Catherine Connolly, the president of Ireland, turned her message for Saint Patrick’s Day into an extended advertisement for mass migration and the dilution and destruction of the Irish cultural and national identity.
Given Connolly’s stellar career both before and since she became Ireland’s president in November 2025, this comes as no surprise, as absurd and annoying as it is. If Catherine Connolly is known for anything, it is for being extremely far to the left. Connolly is, in fact, so far to the left that Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao would take her aside and quietly urge her to be a bit less all-in for total government control of every aspect of citizen’s lives, the Palestinian jihad against Israel, and the destruction of as many babies in the womb as possible, but she would wave away their concerns as patriarchal interference in her rights as a woman and bourgeois attachment to colonialism and white supremacism.
The malodorous wokeness of Connolly’s St. Paddy’s Day statement was obvious right from the beginning. “Whether we are Irish by birth or indeed by choice,” she declared, “today is an occasion when Irish communities around the world celebrate their shared love of all things Irish – our culture, heritage, identity and of course our beautiful language, Gaeilge.”
Wait a minute. “Irish by birth or indeed by choice”? This reflects a central leftist assumption: that anyone can transform his or her ethnic identity simply by changing his or her address. The leftist idea is that if someone moves to Ireland and settles there, he is magically as Irish as corned beef and cabbage, and even as Irish as James Cagney and Maureen O’Hara, or more so, as they were Irish Americans.
In reality, the newcomer may become a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or a British citizen and resident of Northern Ireland, but ethnically, he is still whatever he was before he ever thought of moving to the Emerald Isle. Yet the establishment media and politicians at all points on the political spectrum routinely refer to Afghans or Syrians or Pakistanis as “Irish” or “English” or “French” or “German” depending on where they have acquired citizenship, without any regard for the cultural, religious, and linguistic chasm between the newly arrived migrants and the natives.
Connolly, like all leftist politicians all over the West, wants to obliterate the idea that there is any such chasm and to force her people to assume that the newcomers are just as Irish as they are. Interestingly, however, she contradicts herself by saying that Saint Patrick’s Day “is embraced by an Irish global family of over 70 million people, many of whom have found new homes abroad and built communities over many years.” So Irish people who have left Ireland and settled elsewhere are still Irish; they haven’t taken on the ethnicity of their new homes. But the migrants streaming into Ireland are Irish “by choice.”
In service of her pro-migration agenda, Connolly twisted the story of Saint Patrick into an open-borders parable. “Patrick,” said — she never referred to him even once as Saint Patrick — “was trafficked across the Irish Sea from Britain as a young man in the 5th century only to return to Ireland as a missionary, giving voice and his life to fostering an awareness of the consequences of slavery.” The lesson she drew from this was tailor-made for today’s political controversies: “The story of Patrick’s life serves as a reminder of the resilience and courage of migrants, the invaluable contributions that they have made, and continue to make, to the countries they now call home, sometimes even in the face of great adversity.”
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Connolly has a point, although she did not intend to make it: the fact has scarcely been recognized, but many of the migrants to Europe, Britain, and Ireland have indeed come as missionaries. They are taking hold of the reward Allah promises in the Qur’an (4:100) to those who emigrate for his sake. To emigrate for Allah’s sake means that one goes to a new land not in search of better work opportunities or a peaceful life, but to bring Islam to the new land.
What Connolly wants to do, of course, is shame the Irish into thinking it is wrong to oppose mass Third-World migration into Ireland. In case anyone missed the point, she drives it home: “Patrick’s story speaks not only to the Ireland of the 5th century, but to the millions still subjected to trafficking, forced labour and displacement today.”
She says nary a word, of course, about what exactly Saint Patrick brought to Ireland as a missionary. Mentioning the Christian faith while inundating her country with Muslim migrants (Irish by choice!) might be a bit too much cognitive dissonance even for a hardcore leftist such as Catherine Connolly.
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