Woke is sinking fast. Ireland’s elites want to go down with the ship

The liberal establishment is unwilling to admit the foreign origins of the dogmas they now cling to

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Michael Murphy

03 May 2025 2:04pm BST

The greatest trick the woke ever pulled was convincing the world it didn’t exist. That its strictures on race and gender were not an ideology, but simple human kindness. And when the spell began to wear off, it managed one better: persuading people the revolution had been their idea all along.

Take Ireland. Once defined by Catholicism and national struggle, the country now draws its moral cues not from Rome, but from San Francisco. The tricolour still flies over the Dáil, but it is increasingly outnumbered by rainbow flags in government buildings and shop windows.

This is a country where a man may become a woman with the stroke of a pen – and to question it, to utter a biological fact, is to risk social or professional exile. Last month, the UK Supreme Court ruled that trans women are not women under the legal meaning of the Equality Act. In Ireland, the response was a polite shrug. Norma Foley, the equality minister, said the ruling had no relevance here and reaffirmed Ireland’s commitment to protecting trans identities. RTÉ, ever deferential, noted that a transgender advocacy group was “encouraged” that the British heresy hadn’t crossed the water.

But where did this doctrine come from, if not from Britain? If not from America? It didn’t rise from the peat bog. It was not whispered by ghosts in Glendalough. This new creed – that identity outranks biology, that feeling cancels fact – was imported, like oat milk and mindfulness, and embraced with evangelical zeal by a political class desperate to seem more enlightened than their forebears. Is there, after all, a more Protestant idea than “your truth”?

Ireland has since adopted nearly every progressive orthodoxy drifting in from abroad. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – the corporate euphemism for race and gender quotas – has, for all practical purposes, replaced the Holy Trinity as the nation’s guiding ethic. When the Trump administration sent letters urging multinationals in Ireland to abandon race-based hiring targets for US operations, the response was predictably dismissive.

Simon Harris, the foreign minister, declared that Ireland must “remain true to our European values”, by which he presumably meant America’s old ones. Trinity College Dublin advised staff not to respond to American inquiries about DEI-linked research. The Irish Times condemned Washington’s letters as “unwanted foreign interference” – without quite explaining why DEI, itself an American import, was welcome interference.

Such questions are rarely asked, largely because these ideas were never really debated. That, too, is a measure of American soft power: its values stream in through Netflix, filter down through HR departments, and echo through NGOs – not as ideology, but as moral instinct.

Consider the Gender Recognition Act of 2015. It allows a person to change legal sex by obtaining a certificate, and it passed with barely a whisper of dissent. When RTÉ in 2022 briefly gave airtime to gender-critical women, activists threatened to uninvite them from Pride events. Micheál Martin, now Taoiseach, dismissed the segment as “toxic” and added: “We don’t need that kind of debate in Ireland.”

If that sounds patronising, it’s because it is. Martin, like many of his colleagues – including Norma Foley – is a former teacher. And it shows. They speak in the platitudinous simplicities of the classroom: this is kind, that is not. The possibility that a complex issue might involve competing, even irreconcilable rights is quietly set aside.

But outside the classroom, the tune is changing. Corporate America is starting to backtrack. In 2023, references to “diversity” and “DEI” in Fortune 100 company filings dropped by 22 per cent. Even BlackRock – once the $11.5 trillion engine room of woke capitalism — has scaled back its language, just three years after CEO Larry Fink declared the firm must “embed DEI into everything we do.”

Ireland may soon find itself pulled in two directions: between its economic lifeline – US multinationals – and the values of its progressive elite. It remains to be seen whether it will toe the new line coming from Washington, or remain a stubborn holdout for wokeism: a relic of a cargo cult of bad ideas already tapering out elsewhere.

But if Irish leaders choose that hill to die on, they should not delude themselves. It is not native ground.