In autumn 2023, the world woke up to the existence of a new face of Irish politics: a violent far right. On a cold November night in Dublin, young men apparently inspired by inflammatory online calls to arms, attacked police officers protecting a crime scene where it’s alleged a foreign-born Irish citizen had stabbed young children and a care worker (the case is currently before the courts). It was the worst riot in modern Irish history.
Police vehicles, a tram and a bus were burned. Shops were ransacked by looting mobs. That night’s disorder and the level of hatred on display were a shock to Ireland’s leaders, to ordinary people and to many of those who had recently moved to the country. A year later, the far right has altered the political landscape, and yet its candidates failed to gain a single seat in the general election at the end of November. Will it tighten its grip in Ireland as it has across other countries in Europe, or retreat to the fringes?
I encountered the issues underlying this new political reality last December reporting a protest outside a disused pub near Google’s enormous European headquarters in Dublin. The protesters said they were there because they believed the pub was going to be used to house asylum seekers rather than homeless families, as the authorities claimed.
When I asked for an interview for the BBC documentary I was working on the protesters said they didn’t talk to the mainstream media with its ‘fake news’. Two weeks later I was back reporting from the now roofless and blackened pub after it had been burnt down in an arson attack.
Unrest flared again in July when a protest against a planned centre for 550 asylum seekers in Coolock, Dublin, turned violent. In the months between, other planned asylum centres across the country were set alight. These incidents are all evidence that immigration has become as prominent an issue as those it is linked to: a housing shortage, the cost of living and healthcare provision.
New demographics
In the last two decades, Ireland’s historic tradition of emigration has reversed. Today, about a million of the 5.1m population were born abroad. The vast majority of immigrants are working legally in healthcare, IT, hospitality and consruction. But it’s recent immigration that has had the greatest political impact. More than 100,000 Ukrainians have arrived since Russia invaded their country, and the number of asylum seekers from Middle Eastern, African and other countries relying on the state to house them has more than quadrupled in three years.
In response, the government has taken to housing asylum seekers in hotels in rural communities and state-run tented villages. Dublin authorities have erected barricades on Mount Street, not far from the parliament, the Dáil, to prevent people camping, refugees among them. The numbers of homeless jumped by 16 per cent in the year to March 2024 and a leaked government report suggested that Ireland was short of more than 250,000 homes.
In the face of this rapid social change and the increased pressures on housing and other infrastructure, attitudes are mixed. Two thirds of Irish believe that immigrants should be welcomed and Ireland was recently estimated to have some of the most positive attitudes to immigration in the EU. Yet two-thirds also favour increased immigration controls.
Far-right elements have played on this concern. On the night of the riots last November, extremist commentators began posting online, surmising incorrectly about the origins of the alleged attacker, according to Ciaran O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that specialises in online disinformation and extremism. O’Connor says sample posts included: ‘If it turns out to be a foreigner-related incident, it’s time to get the petrol bombs and baseball bats and kill each and everyone that stands in our way.’
Tech-enabled far-right
Notably, O’Connor says, false speculation online that the incident was a Muslim terror attack came within an hour from a leading British activist. In the aftermath, Elon Musk posted that ‘the Irish PM hates the Irish people’ and Tucker Carlson, the American former Fox News host, suggested the Irish government was trying to replace the Irish population with people from ‘third-world countries’.
US commentary of this sort on Ireland is part of a wider narrative, according to Mark Little, formerly Washington correspondent with RTE and now an adviser on the impact of technology on democracy.
‘A lot of far-right activity from the US over the last couple of years has been focused on the idealised version of what it meant to be white and Irish,’ he said. ‘It’s no accident that the tech-enabled far right have chosen countries such as Ireland and those in Scandinavia that, for them, are representative of an idealised Aryan nation of the past that has been over-run.’
These messages may have found a receptive audience in certain quarters in Ireland, but not among many of its voters so far. In local elections this year, far-right independent candidates won only 5 of the 949 seats contested. In the late November general election, no far-right candidate got close to winning any of the 174 seats in the Dáil.
Among those disappointed was Phil Sutcliffe, who once boxed for Ireland at the Olympics and is credited with discovering the professional Mixed Martial Arts fighter Conor McGregor. He won a seat in the local elections in June on a hard-right platform. ‘We shouldn’t be putting up every Tom, Dick and Harry,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got the facilities for our own. People are lying on trolleys in our hospitals.’ His message failed to win him a seat in the general election.
Poor electoral showing
Several reasons underlie the poor electoral showing for the far right. Unlike other European countries, Ireland has no mainstream political party offering a platform for their views. Nor does Irish politics yet have an identifiable far-right figurehead. But that doesn’t mean the far right and the concerns they have exploited – housing and immigration – haven’t impacted Irish politics.
Twelve months ago Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald was on course to be Ireland’s first female taoiseach (prime minister), with her party also in government in Northern Ireland. That changed, in part, because a rump of traditional Sinn Féin voters deserted the party. Many of them want to see an end to immigration while the country is in the midst of a housing crisis, and regarded the party’s policies as inadequate.
In the general election Sinn Féin won 19 per cent of the vote and performed much better than in summer’s local elections. But not sufficiently so to be part of the new ruling coalition. Instead, the lead parties of the previous coalition, the centrist Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – both of which also won around 20 per cent of the vote – will lead the next government.
Far-right candidates may not attract votes in big numbers but that doesn’t tell the whole story, according to Kevin Cunningham, lecturer in politics at Technological University, Dublin. ‘Ireland has the highest number of elected independent candidates of any European country,’ he said – 9 per cent of candidates returned to the Dáil in November were independents. ‘People who support independent candidates tend to be on the conservative side.’
Ireland has liberalised its laws on abortion and LGBT issues in recent years, and many of those who articulate far right views are conservative Catholics who believe the major political parties no longer represent them.
Another reason the far right performed poorly in November is that the main parties chose to play down immigration as a campaign issue. The authorities also shifted their approach: there were no announcements of proposed new accommodation centres for asylum seekers in the run up to polling day and street barricades were erected to prevent asylum seekers camping in public places. The government also announced that the financial support for Ukrainian refugees would be reduced.
These measures seem to have removed the heat from the issue of immigration for now. The scale of protests at proposed asylum centres has reduced and those that remain are sporadic and appear legitimate.
An RTE exit poll found that immigration was a major issue for only 6 per cent of voters. Daithí Doolan, an unsuccessful Sinn Féin election candidate, said: ‘The far right, despite beating their drums, have been humbled by this election. I’m proud to say our democracy, I hope, has seen them off.’
An enduring threat
That confidence is not shared by all. Professor David Farrell, professor of politics at University College Dublin, noted how the three main parties have adopted ‘a more hard-nose strategy’, adding: ‘The threat from the far right has been parked rather than extinguished .. but it will come back as there is only direction that Ireland’s immigrant numbers can go and that is up.’