May 12, 2025 • 34 mins
Robert sits down with Irish author Padraig O Ruairc to discuss the growth of Ireland's far right anti-immigrant movement since COVID, and what can be done to stop it.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
it Happening Here, which is normally focused on the United
States because that's where we all live. However, we do
like to cover the rest of the world and the
ongoing struggle against the global far right movement. And today
we're going to talk about a place that we don't
cover often on this show, Ireland. And it's not because
(00:27):
Ireland doesn't have a problem with the far right, because
as our guest today is going to talk to us
about it, most certainly does. And so I would like
to welcome to the program a great guy, Padre O'Rourke,
author of Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and
the far right in Ireland. Thank you so much for
being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
No problem, delice to be here. Thanks very much, Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, you know, there's this attitude and I think, as
you noted in some note use of the long, there's
a degree to which it's true that Ireland has some
resistance to the far right that has led to maybe
it growing slower or taking a little longer to get
off the ground to the same extent that it has
in the UK or the US. As a result, of
kind of the history of Irish Republicanism, but that's not
(01:11):
comprehensively true across the island, and that that's you know,
certainly has not stopped it from having some pretty significant problems,
which we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah, Sadly, as long as fascism has existed, since Mussolini's
March on Rome and his political rise, we have had
fascist groups here of one sort or another. We've had
fascist groups in Ireland that were pro British and politics,
fascist groups in Ireland that were pro Irish or Irish independents.
You know, obviously we were neutral during World War Two.
(01:41):
We weren't occupied by Nazi Germany or anything like that.
We did have one very big fascist group here in
the nineteen thirties, the Blue Shirts, who were extremely violent
and got sixty eight members of parliament elected. They were
the main political opposition. They were kind of the largest
non governing fascist organization in the world per capita. But
as you said, Irish republicanism has kind of inoculated us
(02:04):
against a lot of the far right stuff we'd have
seen in Britain and Germany and France in the nineties
because you know, while the conflict was going on in
the North of Ireland. Basically, if you were an angry
young man with very strong patriotic feelings who was given
towards political violence, you would probably end up in the
Provisional IRA and their politics were very left wing and internationalist.
(02:28):
I mean I remember going into their political wing Shinfein's
bookshop in Dublin in the nineteen nineties and it was
all pictures of you know, yes Er Arafat, and it
was pictures of Nelson Mandela and like the Zapatistas, and
you know, it was very much about Irish independence being
an anti colonial struggle. You do, of course get like
(02:50):
on the opposite side of that, on kind of the
loyalist pro British side. In the North, you did get
as kind of reaction to that, pro British paramilitaries, the
Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDA, Ulster Defense Association, the Ulster
Volunteer Force, the UVF. They would have linked up with
neo Nazi groups like Combat eighteen in England to get guns,
(03:11):
to get finances, to get their hands on explosives and
things which were easier to get in England than in
the North of Ireland. But really we never had a
party here, either in the north or in the south
that was as successful as groups like the Front National
in France or the British National Party in England. Both
sadly in recent years, certainly in the last ten years,
(03:32):
the far right are kind of back. They're alive and kicking,
and they're taken to the streets.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
And so what do you credit that? I mean, it
seems like there's a mix of things. First off, you
suddenly do have people immigrating into Ireland from elsewhere in
the world in significant numbers for you know, the first
time in quite a while. And then on the other head,
it sounds like there's also the kind of as we
see everywhere, all the conscious exporting of far right figures
(03:59):
in id is into the country.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah. Well, Ireland's greatest export was always people, and you know,
we a few Irish American communities in you know, Chicago,
New York, you know, all over Ebi, Irish people in
Australia and Canada and England, all over the continent. So
in the early you know, twenty tens, we started like
there had always been a trickle of migration and people
(04:22):
coming back and forward, like we had some you know
Vietnamese refugees here. We had you know, historically we had
Russian Jews coming here and so on, escaping pilgrims in Zaras, Russia.
But really the first time that we had very large
numbers of people coming was in the twenty teens, and
it was things like the Mediterranean migrant crisis. It was
people fleeing climate change in Africa, the Syrian civil War,
(04:45):
Teliban in Afghanistan, and more recently, of course Putant's invasion
of Ukraine and the fire Heights. Had always been these
tiny little fringe parties and figures. It was a very
active anti fascist group here called Anti Fascist Action Ireland.
And anytime these groups tried to organize or take to
the streets, they were challenged and they were run off.
But really what brought them all together Ireland's kind of
(05:07):
attempt to unite the right was the COVID nineteen pandemic,
because we had one of the strictest COVID lockdowns in Europe.
You're talking about. Originally you weren't allowed to travel more
than two kilometers from your home. That's one of the
quarter miles for you Americans, and basically you could go
to the store, but other than that, you couldn't you know,
(05:29):
you couldn't travel very far. And of course everyone was
locked at home with their with their internet and started
going down the rabbit hole. And what we saw was
the anti vaxer COVID conspiracy movement took to the streets
in Ireland very quickly, and that brought together all of
the disparate tiny far right and neo fascist factions, the
(05:50):
closet neo Nazis, the anti vaxers, the fundamentalist Catholics like
the Society of Saint Pias, the tenth, the sovereign citizen types,
the people who were on about five G conspiracies and
chemtrails all got onto the streets, all got active on
the Irish left and the anti fascist side. We kind
of dropped the ball because we were following the healthcare
advice and the cops were quite happy to ignore the
(06:14):
far right mobilizing on the street. But there were striking
workers like Debenhams and Clearies who'd been striking before COVID struck,
and the cops were going up and moving these trade
unionissan saying, you know, you're breaking the pandemic. So it
wasn't released even Lee and you know, suddenly, for the
first time during the pandemic, we were starting to see
groups of three four hundred far right in Dublin, which
(06:35):
doesn't sound like much, but I mean last weekend there
was a march in Dublin City and they had probably
around five thousand, maybe up to ten thousand people marching,
and that's something we haven't seen here since the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, and that's such I think an important point. The
degree to which, because this is a global issue, the
degree to which everyone else attempting to abide by public
safety measures during COVID nineteen strengthened the far right because
they were out in the streets this kind of organizing
equivalent of getting to steal a march on the enemy.
