Ireland's far-right pushes its 'invasion' propaganda
Several hundred residents of the East Wall area protest about Government policy on the use of empty office buildings in the area as temporary housing for refugees. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin
“Communities all over Ireland are getting absolutely pummelled… invaded.”
So said a man who broadcast a video online live from a recent protest against housing asylum seekers in East Wall, Dublin, though he doesn't hail from the area himself.
In the comments section, people agreed, saying: “It’s an invasion of military-aged males."
Invasion. The word keeps coming up in certain quarters online to describe the arrival to Ireland of asylum seekers and people fleeing war zones, conflict or persecution.
Invasion denotes a planned or coordinated act by a group of people, something akin to an army or an enemy force, seeking to cause harm or overrun an area.
In recent weeks, local community groups across Ireland have expressed concerns over their area’s capacity to house a sudden influx of hundreds of people and the lack of consultation or dialogue from the State.
But these groups aren’t calling them ‘invaders’.
That’s the preferred description of far-right figures, seeking to present an extreme worldview of dangerous foreigners, traitorous politicians and helpless locals.
Often these figures and groups try to insert themselves, online and offline, into local communities. They exploit locals’ concerns and further their own agenda.
This has been evident in protests against direct provision centres for years. Oughterard, Rooskey, Killarney.
With East Wall the latest example, it’s worth exploring the online world of Ireland’s far-right.
These figures and groups support political ideologies and belief systems that combine overt forms of nationalism, racism and xenophobia.
Ethnonationalism is a constant in these spaces, best encapsulated by the phrase “Ireland for the Irish".
Far-right communities use it to advocate for an Ireland that is a monocultural nation for white Irish people only.
They demonstrate these beliefs by describing minorities with dehumanising language, using disinformation to incite tensions and accusing asylum seekers or others of conspiring to threaten, ‘invade’ or ‘replace’ local populations.
The ‘Great Replacement’ theory is a conspiracy theory popularised and mainstreamed by far-right groups that argues that white populations are being deliberately or negligently replaced through migration and the growth of minority communities.
Among those to promote the notion of the “replacement” of Irish people is Hermann Kelly, leader of the Irish Freedom Party, who was present at protests in East Wall.
Online, Kelly has repeatedly described immigration into Ireland as a “new plantation.”
In Ireland, far-right groups were at the forefront of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests during the pandemic, supporting their efforts with disinformation campaigns riddled with false claims, conspiracy theories and rhetoric threatening public officials.
Now, they are increasingly turning their attention towards targeting LGBTQ+ communities, sharing homophobic claims that there is some sinister agenda to turn children gay or trains via education and the media or claiming there is some link between homosexuality and pedophilia.
This trend mirrors a worrying development first seen in similar groups in the US in recent years.
In Ireland, the online communities espousing these views are predominantly made up of people with few formal connections other than perhaps following the same YouTube channel, being members of the same chat group on Telegram or being paid subscribers to the same figure who produces content denigrating asylum seekers.
Some are also members of formal political parties and groups that support these views.
Far-right communities actively publish comments, create videos and produce memes featuring harmful and false claims about asylum seekers, and minorities more broadly, on platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter.
The language of “invasion” is popular throughout. These platforms have community guidelines that, when violated, should result in content being removed.
All too often however, this whack-a-mole approach is only marginally effective on these platforms. And on other platforms, such as Telegram, there are next to no guidelines enforced.
Telegram is the primary platform for the far-right in Ireland, as we have documented in our analysis at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that researches disinformation, hate, and extremism online.
It is alarmingly easy for people to become engaged in these spaces. Passively, through recommender algorithms, or actively, by searching online with just a few keywords, people can become exposed to extremist communities and hateful material.
People often share content produced by far-right figures without realising it or recognising their agenda, helping to mainstream these viewpoints and support these figures.
This is the case with much direct provision content online, produced and distributed by figures who might refer to themselves as “housing activists” or “citizen journalists”.
Funding Ireland’s far-right ecosystem also plays host to formal groups and figures who use their platform to develop political parties and solicit donations from their supporters.
The National Party and the Irish Freedom Party receive funding from party memberships and donation buttons on their website, though this is also a common means of fundraising for most parties.
Derek Blighe, a far-right activist who has spent months campaigning against Ukrainian refugees and was present in Killarney and East Wall recently, has stated that he plans to launch a political party and he is already accepting membership fees online.
Far-right figures make use of the full suite of donation and fundraising tools available online such as Paypal, Patreon and SubscribeStar.
In recent weeks, Philip Dwyer, a former candidate for the National Party, has produced videos from East Wall, Killarney and elsewhere, warning about the “invasion” of Ireland.
Accompanying each video is a link where viewers can become paid subscribers to support him.
These tools offer little in the form of transparency, meaning we don’t know if such figures within Ireland are receiving international support.
In separate research with my organisation earlier this year, I documented how the Canadian truckers’ anti-government protest movement received support from far-right groups around the world through these same donation platforms.
Far-right figures routinely cry foul and claim everyone is now being branded as “far-right” or called an extremist for expressing concerns over asylum seekers in Ireland.
Such lazy characterisations like this are unhelpful, misguided and simply not true.
More importantly, this is just a ploy by these figures to understate their own racist beliefs.
It’s an attempt to suggest to people that it’s okay to refer to asylum seekers as “invaders” and to claim their viewpoint is representative of most of Ireland.
Thankfully, it’s not. But the State must do more to listen to the concerns of the people in East Wall and elsewhere and consult with locals over their questions about integration, cost and capacity.
Most pressing, in the midst of a housing and cost of living crisis, the State must do something about these concerns.
The alternative is that other figures and groups, like those profiled in this piece, will step in to offer their own solutions and persuade people who have raised these concerns that mainstream politicians no longer speak for them.
Online, this is already happening. Far-right communities openly talk of an invasion and a plantation.
They supplement these remarks with disinformation and conspiracy theories about replacement, fuelling remarks that refer to government ministers and politicians as traitors and promoting extremist parties as the alternative.
There must be a political solution.
