The ''Look After Our Own'' Brigade

The Look After our Own Brigade. Who are they? Do they have a colourful language and a rather vicious behaviour? Do they tend to spit their venom instead of arguing sensibly? Do they repeat the same thing over and over? Are they outraged at the notion that one may suggest they are utterly wrong with their actions and school of thoughts? I am afraid the answer is yes to most of these questions. But who are really those guys and gals?

Nowadays I would say  you are bound to find them proliferating on line mainly. They cowardly love Facebook and the online outlets. Tabloid newspaper platforms provide them with a great opportunity to magnify their irrationality and antagonise with anybody who dare advocating anything that is different to their beliefs.

We have loads of them here in Ireland. In fact its a widespread phenomenon. Any day of the week  you find them trolling on the Journal.ie comment threads, the most adventurous would even dare tagging along an article of the Irish Times providing its posted as an excerpt on the FB feed.  The one topic that do agitate them frenetically is homelessness.  Absolutely nothing wrong with that, ''bien au contraire''  I would say as it is really  one of the burning issues here among a few others.  

For them the root cause is the government quickly followed by the asylum seekers and foreign nationals. Its not necessarily always in that order but they systematically  claim that we should be looking after our own before giving money away to refugees. Add the unhealthy obsession the Irish nation has about the travellers community being responsible for 95% of the crimes on the island (there are less than 15000 of them) and you get a perfect recipe for casual racism as a ratified chapter. 

You would think that a country with a gay prime minister who is half Indian half Irish would be progressive at its core. Que nenni, at this stage it is more like a window dressing exercise. Am I too harsh ? I don't know Peter Casey's score boost at the last presidential election a few months ago have raised a few eyebrows. Its DNA comment about the travellers community went down like a storm among the blinkered minds. At last somebody who said loudly what everybody thought behind closed doors.

What a great way to legitimise hatred as a political program. The imputation to blame as main message. Hang on some of you may say, you are painting an entire nation with the same brush and by doing so you are not any better than the ones you pretend to advocate against? Casual racism is a fact and there is nothing casual about it. Why do black job seekers have the lowest rate of employment for example? 

Insularity as a modus operandi is easy. Characterized by the telling of a parochial story, its very often fuelled by decades of unconscious bias. A few years ago I was told to go back to my own country when I dared pointing to an Irish driver she had misunderstood how to negotiate a roundabout. A few weeks later at a Hurling GAA match, I attended a fixture where my son got repeatedly targeted and ended on the ground a few times. On one occasion I went to him to check if he was OK. I made the mistake to address him in French and all I could hear in the background were comments that non Irish should REALLY stick to their own games. My son got up , looked at them, took the free and scored. 

The Look After our Own Brigade is everywhere and it's international too. Its not limited to the UK, France, US or even Russia. You may have a few specimens in your own country too on the condition that your nation is experiencing a few societal challenges. Most of them have something in common besides the narrative and the little sympathy they have for anything dissimilar. 

They are all finger pointers and very rarely solution providers.

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Written Material 2019 Copyright - Pascal Derrien-