Brendan O'Neill (columnist)

O'Neill is a supporter of a united Ireland, having said that former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is "not the ruler of the six counties, unfortunately, in my view. I am in favour of Irish unity, as it happens."[10]

O'Neill was critical of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA supported. O'Neill wrote, in a 1998 issue of Living Marxism, "The new peace deal is a disgrace... The biggest losers in all this are the republican movement... [W]hat exactly will the republican communities gain at the end of their 25-year struggle? Sinn Fein and the IRA have not just agreed to down arms. They have effectively signed away everything they once stood for, accepting that there will not be a united Ireland."[11] [12]

In a 2012 Huffington Post article ,[13] O'Neill argued against victims of sexual abuse by high-profile individuals like Jimmy Savile coming forward publicly, stating: "I think there is more virtue in keeping the abuse as a firm part of your past, rather than offering it up to a scandal-hungry media and abuse-obsessed society that are desperate for more episodes of perversion to pore over".[13][14]

He has also derided the increased acceptance in Western countries to homosexuality as “queer imperialism,[14] said that homophobes are now treated the same way homosexuals used to be,[15] and opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage in Australia, arguing that it has been "attended by authoritarianism wherever it’s been introduced"[16]

He considers efforts to combat racism in football to be "a class war" driven by "elites' utter incomprehension of the mass passions that get aired at football matches".[17] Referring to high-profile cases of racial abuse and alleged racial abuse, he argued, "these incidents and alleged incidents are not racism at all, in the true meaning of the word", due to the levels of passion involved, describing anti-racism efforts as "a pretty poisonous desire to police the ... working classes".[17] In 2020, when football fans booed players taking a knee to protest racism showed "their disapproval of the colonisation of the beautiful game by the divisive cult of identity politics" and a working class reaction against the "virtue-signalling nonsense of Black Lives Matter". He has also described the far right Football Lads Alliance as a "working-class movement" against "terrorism and the ideologies that fuel it".[18]

O'Neill has described himself as "an atheistic libertarian". He criticised opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to the United Kingdom as intolerant and fearmongering.[19]

O'Neill has opposed efforts to combat climate change through reductions in carbon emissions, and instead advocates for "technological progress".[20] He has said that the environmental movement has become a "religious cult"[21] “waging war on the working class”.[22] He criticised the Swedish environmentalist activist Greta Thunberg in his 2019 article "The Cult of Greta Thunberg"[23] in which he describes her as a "millenarian weirdo" and criticises what he describes as the "monotone voice" speech patterns[24][25][26][27] of the Swedish environmentalist. O'Neill has described warnings over overpopulation as a "Malthusian" interference in women's right to reproductive freedom.[28]

In September 2019, he said on the BBC's Politics Live that British people should be rioting about delays to Brexit.[29] He said: "I'm amazed that there haven't been riots yet." When asked by guest presenter Adam Fleming: "Do you think there will be riots?", O'Neill responded: "I think there should be." In October 2019, 585 complaints about him calling for riots were dismissed by the BBC's executive complaints unit.[30]

In 2020, in relation to COVID-19, he has argued that that “this pandemic has shown us what life would be like if environmentalists got their way”[31][32] and condemned the “chilling” and “dangerous” “witch-hunting of those who criticise the response to coronavirus”.[33]