The David McWilliams School of Gardening

Last night, RTE broadcast the third and final part of David McWilliams’ ‘Generation Game’. The first two episodes revisited familiar McWilliams territory: Ireland’s debt explosion, our over-reliance on multi-nationals, the impending slowdown in the property market. The final episode was intended to showcase McWilliams ‘Big Idea’. Namely, that we institute a ‘right of return’ for those of Irish descent, inviting the Irish ‘diaspora’ or ‘nation’ back to the ‘mothership’ to inject some much-needed creativity and entrepreneurship into the economy. To buttress this theory, he interviewed Americans and Argentinians of Irish descent who, we were told, felt some sort of mystical affinity with this small island.

Well, we’ve heard that before – generally from Irish-Americans gazing misty-eyed into a green pint after the Paddy’s Day parade. McWilliams went rather further: his talk of the ‘nation’ was eerily reminiscent of the ‘blood and soil’ mantras familiar from the 1930s.

The television series was broadcast to coincide with – and promote – McWilliams new book, The Generation Game. Extracts from the book are published on his website, and this is where his theories of nation and migration get rather disturbing.

Before quoting Mr. McWilliams, let us examine the term ‘nation’ – a term which crops up repeatedly in both the programme and the book. ‘Nation’ is not synonymous with ‘state’: rather, ‘nation’ has historically been used to refer to ethnicity and culture. The concept of ‘nation’, in its reductionist McWilliamsite form, is one of the building blocks of nationalism. It is exclusive rather than inclusive, as is made clear by Mr. McWilliams’ contention that:

Mass immigration and multiculturalism, which might be necessary to create an efficient economy, will not be tolerated by people who value the uniqueness of the nation.

The ‘uniqueness of the nation’ will, however, be preserved by importing those of Irish descent. In the programme, McWilliams cited the automatic Israeli citizenship awarded to Jews around the world as a precedent for his idea. In the book, however, he cites another precedent:

In 1990, Germany extended its financial generosity to 100,000 ethnic Germans living in Russia—the Volga Germans. By doing so, the large paternalist German State was throwing its arms around people of German culture, even though their ancestors had left Germany four centuries previously.

Quite true. What Mr. McWilliams neglects to tell us, however, is that the German government was merely following – albeit using Deutschmarks and passports in place of troops – a precedent set over 70 years ago, when the National Socialist government decided to bring ethnic Germans throughout Europe – from Romania to Yugoslavia – ‘heim ins Reich’ (home into the Reich). Admittedly, the Nazis accomplished this by the simple expedient of moving the Reich’s borders to include the people concerned, rather than moving the people within the Reich’s borders.

Mr. McWilliams also fails to mention the considerable social problems caused by the large-scale migration of Russian-speaking ethnic Germans to Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg during the 1990s. Of course, mentioning these problems would negate the thesis at the heart of his big idea: that, purely by virtue of their ethnicity, people of Irish descent would automatically integrate into the ‘mothership’. The unspoken corollary of this thesis is that other ethnicities – Lithuanians, say, or Chinese – are not able to integrate.

That corollary was unspoken in the programme, but is extensively articulated in the book. And this is where we come to the garden.

Under the sub-title ‘Culture matters’, Mr. McWilliams writes that:

Now that Ireland has become an immigrant nation and we have seen that the country can absorb considerably more people than any of us imagined possible a few years ago, we should consider what type of immigrants we want because in our successful economy and tolerant society, we have created something of value, something that has a price on it, something which should be cherished, not given away cheaply. A successful economy and society is like a well-tended garden. The gardener spends time and effort thinking about which plants to plant, which will flourish, which will allow others enough light to blossom and how the entire ecosystem works. This doesn’t happen overnight, but via a process of trial and error that, in most cases, takes years to perfect. The gardener will be cautious about introducing new plants which might overshadow some of the existing varieties. He is always weighing up, assessing and imagining what fits where. Societies and immigration policy are likely in the future to be similarly selective and planned.

The sub-text is clear. Non-ethnic-Irish immigrants will not flourish, nor will they allow others enough light to flourish.

The next step is obvious to any gardener: non-ethnic-Irish immigrants must, like Japanese knotweed, be eradicated if the Irish garden is to flourish.

Mr. McWilliams travelled far afield during his researches, visiting cities as far apart as Shanghai and Buenos Aires. I suggest that he take his next trip a little closer to home. If he travels to West Cork, he will see flourishing fuchsia hedges and drifts of montbretia growing in the ditches. These plants were brought to Ireland from Chile and South Africa around 150 years ago; they found the climate and the soil to their liking, and they flourished both in the wild and under cultivation. They are what gardeners call ‘naturalised’ plants, and they have added to our (bio)diversity.

I would suggest that the children of Lithuanian and Chinese immigrants – many of whom are naturalised citizens – will add greatly to our social biodiversity. Rather than threatening the ‘uniqueness of the Irish nation’ they will – like Huguenot and Jewish immigrants before them – enrich both the nation and the state. And certainly they will be far more in tune with our ‘culture’ than those whose ancestors emigrated a hundred years ago, and whose only connection with the nation is an annual wearing-of-the-green on March 18th.

Mr. McWilliams is not a racist. He may or may not be a nationalist. But he is clearly neither an historian nor a gardener.