November 22nd, 2023. All things considered, it had been a relatively quiet year for Ireland in the international news cycle. The majority of our domestic political and social struggles, while increasingly frayed, did little to capture the attention of the world beyond the Atlantic. Our chronic housing crisis, record homelessness levels, and buckling healthcare system have become symptomatic throughout much of Europe. One of the few breakthrough stories was perhaps the untimely death of Sinead O’Connor.
By the following evening, our capital city found itself in the global spotlight for deeply unsettling reasons. Following a shock attack on a Dublin city centre primary school, in which three young children and their carer were stabbed multiple times and left hospitalised in critical conditions, rumours began to circulate on social media regarding the attacker’s nationality. A small but virulent cluster of chronically online far-right figures, the majority of them young men, spread waves of aggressive rhetoric, calling for their followers to take to the streets and ‘Bally’ up. tool up’ against a perceived threat by non-nationals. ‘Any fucking foreigner you see, kill them. Kill them all’, was one message delivered to a prominent Telegram channel.
By late evening, O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, had been held hostage. Several cars, buses, and a tram were set alight. A city centre hotel was broken into and damaged by groups of hooded men. Over a dozen businesses were looted, with one shop owner of Indian background having to hide in his basement for hours while his stock was stolen and his store destroyed. At least two accommodation centres that currently or formerly housed asylum seekers were targeted, with one being firebombed. The atmosphere was that of an alt-right Discord server come alive, replete with all of the insulated male rage and baffling, incomprehensible stupidity that entails.
What made the chaotic scenes so insidious to watch, whether online or in person, was the overtly racist tone that energised them from the outset. Shortly after news of the stabbings broke, Gript.ie, a website that can only be described fairly as the incestuous Irish cousin of Breitbart, published a story claiming the assailant was an Algerian national, without verifying any of their sources independently.
This, in hindsight, was unquestionably the driving force behind the xenophobic anger at the riots. Before it escalated, An Garda Síochána (Ireland’s police force, ‘Guardians of Peace’ in Irish) claimed that several agitators had attempted to breach the crime scene mere hours after the stabbings. Many of them were heard shouting, ‘get them out, get the fuck out!’. Throughout the night, figures such as Gavin Pepper, Mick O’Keefe, and Keith O’Brien (known as Keith Woods to Americans) were live blogging events in the city, with none of them being present at the scenes themselves.
Most of these accounts have been building loyal followings since the peak of lockdown paranoia and have only grown in influence since. Some of them, such as Woods, have cozied up to white supremacist voices in the U.S. like Richard Spencer (the main organiser of the Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville VA), and have hosted the notorious white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes on his Youtube channel, who said he has bonded with Woods over “the Jewish thing and white identity”. On his own show, Fuentes has endorsed Conor McGregor as a de facto mascot of the Irish far-right, stating, ‘it’s either going to be the Irish or it’s going to be the blacks. Only one side is going to come out of this alive.”
To those unfamiliar with the nuances of Irish politics, the riots were hardly the most violent or persistent by European standards. The French have us squarely beaten there.
To most of the country, however, what we witnessed was both unsurprising in its nature and horrifying in its form. It needs to be stressed that these events did not exist in a vacuum. Ireland has endured a year of intense anti-migrant bigotry, fuelled primarily by the same cynical grifters that instigated last month's destruction. In January, a small migrant campsite nestled in one of the city’s forest parks was attacked by masked men, armed with baseball bats and sticks, and accompanied by large dogs. While none of the migrants were seriously injured, the incident frightened them enough to abandon their shelters. In Dublin’s south inner city this summer, a vigilante group firebombed a tent encampment in an attempt to drive the campers out and project the same message:You are not welcome here.
Beyond Dublin, a similar discontent with the government’s immigration policy was growing in rural communities. Many Irish people began to resent what they perceived, accurately or not, as the prioritisation of housing non-citizens, against the backdrop of historic housing shortages and the selling off of development sites to corporate vulture funds. Just a 30-minute drive from my hometown lies the rural village of Dromahair, Co.Leitrim. Mere days after the violence in Dublin, vigilante groups emboldened by the riots set up illegal checkpoints on the main roads leading into the town in anticipation of 155 International Protection Applicants being bussed into the village. While the bus never arrived, the intention of the vigilantes was clear: block the migrants from arriving and intimidate them into leaving. Similar blockades and protests have popped up across the country, in counties Donegal, Cork, and Clare. It’s unclear how many of these locals were motivated by explicit distrust of foreigners and how many were simply concerned that the new influx of people would strain an already underserviced area. Regardless, the far right will see this backlash as an endorsement of their ideology and continue appealing to the same disenfranchised voters who have repeatedly lost faith in the current government to address their most basic needs of housing, healthcare, and stability.
The same groups have also been trying to import the toxic culture wars from the US and UK. Earlier this year, a friend of mine was part of several anti-fascist counter protests against far-right gatherings in Cork city. The far-right agitators entered the city library on several occasions, screaming at and harassing workers for “grooming young people”, a common attack used to baselessly link LGBTQ literature to pedophilia.
