Congratulations Ireland, you’re no longer Europe’s most ridiculous country

Jake Wallis SimonsSun, August 2, 2026 at 10:43 AM UTC

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Spain’s posturing has been punctured by the sudden arrival of 50,000 Moroccan migrants - ABDEL MAJID BZIOUAT/AFP

There’s nothing like 50,000 migrants pouring over a border to burst a bubble of progressive indulgence. In a single afternoon, the dogma upon which Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s reviled prime minister, had built much of his liberal Eldorado – that migration and security can be managed by way of humanitarianism and European solidarity – collapsed under the dead weight of reality.

In fact, the only major plank of his dogma that was left unchallenged was his gratuitous Israelophobia, and even that came jolly close. After all, Sánchez’s ability to side with Hamas over absolutely everything – this is a man who said he regretted not having nuclear weapons to “stop” Israel’s war of self-defence – would have looked rather silly if the Ceuta migrants had employed jihadi-style butchery, rape, mutilation and kidnap.

Lucky old Sánchez, eh? There would have been only one way to deal with that grim reality, and it would have left the Spanish leader looking even more of a hypocrite. (As it was, the Israelis found his predicament pretty funny.)

So, Pedro old son, it could have been a lot worse. Be that as it may, the man could have been chewing a wasp for the sourness of his tone as he found himself talking in the language of sovereignty – territorial integrity, legal reforms, maritime barriers – rather than the post-national liberalism upon which he has so often relied for that warm and fuzzy tingle.

From a British point of view, it was hard to avoid a frisson of schadenfreude. Two weeks ago, the achingly cosmopolitan Sánchez was crowing about the removal of la verja, the border barrier at Gibraltar, describing it as the fall of “the last wall in western Europe”.

Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish PM has seen his dogma collapse in the face of reality - Fabian Bimmer/REUTERS

Fast-forward to Friday, and the Spanish leader, who remains mired in an awkward corruption scandal, found himself condemning a “violación de la integridad territorial de España” as if he had converted to conservatism.

It was even more satisfying to see the beleaguered socialist bleating so impotently as Italy suspended the EU’s hallowed Schengen open borders agreement, backed by Finland, Denmark and Czechia.

Anyway, my point is this: the spectacle brought me to a hard conclusion that I had been pondering for some time. Reader, the worst country in Europe is no longer Ireland.

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The emblems of national decline

Not that I’m criticising the people of either nation, I hasten to add (though an almost fascist progressivism seems to have swept through great swathes of both societies of late). No, I’m principally speaking of the governing elites.

For some time, it has been too close to call. The great nation of Ireland has been steadily vandalising itself in recent years.

Beginning in the Nineties, its elites replaced one overbearing moral establishment – the Catholic-nationalist order, which had long been beset by scandals – with another, namely a creed of Brussels fanaticism, the embrace of American-centric multinational capitalism and the determined imposition of tiresome progressive ideology.

As ever, the most potent symbolism of this cultural shift is that of immigration. The Emerald Isle, a country of just five million, has experienced one of the fastest rates of population growth in the developed world in recent years, driven overwhelmingly by arrivals from overseas.

Record numbers of new arrivals have coincided with housing shortages that predated the migration wave, leading to tent villages in Dublin, asylum seekers living in hotels and old office blocks, and GP surgeries and schools coming under immense strain. Violent riots flared in 2023, followed by arson attacks.

Ireland’s obsessive anti-Zionism has found its match in Spain’s PM - Clodagh Kilcoyne/REUTERS

The second emblem of national decline, of course, is hatred of Israel. Here, too, we find Ireland excelling; Jerusalem even announced the closure of its Dublin embassy in December 2024, citing the Irish government’s “extreme anti-Israel policies”.

Anti-Semitism has a long history in Catholic Ireland. In James Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, Mr Deasy tells Stephen Dedalus: “Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews... Because she never let them in.”

But its obsession with Israelophobia has reached new depths of petty depravity, from withdrawing from Eurovision in protest against Israel, to renaming Herzog Park in Dublin, which was named after the Chaim Herzog, Israel’s sixth president, who grew up there.

All pretty bleak. Spain, however, has now claimed the booby prize. Not only has it also pulled out of Eurovision and indulged in gender recognition laws and amnesty programmes for undocumented migrants that would make Zack Polanski blush, but – as Ceuta has shown – its hard-left leader governs with such brazen hypocrisy that no other European country comes close.

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Source: “AOL Breaking”