The Graves on the Hillsides Still Speak: What Kaja Kallas Gets Wrong About Irish History

Ireland’s past is written in famine, exile, and resistance — not absence. When the EU's chief diplomat questions our experience of suffering, she reveals her historical amnesia

There’s a particular tone of voice that can easily be recognised in certain political actors; that's the clipped, unearned certainty of people who know the lines but have never lived the scenes. It's a sound often heard in Brussels, but it rang out like a cracked bell this week when Kaja Kallas, the EU’s newest foreign policy chief, decided to deliver a history lesson to the people of Ireland. A race of people who have famously never known any real suffering.

Addressing a debate on NATO and security, she turned her gaze westwards and declared that while her native Estonia had endured “atrocities, mass deportations, and cultural suppression” behind the Iron Curtain, Ireland had simply “built up its prosperity.” The implication was as clear as day: those privileged Paddy's don’t understand what real suffering looks like.

And so it seems that the EU has entrusted its foreign policy to someone who appears to be playing a grown-up’s game in a child’s shoes.

Because Ireland is, by any sober reckoning, one of the very few nations on earth whose population remains lower than it was in the 1840s: We had over eight million people before the famine hit and we’ve never come close to that figure since. During an gorta mór, whole counties were practically emptied, not by warplanes or tanks, but by slow starvation and the forced emigration that followed. Families vanished across oceans and generations and graves were dug in silence on hillsides that hadn’t known ploughs in years while the British overlords continued to export food to 'the mainland.'

If that doesn’t qualify as atrocity, you'd like to know what does.

You see, we didn’t have to wait for Stalin to see cultural suppression in action because long before the Georgian generalissimo was even thought of, we had a state that criminalised our language and mocked our music. We were ruled for centuries by a neighbour whose every policy, from plantation to partition, was designed to diminish us, yet there she was explaining to us that we’ve somehow missed out on the harsh lessons of history.

But of course, all this guff wasn’t really about Ireland; rather it was about her. This is a woman who has built her political brand on a diet of unyielding anti-Russian rhetoric, which would be easier to take seriously if it weren’t so obviously stitched together with threads of opportunism.

Kallas is often spoken of in the hushed tones that Brussels reserves for its regional high-flyer, but peel back the glossy photos and recycled slogans, and you find something else entirely; the daughter of a senior Soviet official, a man who edited the Communist Party’s house newspaper in Estonia and spent nearly two decades climbing the ladder of power in the USSR, before quickly reinventing himself as a liberal under Gorby's glasnost. Her Russian is fluent, whereas her English falters and she grew up not in resistance to the Soviet machine, but comfortably within its walls.

That wouldn’t matter (after all, people change, families evolve) if she didn’t now spend her political life proving just how converted she has become. Her anti-Russian zeal is not just fervent, it’s performative, and so much so that she has moved to help erase Russian-language schooling and media at home; even as a third of her country speaks it as their mother tongue. This amounted to a clear form of overcorrection, showing a need to prove that she is no longer her father’s daughter; or at least, that nobody will dare suggest it.

Her diplomacy abroad is no less selective, where she refuses to even entertain dialogue with Moscow, painting any effort at negotiation as a form of surrender. And yet she stands beaming next to the petro-dictators of Central Asia, toasting “important partnerships” with regimes like Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan; governments that make the Kremlin look like a rotary club.

Earlier this year, her big diplomatic debut in Washington was unceremoniously cancelled. Marco Rubio wouldn’t even give her a handshake, let alone a photo-op. For a woman who has spent her career proving loyalty to NATO, it was a brutal reminder that obedience won't always guarantee you relevance.

But the most dangerous thing about Kallas isn’t her hypocrisy; rather it’s her naivety, like when she speaks of breaking Russia into “smaller pieces,” as if statecraft were a game of Risk. She seems blind to the idea that when you back a nuclear power into a corner, you may not like what comes out.

And all of this would be bad enough if she were a foreign minister in Tallinn, but she now speaks on behalf of the entire European Union; 450 million people whose security and prosperity may depend on precisely the sort of diplomatic skill and strategic subtlety that she has shown no capacity to wield.

Any boxing writer could tell you that a fighter who confuses bravado with courage will soon find the canvas and that real fortitude lies in listening, and in knowing when to lean back on the ropes and when to punch. But what Kallas offers instead is the perpetual wind-milling of a bantamweight who mistakes the volume of their attacks for power.

And that brings me back to Ireland; not as a special case, but as an example of what happens when you’re represented by people who haven't a fecking notion of your history.

To pretend that Ireland somehow sat out the convulsions of the 20th century is to ignore the bombs in Belfast, the torment wielded upon Derry, the sheer terror unleashed by the Black and Tans, the burning of Cork, and the war waged in hedgerows and tenements. Not to mention the civil war that followed with all its betrayals and executions.

We didn’t avoid history, as a matter of fact we were ransacked by it; and in many ways, we’re still living with it.

If Kaja Kallas wishes to keep lecturing on atrocities, she might first pay a visit to Connemara, count the famine graves, and ask how a nation still short of its pre-An Gorta Mór population knows nothing of loss. Until then, she’d do well to keep her history lessons to herself.