Several LGBTQ educational books in the Young Adult section, most notably ‘This Book Is Gay’ by Juno Dawson, were singled out by the agitators for allegedly containing explicit content. There is no material in the book that would suggest its content is inappropriate for young people, and it’s telling that the protesters exclusively targeted books aimed at the LGBTQ community.
Despite these clear signs of aggression and defamation, the police made no arrests and, on most occasions, allowed their hostilities to go unchallenged, fearful of escalating the situation. This hands-off strategy was used by the guards on almost every instance of the far-right protesting throughout the country this year, while many counter-protestors faced threats of arrest and disruption. On one occasion, the guards gave an anti-vaccine, anti-LGBT protestor an escort into a Dublin library, where he harassed and intimidated staff while counter-protestors were forbidden from entering.
At the most recent library protest, tense exchanges and occasional threats of violence were made. When my friend told the fascists to “fuck off back to whatever hole you crawled out of”, the guards took her aside and threatened to arrest her immediately if she did not leave the scene. Considering that the guards were content allowing library workers to be screamed at and accused of grooming children, to then threaten someone for challenging this disgusting behaviour illustrates their priorities in keeping the peace. As my friend then pointed out, “We wouldn’t even be here if you had been doing your jobs right”.
Intentionally or not, the culmination of destructive violence, migrant resentments, and failed state responses has become a flashpoint for Ireland’s anxieties writ large. Since then, debates around policing culture and immigration have dominated the media landscape. Some pundits have confessed their desire for more ‘law and order’ style policing in the country to make them feel safer, as if arming the Guards with water cannons and tasers will do anything besides martyr the young men whose identities are tethered to their contempt for authority. We already know from countries like the US that an increase in aggressive policing does not always correlate to increased safety.
This is not to invalidate the all-too-real concerns of Dubliners that their city is no longer safe to live in or that the policing response to the riots was a shocking failure of containment. It does illustrate that the government is eager to focus on treating the symptoms of violence, and not their causes. This is because doing so would mean admitting that their entire governing strategy up to now has been the exact reason for these tensions boiling over. The arrogance with which Irish people assumed the far right could never embed themselves here is a testament to our naivete. We have seen this pattern play out ad nauseam in just about every major nation. When the state commodifies large services of the economy (such as housing) at the expense of guaranteeing said service as an essential need for its citizens, it strikes a very deep nerve with the electorate. When they feel that there is no genuine political alternative to this repressive system, the populist right swoops in and diverts this legitimate anger away from the state and towards the most marginalised in society.
After the fires had died and the crowd had dispersed, the global far-right watched it all and knew they had struck gold. In Dublin’s smouldering buses and smashed shop windows, they found their latest world-building project. One that would, in partnership with Ireland’s native fringe extremists, work to engineer a culture of fear and intimidation towards ‘the Other’. They will do everything in their power to divert ordinary people’s anger away from Ireland’s ineffective neoliberal government and their decades-long abandonment of social policies to alleviate poverty in place of appeasing the interests of private capital and direct it towards some of the country’s most impoverished and maligned peoples.
Worryingly, its usefulness as a story has already been exhausted by some media outlets. The BBC, The Washington Post, and Al Jazeera have since thinned their reporting on the violence and its aftermath. They’ve handed that torch over to disgraced Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose X/Twitter broadcast framing the riots as a catalyst for the Great Replacement Theory has amassed 9 million views. In an interview with Steve Bannon (the architect behind Trump’s 2016 campaign), Carlson professed his belief that “the Irish government is trying to replace the people of Ireland with people from the Third World. Obviously”. The line would make for an amazingly dark comedy, if it weren’t told with sincerity. Boris Johnson has chipped in to say that “the lovely and happy people of Dublin” were “engulfed in race riots”. Conservative commentator and failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro even picked up the story. When he isn’t giddily comparing Palestinians to sewer rats, Mr.Shapiro is martyring Conor McGregor as an Irish patriot and working class hero being censored by his own government. None of these terminally insecure bigots have even the most tepid concern for the plight of ordinary Irish people in their hearts. They’re motivated by nothing but attention and profit, and the last thing Ireland needs is a class of sociopaths fostering suffering and division and fetishising the repressive Christian theocracy this country once was.
At the time of writing, the principal suspect in the school stabbing remains in an induced coma, with Gardai unable to question him.
It is precisely in this crucial window of time that the Irish government, the Gardai, and the media class must do everything in their power to contain the spread of disinformation, arrest and investigate all perpetrators of the violence, and work on educating the Irish public on the dangers of the far-right.
Specifically, the role of social media in spreading far right propaganda must be investigated. X/Twitter was by far the largest gathering space for these bigots on the night, with many of their most incendiary posts gaining several hundred thousand views.
Most critically, every modern woe in Irish society has flowed downstream from our dire housing crisis. Dublin is among Europe's most unaffordable cities, containing some of the most concentrated levels of poverty in the country. An entire generation increasingly feels like home ownership is a nostalgic relic. Waiting lists for GP visits and surgeries are forever climbing, as are rents and food prices.
It is absolutely essential that the bedrock issues animating these ugly tensions are addressed after years of neglect by the State. If the Irish government continues to focus solely on tougher policing and cleaning up Dublin’s streets while ignoring the conditions of inequality and alienation that led to this point, the rage of November 23rd will only become a precursor to something much darker.
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