The newspapers these days are filled with it, so it must be true. We are living in the darkened age of the “Rise of the Far-Right”. The Irish Times says so from behind paywalls, so I don’t know much about what they think of it, but they seem to believe it is bad. The Irish Independent says so sometimes without a paywall and they think it is very very bad. The Times of London allow you to read two free articles per week (which is about all anyone could retain their sanity through anyway) and they are apoplectic with how awful it is. So many opinion pieces, only one opinion. It’s bad.

And it’s getting worse.

Also, and this is possibly the most important thing –it isn’t happening at all. They are all agreed. It is very bad, getting worse and not happening at all. Because no-one, you see, supports this rise of the far-right, and while climate change may or may not be man-made, political events must be, so how can this dreadful thing happen while the Irish people oppose it completely and unanimously? The Irish people, we are assured, are if anything more horrified than the op-ed writers and want nothing to do with it. They will oppose it with every fibre of their being because “diversity is the very essence of being Irish”, or at least some Nigerian told the UN that. Yes, if there’s one thing the rise of the far-right would put most at risk, it’s the ever increasing blessing of diversity. A blessing on our cold bleak island, which had so little by way of consoling its own people that the whole world started turning up on our shores to liven it up. Or is it live it up? Nevermind.

The explanation for all this is, of course, that newspapers lie. There is no sudden rise of the far-right except in the fevered imaginations of those who want –and who need –“hate speech” laws. They need them so that when they lose arguments with sensible people, they can pick up their phone and complain to the Guards. They need them so that facts and the ability to articulate facts, can arbitrarily be suppressed by arrests and preferably lengthy prison sentences.

By the same token though, there is a much wider opposition to the New Irish Ireland than anyone in the un-Irish Times would like to admit, and it’s growing. It’s growing in part because of the tide of immigration, legal, measurable and too large; as well as illegal, unmeasurable but universally visible. In that sense we have caught the continental wave of “xenophobia”.

Beyond the conceptual vista of our lying press, there is a growing awareness that the immigration flood is a symptom of a deeper malaise; one which has lain over the Irish people and their abandonment of Irish Nationality, but which is now beginning to lift. For us on the National side, we see a painfully slow awakening to the immediate and wider dangers involved.

As the old year ends and the new begins we can in fairness take some pride in what we have achieved as a Movement and even as a Party. In many ways, too many to recount here, 2019 has been the year of the ordinary Party member. It isn’t that I or anyone else in the leadership slackened our efforts or let go of the reins in any way, but rather the National Party has itself expanded, extended and grown in numbers, organisational networks and activism so as to cause a natural development of autonomous structures in the cumann system, not always looking to HQ for every word but self-initiating towards the greater goal; the one we all understood in our hearts but which was given name and form in the National Idea.

And how our young people have worked. A dramatic pace, self-set, to bring about what we can hold in our hands at the beginning of 2020 and say “This is the National Party”. They have more than begun the process of rallying our Irish people to the Nation’s flag to strike for her freedom. While the body politic shows only signs of decay and the establishment clique exhibit only cretinous ineptitude, we take confidence in opposing that which currently is and is currently being done, from a position so much stronger than a year ago.

We can take confidence too that we have been patient, and under malicious gossip and slanderous insinuations we have not been drawn into battles for which we were not ready; grasping at the fool’s gold of being praised for “fighting the good fight” when we would simply have been frittering away vital resources in the pursuit of the unachievable and in any case the simply-not-worth-it. Neither have we squandered the credibility of the National Movement in contests at the enemy’s bidding, on the enemy’s ground and on terms where they could say, “Now look how you promised so much and delivered so little.” If we have been overly parsimonious I do not regret that, for I look forward to the year 2020 with the certain knowledge that if we are not ready we are nearly, and when the time comes we will be ready for all the challenges this new year presents.

2020 is going to be a year of a General Election. Every seat in the Oireachtas, but more particularly that central Chamber, Dáil Éireann, will be vacated and refilled anew. The Irish people speak.

Now none of us are parliamentarians by nature (I hope) and the National Party is not a natural parliamentary party. It is not even of its essential nature a Party; that is merely the form the National Movement must take at this time and place. It is a tactic. A strategy even. But it is not in a Dáil majority that Ireland’s fate will finally be decided any more than it was after the Westminster parliamentary election of 1918. But through elections the Irish people speak in all their cowardice and courage; in all their greed and idealism. In a General Election you see the Irish people at their worst and at their best but more vitally as they are. It captures a moment, and the result is not forever, but the question is who will capture this moment of 2020? To what extent do the Irish people still trust the old system, and to what extent and in what number are they ready to try a new way?

I have said, time and again, on behalf of the National Party that we simply don’t do optimism or pessimism, we do logistics. That is our calling and duty, neither to stir up false hope nor dash incipient possibility. To work with what we have to achieve what we can, neither over nor understating it. So stating it straight, I don’t know what the outcome of the election will be with the single exception I guess that we will not be talking of a National Government after it. There is still the enormous extent to which the Irish people “trust” the devil they know, and there are as yet insurmountable difficulties for a new party to make revolutionary progress through a corrupted structure.

Through the trolling anonymity of social media we are accused of many things; some things which have not even happened, either by our hand or by anyone else’s. Meanwhile, the legacy media is not yet so powerless as we would want it to be or as it will eventually become. The demonisation of the “far-right” being just an example. They don’t describe it, define it or even name it except for a few individuals of which I take some pride in being one. But they speak of it in hushed tones of dread which many people still take seriously. My own disembodied and edited voice alone was deemed dangerous to broadcast, never mind being allowed the cut and thrust of debate in studio. Politicians of the highest rank deemed this too much, and one “conservative” TD said I had “no business” being at a public meeting in my own home town, without the faintest blush of irony.

Let us not then underestimate the task the election presents or overstate what can or will be achieved. Rather think a moment and then grasp the moment of opportunity to present ourselves and the National idea to the Irish people directly, not through the distorted kaleidoscope optics of media, but ourselves as we are, patriotic and largely young men and women, with a real alternative in hand. The media have at least given us that; the National Party is not the same nor a variation of the same as has gone on before. We are by our and their agreement something else entirely.

This year, 2020, must produce a reaction, the beginnings of a rejection of the politics of endless decline, slow or fast, into the morass of nothingness which is the core of the globalist agenda, Marx or Money, the false dichotomy must be broken psychologically if not yet physically. And that means a significant breakthrough in the election. I will not hazard to put a numerical measure on it, but we’ll know if it happens and by the same, we will know if it doesn’t. Duty, either way, will compel us forward to try and try again, but time is not on our side and everyone knows it. Ireland 2040 is the death of the dream of ancient heroes, going out on new motorways built for foreigners and paid for by ourselves. 800 years will not recover what will have been lost.

And I say this too, if anyone on the nationalist side purports to say there is anything more important than the election and its outcome, that there is another, easier, more clever way, and that they have found it, then they are stupid or lying. The Constitution lays out the means by which control of the State may lawfully be taken, and no force I know of is comparable to the force employable by the modern State in full function and with a people’s mandate. In the medium or long term any goal other than this goal is a diversion, a stupidity at best.

So then in the year 2020 “heads erect, eyes to front, stepping proudly together, freedom sits throned on each proud spirit there.” You have your task, you inherited it, your children must own it.

Keep Ireland, and keep Ireland free!

Justin Barrett
Ceannaire an Pháirtí Náisiúnta