“You were told it was just about trade,
You were told it wouldn’t affect your sovereignty
You were told it wouldn’t affect your independence”
Farage opened with an attack on the EU institutions playing the same tune of jingoism from his showband years in the UK and the audience were ready to dance.
"How much more humiliating could this country be than for years being run by the Troika?"
Farage’s message was very clear, Ireland had lost its financial autonomy and the country was being run by the powers of Europe;
"The indignity, a few years back, of your budget being seen by the German government before it was put to the Dail" he added.
Of course Farage’s pronunciation of the Dail as the Dale was irrelevant to his point of foreign occupation of our government offices as this crowd were more incised by the financial burden imposed on this country which Nigel aimed to exploit.
The twisted reality is that an Irexit would solve a lot of problems for the Brexiteers in terms of border and trade and Farage is nothing more than a British conman trying to manipulate the crowd for his own gain. Common scum with a deluded goal of recolonising our country so we can become a net contributor to a failed UK project instead of remaining as part of a stabilising and growing European Union. Imperialists like Nidge would probably see us converting to a diet of potatoes by 2020 so our grain could be exported to England and sold for cheap, but we’ve already been down that road and it’s a path we do not wish to travel again.
Of course it wouldn’t be an Alt Right gathering without mentioning how fake news has got everything wrong, attacking overpaid bureaucrats, referring to everyone in power as elitists, draining the swamp rhetoric, and the inevitable glorification of Donald Trump.
Nidge offered the Irexit disciples some encouragement when facing public criticism;
“They will call you all the names under the sun. You will be racists, xenophobes. When our side of the argument talks about all these things they go for the man not the ball”.
The Alt Right attendees by in large just want someone in authority to tell them it’s ok to be called a racist and Farage was the man willing to charge them all 50p for that privilege. Thus several people were indoctrinated on the spot taking to twitter immediately with the analogy, an analogy which will be spouted out for some time now I imagine.
Farage made it clear to the hall that there is no such thing as bad press provided you are on the front cover, he also spoke to the crowd about mobilising on social media noting Trump’s following of 47.6m on Twitter.
Nigel rounded up with a prophetic declaration that once again had his audience on their feet, an absolute farce of an event with most people leaving the hall once he’d exited the stage:
“This European project is not going to work, far from making this a union it has resulted in an East/West split”
A statement more suitable to the Eurovision song contest than to our democratic union of nations.
I always feel bad when people are walking out of the room as an economist is talking but the exception to that rule has to be Cormac Lucey (@CormacLucey) who took to the stage to describe how the “EU would completely emasculate us”.
Cormac claimed the Euro has given us a BoomBustBoom cycle and compared it to ‘Economic binge eating, economic binge dieting, and economic binge eating’ blaming the rise and fall of our economy on cheap interest from Europe. No chance it had anything to do with poor regulation, corrupt politicians and greedy corporate bankers. No it was simply the Euro and if we left Europe the greedy politicians and corrupt bankers wouldn’t have had access to the money to begin with, everything makes sense now.
Of course when you’re a special advisor to the Tainiste from 2002 to 2007 why would you consider the Irish government to have any blame in boom bust economics.
“One big difference between the North and South is our level of corporation tax” he says
Now the big difference that comes to my mind is the British forces in the North and the lack of said forces in the south, but that’s a difference everyone in the room is willing to overcome in order to become friends with their white Christian Knight Nigel.
Cormac’s point of course is that we should be protecting our corporation tax rate at all cost, again the moral and ethical ineptitude of collecting billions in European revenue for the sake of protecting these vile corporations and a few token jobs is lost on middle class prats who don’t believe in the social welfare system or taxation in general.
“EU sovereignty sounds like the prospect of death to me” Cormac continued in protest to his vision of an “EU Federal Superstate”
Cormac warned that if Ireland lost its corporate tax rate that “the EU will reduce Ireland to a rural backwater, a sort of North Dakota black hole”.
Of course if we leave Europe we can be the perfect little tax haven he's always wanted us to be but then we wouldn't have access to the markets the companies who base themselves here need, which is why they came here to do business in the first place, a real conundrum that, or maybe Cormac just doesn’t know what he’s talking about very much and is fear mongering the crowd into thinking that the European Union is a sinister organisation, probably as he adds comments such as,
“Common Policy is common in name only” & “I profoundly distrust these institutions”