{"id":80944,"date":"2025-09-23T12:11:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T12:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/80944\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T12:11:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T12:11:06","slug":"perrins-ireland-where-the-establishment-are-extremist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/80944\/","title":{"rendered":"PERRINS: Ireland, where the establishment are extremist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Kirk\u2019s memorial service was what I would call, big, beautiful and brash.<\/strong> It was not your average funeral mass or month\u2019s anniversary mass you\u2019d get down at St Peter and St Paul\u2019s Church, that\u2019s for sure. It was Americana in full swing. It was very religious, very Christian and at times political.<\/p>\n

Tens of millions of people around the world watched the service, or clips from it. Almost two hundred thousand people attended in person in Phoenix, with 90,000 in the stadium.<\/p>\n

And for some people in Ireland it was seriously triggering.<\/p>\n

Take Maynooth University\u2019s Jean Monnet Professor of European Politics, John O\u2019Brennan, who tweeted the following about the event: \u201cA modern version of the Nuremberg rally \u2013 a festival of hatred and divisiveness masquerading as American patriotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of another set of videos, he thought, \u201cAmerica\u2019s Nuremberg Rally. Almost like we were living in 1935. Extremism worshipped like a religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ordinary Americans came to that memorial service in their thousands. They wanted to remember a young man, Charlie Kirk, 31 years of age, a husband and father to two young children who was brutally shot in public on campus for the sin of debating. They prayed, they sang and they mourned.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not what John O\u2019Brennan saw. He saw a Nuremberg rally, continuing on the dangerous Nazi comparisons that have been the hallmark of the left for a decade and probably contributed to Charlie\u2019 Kirk\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n

Charlie Kirk\u2019s wife Erika Kirk spoke of love. She said she forgave her husband\u2019s killer, as it is the great burden of all Christians, to forgive those who trespass against us.<\/p>\n

In the face of this courageous act of forgiveness Mr O\u2019Brennan only saw a \u2018festival of hatred.\u2019<\/p>\n

Marco Rubio the Secretary of State and one of the most powerful men on earth gave a wonderful version of the Good News, saying Jesus will come again,\u00a0and we will be with\u00a0our loved\u00a0ones who died once again. This to Mr Brennan was \u2018extremism worshipped like a religion.\u2019<\/p>\n

This is important because John O\u2019Brennan isn\u2019t some sad man with a laptop in his mother\u2019s basement. John O\u2019Brennan is Professor of European Politics, Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration at Maynooth University. He is smart, logical and trained to make distinctions. I am sure he reads books \u2013 real ones where you turn the pages. He\u2019s not a left wing crank or extremist. He is as mainstream and establishment as you can get.<\/p>\n

Yet when Professor O\u2019Brennan sees American conservatives at prayer, all he sees is hate, division and fascism. That\u2019s a problem. If you see a wife forgiving her husband\u2019s killer as hate, that\u2019s not a normal reaction. If you see Marco Rubio talking about the resurrection of Christ, something that is believed by 2.6 billion people in the world, and think this is the same as a Nuremberg rally, that\u2019s a problem. And what\u2019s more, it is a problem for us.<\/p>\n

John O\u2019Brennan\u2019s reaction will not have been an outlier in the Irish academy. I would take an educated guess that his view that US conservative people (not just politicians) are a bunch of fascists is held, if not shared, by the majority of academics in Ireland. This is an academy that nearly\u00a0every single young person in Ireland will spend at least three years of their formative years in. These are the professors they are exposed to. Those who think a prayer service, a memorial service for a young man brutally murdered, is a modern day Nuremberg Rally.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not an outlier. As I said before it is bad enough that Charlie Kirk was assassinated in life but to compound the wrong most of the Irish media then engaged in a character assassination of the man in death. This is a country where elected politicians think flying the tri-colour is a problem, where the media will gaslight you into thinking that the tri-colour is a \u2018symbol of the far \u2013 right.\u2019 This is a country where the premier entertainment programme will take time to support an American talk show host who was fired for gross misconduct (now reinstated) and treat him as some kind of free speech martyr while ignoring completely the brutal killing of a young conservative in the act of debating.<\/p>\n

This is a country where the Taoiseach himself will label the phrase \u2018Ireland for the Irish\u2019 as incitement to hatred. Not just that it is a wrong argument but that it is \u2018incitement to hatred.\u2019 That turns ordinary Irish people into criminals.<\/p>\n

This is the Irish media, academic and political establishment. They are ruthlessly conformist and enforce their extreme views on the ordinary Irish person relentlessly. They have turned Ireland into an outpost of the most extreme part of the Democrat party. And they are pumping this stuff out, day in and day out. Do not think it is normal.<\/p>\n

Loving your country is normal. Being a Christian is normal. Remembering your dead is a virtue. This is the dividing line. Those who think otherwise are the extremists.<\/p>\n

Those who see a man lying dead on the ground for speaking and then defame that man in death, are disordered. Those who claim \u2018Ireland for the Irish\u2019 is incitement to violence are not only shutting down legitimate debate in a disgusting fashion but are extreme. Those who watch people at prayer and a wife forgiving her husband\u2019s killer and see only hate, are odd. Presenters who stay silent in the face of political assassination but work themselves up over a firing for gross misconduct are cowards.<\/p>\n

We live in an Ireland where the establishment are the extremists. You mass going, free speech loving, flag waving readers are the moderates. Now you need to be moderates with courage. Speak up. Remember what they think of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charlie Kirk\u2019s memorial service was what I would call, big, beautiful and brash. It was not your average…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,41120,1067,43646,2219,13,14,49593,6,54365,11,12,24958,15,16,51348,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-80944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-charlie-kirk","tag-culture","tag-erika-kirk","tag-european-union","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-free-speech","tag-headlines","tag-john-obrennan","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-laura-perrins","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-maynooth","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}