Ireland’s Populists Wage War on Reality While the World Burns

Iran has Shiites, Ireland has Gobshiites!

Dublin is drowning, again, not in oil or wet weather, but in stupidity, denial, and Trumpian populism. The Strait of Hormuz burns all over the media and on our devices, U.S. gunboats shimmer under the boiling sun, and the entire Middle East is collapsing beneath the weight of its own hydrocarbons. The region is unable to export its fuel for the global economy because of one man’s demonstrable lack of intelligence. But walk into Leinster House (Irish Parliment), and you’d think the fuel apocalypse was a VAT indcuced or an excise problem to be exorcised. Petrol has become a luxury good fit for the minor aristocracy, they wail - €2.00 a litre for the chance to drive to your own funeral, and our elected tribunes have found the true culprits: their colleagues across the aisle or whichever priestly faction of accountants now squats in the Department of Finance, administering a great Irish torment as though it were an ancient curse, a bureaucracy so pitiless it condems certain sections of society to penury. According to the populist brain trust, this isn’t the result of a geopolitical firestorm in the Persian Gulf. No. It is, of course, the work of Micheál Martin and his cabinet of goblins subjugating the plebs for their own nefarious habitudes.

The world is ending because of the Middle East, again, and Aontú (a political party that claims to be left-wing and anti-abortion) is blaming the price of diesel. Sinn Féin ( a political party that claims to be left-wing but has more in common with Trump) is demanding justice for the cognizant motorist, that perennial victim of global upheaval. Rural independents and Independent Ireland pound the table and ask why the government hasn’t conjured up an Irish oilfield untouched by the baleful gaze of history. Meanwhile, in the Persian Gulf, that biblical theatre of flames, tankers sink, ports choke, and petroleum itself combusts. 20% of the world’s supply vanishes. In its absence, we are forced to confront an unbearable truth: the universe is vast, indifferent, and absolutely uninterested in Mary Lou McDonald and Pearse Doherty shrieking across the parliment chamber like some demented banshees engaged in some phantasmic pre-coital courtship.

It’s theatre. It’s the same rain dance performed to ward off the spirits or the horror of globalism, the knowledge that somewhere far away, people are dying so that your vehicle might stutter into motion. The Irish populists have decided that reality itself is negotiable; that through the solemn incantation of “cut the taxes”, one might reverse cause and effect, unmake the blockade, resurrect the supertankers, and restore the sacred flow of black gold to its rightful place in their amoral world order. The Dáil has ceased to be a temple of Irish democracy and instead has become a temple of denial, its opposition benches vibrating with incantations for cheaper petrol as the world burns, while they whisper to the baying fuel protesters like false prophets, urging the faithful to set fire to the edifice of Irish society itself, to let the institutions smoulder, the cathederal of civil society to crack apart, and the whole weary republic collapse into ash, all for the cruel ecstasy of their own lust for power, willing to tear down Irish society itself in a fit of political vanity and self‑importance.

And not one of them, miraculously, seems to have noticed the glowing target just across the river: the American embassy in Ballsbridge, a vast glass nerve‑centre of the empire whose current master lit the fuse under the Gulf. Donald Trump ordered the gunboats, pulled the trigger of this fuel apocalypse, yet the Irish imbecile populists, brave enough to denounce their own Minister for cosmic crimes, shrink to silence before the ambassador’s gates. No placards, no chants, no righteous fury hurled at the real architect of our global ruin. Their rebellion lacks credibility where economics meets realpolitik. Brent crude is dancing a jig between $100 and $120 a barrel, laughing its head off as the global economy chokes on its own fumes, but the populists studiously ignore our globally interconnected world.

You’d think it was a kind of genius, this talent for turning global cataclysm into personal grievance. But it’s not cleverness; it’s cowardice dressed in the populist costumes of Trump, Orban, and Farage. This is their well-worn playbook. Now it’s Ireland’s turn. Every litre poured is imported, every price distributed in blood, every speech a polite refusal to see the oil‑slick miracle of the world collapsing outside your office window. The Minister for Finance is not the villain here. The villain is causality itself. Yet they rage against the wrong gods, while their false god feasts on the bones of civilians in the Gulf.

The war will not stop because Irish politicians choose to ignore it. But it will thicken like smog around their words, and someday Ireland will notice that elements of its political class have been talking with their eyes wide shut, chanting about taxes, while the planet burns. There’s a war on, and the price of petrol has become like a hymn or lament for the whole crisis. To pretend otherwise is not just populism. It is blasphemy.

If, after reading this artcle you don’t share it, you will receive 7 years’ bad luck. If you’re American, you’re probably thinking whats another 7 sure?