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How the Irish Came to Rule Pop Culture
Artists from the island continue to punch above their weight. Online, they’ve gained a rep as the “good Europeans.”
The fact that the Catholic Church held so much sway over the Republic of Ireland’s political institutions for so long ensured that, once the shackles were loosened, the South more or less speedran the entire postwar era in the past 30 years. A TikTok clip of Irish step-dancers performing a rendition of “Another One Bites the Dust” outside Buckingham Palace was viewed more than 6 million times, its power undimmed by the unfortunate detail of having been shot while the queen was still alive. O’Reilly doesn’t want to comfort himself with the notion that Ireland’s experience of subjugation has inoculated it against the xenophobia on the rise elsewhere in Europe: “What kind of arrogance do we have to imagine that we somehow have the emotional or intellectual infrastructure to be able to forestall this?” Yet he can’t help but take solace in examples of the Irish pushing back on nativist myths.
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