Running guns at the theme park: How Ireland’s sugar baby relationship with D.C endangers its sovereignty

Making your way from Dublin airport to the city centre, it becomes apparent that there are far more thorough ways than bombing, to destroy a city. Open-air crack dealing, homeless encampments and herds of American tourists milling about city centre districts-turned-daycare construct the vibe of the kip. 

Down on the Liffeyside, the squat glass offices of tax-evading tech giants grow like moss around a dirty gutter. Streets over, in old British buildings, clientelistic Irish policymakers preen themselves for TikTok’s or Guinness photo ops, oblivious to the withering polity around them. 

Following the motorway out from our jaded capital, perhaps by private car as many wealthy Americans do, you can visit the Blarney Stone or The Gap of Dunloe.

On the way, maybe you’ll stop for petrol in Barack Obama Plaza or enjoy a Supermacs in Ballina. There you could sit, stodgy burger in hand, watching the paint peel from the grovellingly rendered Joe Biden mural whose visage looms over the town like a shit Pompeian Style. 

If you looked up at the right moment maybe you could spot one of the ammunition-laden flights over Irish airspace bound for Israel — as uncovered by The Ditch last month.

These illegal flights carrying millions of primers, baton rounds, detonators and God knows what else rubbish the values of the Irish people and the nation’s stance on Gaza as they pass overhead. Meanwhile, the psychopathic butchery, rape and erasure of the Palestinian people continues at pace. 

The government is now “looking to establish the facts” about these flights according to Taoiseach Simon Harris – facts that, in truth, will have to be removed from maimed Gazan children without anaesthetic.

Facts will have to be swept from soccer pitches and dredged from burnt olive groves in the West Bank. Hell, if they look hard enough, they might just find some facts embedded in the chassis of the Irish Army vehicle hit by an Israeli missile in Lebanon just last month. 

The very idea of needing to be “establishing the facts”, about something we’ve been enabling since October, is as embarrassing as it is monotonously cliché. The Taoiseach would have been better off drunkenly swaying and singing Danny Boy to deflect criticism. 

This impetus to establish patently obvious but ever-elusive ‘facts’ is a frustrating fixture of Irish politics and its endemic culture of cute-hoorism the — great national pastime of political deception and corruption. Massive betrayals of public trust such as this, and the resulting salvos of gaslighting and political ‘shitetalk’, are routine. Calls to “establish the facts” are as much part of the dreary cycle of Irish politics as the ‘brown envelopes’ and bare-faced criminality that perpetually erode confidence in the Irish state at home and abroad. 

Ireland and America: Joined at the hip

In contrast, the Irish public’s position on the genocide in Gaza has been and still is overwhelmingly in favour of the Palestinian people. 

Ireland is the most pro-Palestine state in Europe with a massive majority of people believing Israel is not only committing genocide but exists as an apartheid state. This sentiment has been parroted by policymakers in Dublin who recently recognised Palestinian statehood. However, under the surface, like with many things, the Irish government do not share the convictions of the people – they simply endure them.

Calling Ireland a tax haven is incorrect, you pay tax here, just not enough. Ireland is a themeparkocracy – its mediocre political class serves as middle management for interests in Silicon Valley, DC and Brussels. Ireland’s political leaders don’t aspire to be national heroes, they aspire to walk into a public affairs job. 

Ireland, like any good theme park, would be better if its inhabitants were animatronic. Animatronics don’t care about genocides, they don’t need housing, they don’t need hospitals or food and they aren’t traumatised by centuries of colonial repression – they just smile and wave and perform for the tourists. 

Since we are not animatronics, the state’s next best option is to pretend we don’t exist. As such we live in a nation where foreign interests trump public ones; we act as a supply line for a war we condemn. We offer up our homes to overseas investment funds amid a housing crisis. Calls for unilateral action to address public concerns are met with mealymouthed excuses and condescending attempts at obfuscation. 

These factors, among others, show Ireland’s democracy is atrophying, maybe we’re more comfortable as a vassal – free of the imagination and conviction it takes to be a fully realised country, we are content to be an attraction. 

At least an attraction can be leased. In 2020, US assets in Ireland were worth $2 trillion, four times the value of US assets in China, and US companies employ 378 thousand people (around 14% of the workforce). 

Ireland is so intrinsically in the orbit of the United States that it has US preclearance facilities at two of its airports, the only nation in Europe to have such facilities — an outpost of empire. 

Ireland and Israel may oppose each other on the world stage, but they have more in common than they are likely to admit.

Both small, recently formed states in varying stages of colonialism whose inhabitants have a powerful lobby within the United States itself. Both states have been requisitioned by Washington, great limestone aircraft carriers, projecting US hegemony in their respective neighbourhoods.

When you’re finished with your burger, bin the red wrapper under the watchful eye of sleepy Joe — it's best to head on.

There's no point dwelling too long in the suffocating country towns, in any ex-colony the name of the game is extraction, that’s one habit you can’t kick. Everything from nursing graduates to excess cattle flows to the coastal hubs, ready for export.

Continuing down The Wild Atlantic Way you’ll see more of our great theme park. From crumbling Marian shrines tucked into the roadside to the big data centres that use more electricity than all the islands’ homes.

On your way, you could stop and watch American warplanes lift their fat, weapon-laden arses over the green hills of Clare.

As dusk settles you could head for the beach, just around the corner from Trump’s Golf resort in Doonbeg – there, sitting on cold sand, you could look out over the roaring Atlantic, to the mainland, four thousand miles away.

Adam Doyle is an Irish artist and political commentator working under the moniker ‘Spicebag’. Doyle’s work around Irish culture, politics and Palestinian solidarity has garnered international coverage.

Follow him on Instagram: @spicebag.exe

Artwork done by: @melville_the_third

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.