish context. The Irish situation is far more complicated.

With this in mind, the National Party intends to take a pragmatic and realistic approach towards the European Union. This approach may change over time, but our guiding principles will not. We are a Eurosceptic Party. We will fight, by whatever means available, to regain those national rights which have been undermined.

In the short term, we will advocate an adversarial approach on behalf of Irish national interests, similar to what countries like Poland and Hungary have done in response to the migrant crisis. If it is possible, we will work towards the creation of a nationalist bloc. But if we cannot achieve our aims within the European Union then we will leave.

Two Unions

Facts of Life. We can’t trust the European Union. We can’t trust the British. We can’t trust the Irish government. In order to conduct a successful and immediate withdrawal from the European Union, for example, we would need to be able to trust all three of them.

These three thorns need to be removed and probably in the reverse order.

Real nationalists must get into government across the 32 counties. In Dáil Éireann we must interpose through the Supreme Court on behalf of the Irish nation to nullify any European Union law that stands in the way of Irish national assertion. We must bring about Irish unity by recognising the ethnic tribal nature of the Northern conflict and negotiate this tribalism for what it is, rather than the current strategy of diluting all Irish identity through liberalism. We must create a strong and united country capable of standing on its own two feet, resilient enough to throw off the shackles of both Unions. But above all we must internalise, as a people, the belief that we are sovereign and worthy of ruling ourselves. For only then will we succeed.

Irish Economic Sovereignty

As it stands, the twenty-six county state is among the most indebted economies on the planet. The gross sovereign debt of Ireland on the 30th November 2016 was denominated at €195.08 billion. This so called national debt is really the debt contracted by the current and previous government’s ineptitude.

Our politicians fixate on bogus Debt/ GDP ratios and promise us that the debt can be incrementally repaid. But this is largely an illusion. What happens when we cannot meet the bogus targets? One year’s slip and a decade of austerity measures will be wiped away in an instant. It will have been for nothing. A contracted Irish economy seeking to climb out of such indebtedness on medium range economic growth, would find it mathematically impossible to do so.

The hollowing out of the national infrastructure, the fire sale of national assets, the enslavement of Irish citizens to international banking cartels, is the most vivid illustration of globalised capitalism undermining national sovereignty.

There is no greater threat to the existence of an Irish people, or to any people, than the opening up and then carving up of national economies for the benefit of international speculators. Only by the achievement of fiscal autonomy, by unilateral withdrawal from the Euro zone, and a radical resolution to the current debt crisis, can the future of Ireland be secured.

National Identity and Mass-Immigration

The movement of cheap labour is another key feature of the globalised economy and a major factor in the erasure of national communities. Replacement-level immigration of the type we currently experience is destabilising to the very concept of nationality. Both the scale of the influx and the “diversity” of cultures make assimilation impossible. The first casualty in this process is our very sense of who we are, our confidence and our willingness to define ourselves.

As nationalists we must present a positive definition of nationalism. We must reject rigid caricatures. We must emphasise the organic and the contingent in a fluid and living nation. We must be realistic as well as idealistic. At the same time we must not allow traitors to define the boundaries of Irish nationhood.

To say that a nation is fluid is not to say that it is arbitrary, or that it does not exist. Nor does it mean that it cannot be destroyed. Any culture or any system or any environment can be overwhelmed from without. Indeed Irish history is replete with such examples and such attempts. Occasions where an Irish culture held fast and integrated invading peoples. Occasions where it failed and was all but wiped out

What comes down to us from the past is the wreckage of an Irish nation which the nationalists of one hundred years previous attempted to re-forge. They understood that nationalism almost always contains the idea of rebirth. Rebirth of meaning, rebirth of destiny, just so long as a thread connecting us to the past remains.

An Irish Future for an Irish People

A Return to Dev’s Ireland?

Our politicians, our business leaders, our journalists, our academics all present us with a false choice and they call it freedom. But we reject the fake binary that pits “Modern Progressive Ireland” against “Backward Parochial Ireland.” Neither of these failed visions fulfils the objectives of the National Idea. Those who would deny us liberty have created a false past and a false present. We instead choose a future of our making.

National Rebirth

As long as there is an Irish people, confident in asserting their own claim to belonging, then a national rebirth is possible. But once it is no longer possible to see ourselves as a people, the prospect and the hope of revival will have been quenched forever. Nationalism is the ground upon which we stand and its soil is sacred. It is the basis of everything we do and have and hope for. There can be no higher spiritual ideal than the Irish nation.

The Alternative to the National Idea

What we have sketched above is a worldview grounded in a respect for natural law and consequently grounded in a plausible account of human nature. We have advocated the strengthening of organic social structures; family, parish, nation. And the creation of a nationalist state to protect and correct for those. This is distinct from extreme forms of socialism where, having destroyed all natural structures, one must regulate all life in its minutiae.

The alternative to an organic society (that is to say, one based on natural functional units such as family, parish and nation) is the paranoid liberal police state, to which we are slowly becoming accustomed. It is an artificial society; an anti-social socialism, an anti-human humanism, a negation of the human spirit.

Everywhere we look the natural ties which bind society together are loosening. In their place, clumsy state mechanisms are substituted. We are all becoming customers of the state. No longer countrymen or even citizens. And the state, such as it is, is now merely a franchise of globalised capitalism. We do not have politicians. We do not have civil servants. We do not have journalists. Instead we have brand representatives.

Beyond Liberal Ireland

The Irish today know many shackles. But the most dangerous of these are the ones we have been taught to accept and be grateful for. The shackles we have taken for freedom. We are encouraged to embrace a definition of freedom which is now merely openness and faux-liberty. And as the opening of our economy has enslaved us to a crippling debt, so will the fashionable liberalism of “post-national” Ireland, leave us spiritually bankrupt.