It makes sense to me that it was because in
(07:10):
the US that was interrupted at least by the George
Floyd uprisings. But in Ireland, you know, it seems like
there was a much more significant period of time where
these folks were essentially acting and organizing unopposed, and the
police were, when they chose to act at all, acting
against folks on the opposite side of things who were
organizing during COVID.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Yeah, it was let kind of rum belong to the police.
The cops didn't really start taking action on any of
this stuff until I would say it was nearly November
twenty twenty three when they had this rally called I
think it was called to the Doll or maybe slightly
earlier than that. In September twenty twenty three. The Doll
is the Gaeacord for our Parliament, and basically the dregs
(07:52):
of the COVID movement kind of came together again. You
had all these tiny far rice and fascist parties popping up,
and the best thing of about them is they all
get into furior fights. They all start arguing with each
other about who's going to be the leader, and they
haven't united. But they took to the streets in the autumn,
in the fall of twenty twenty three, and there was
one really violent and disgusting riot outside the outside the
(08:16):
Parliament where the far right were throwing bottles of your
line at politicians trying to get in, were shouting racial
abuse at anybody who wasn't white, who was working in
the building as a cleaner or a parliamentary assistant or anything.
Any opposition politicians they could see. They were screaming at
them in imitation of you guys. And January the sixth
(08:39):
they had built a mock noose and they were using
it to hang effigies of politicians, and you also had
police cops being attacked for the first time by the
far right. Really, there'd been one or two other incidents,
but it's only when cops started getting attacked by them
and politicians were being directly their safety was being threatened,
then the cops start to act, maybe in the last
(09:01):
eighteen months or so, but it was really closing the
stable door about five years after the violent fire right
horse had already bolted.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, and you know, so I'm kind of thinking here,
this is part of why you've started to see you know,
guys like we started this conversation before being recording talking
about Tucker Carlson coming over to talk to Connor McGregor,
who's becoming an increasingly large part of this. And I
wonder if it's if it's maybe these these different kind
(09:29):
of international folks in the international movement sort of sniffing that,
you know, they're hoping that the cancer has metastasized, so
to speak. I mean, is that kind of what you
how you see it?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Well, they definitely have an influence here. I mean the politics,
the talking points, the buzzwords that the far right use
in Ireland have all been learned from the likes of
Alec Jones, have all been learned from watching you know,
crazy stuff on Twitter. And it's all American and British
(10:01):
farrelight talking points that are being replayed here. Stuff about
the Clergy Plan, stuff about the Great Replacement and and
so on. I mean, one hundred years ago was the
protocols of the Elders of Zion, and now they're just
spinning the same conspiracy, same talking points again. Like for example,
one of the things we had here was we had
a party called the Irish People's Party and some of
(10:23):
our campaigners were really fundamentalist Latin mass set of Acantas Catholics,
and they were going down and protesting about drag queen
story time at Irish libraries. We don't even have drag
queen story time. These guys have been so inspired by
what was happening in America and I just went in
and started taking books off the shelves, you know, and
(10:46):
anything to do with any LGBT plus team, even basic
sex education guides for kids. Stuff that's pretty mild and
perfectly happy to give my own my own kids, and
I'm not the most woke guy, but it's not ripping
them up. They'd start taking them out in the library,
filming themselves, burning books at home. It was really crazy stuff.
(11:06):
And at that stage again you did get anti anti
fascist organizing. But what you kind of get is figures
like Connor McGregor being amplified by the likes of Elon
Musk being amplified by you know, Tucker Carlson coming over
interviewing him, or Donald Trump of course inviting him to
the to the White House, I mean the Prime Minister
(11:27):
of Ireland as we'd say, Gail, like the teacher Meehall Martin.
He was invited to the White House on the twelfth
of March. But the guy that Trump chose to actually
have there on Patrick's Day itself was of course Connor McGregor.
And McGregor has links to I wouldn't say far right figures,
but certainly very populist figures. And McGregor has kind of
(11:48):
started he's become God pilled and he started rambling on
about you know, rosary beads and the power of Christ
and all this kind of stuff, and he doesn't strike
me as a particularly religious man. And now with the
head of soccer Carlson, you know, and Elon Muskin others,
he says he's going to run for president, and we
have a presidential election coming up here in six months.
(12:09):
Did you watch the interview, Robert.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No, No, I haven't yet. I caught some clips of
it all on social media. Yeah, but I haven't gotten
to sit through the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It's wild. Bear's absolutely no resemblance like what Connor puts
across bears no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland.
Like he starts ranting about how the police are so corrupt.
Element that's true, but he starts talking about how the
traffic cor the road cops who give you like speeding
tickets and stuff, they're the most violent and repressive and
(12:37):
all this kind of stuff. And it just so happens
that Connor McGregor has a string of speeding violations in
his sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson chips in and says, oh,
my god, you've got these armed cops and they're they're
repressing the Irish people, but they're letting these immigrants do whatever.
My dad was a copier for thirty years. My dad
(12:57):
was on the border in the nineteen seventies with the
iron ray shooting at him and he didn't even get
a gun. Her cops aren't armed. But Carlson is just
trying this stuff out, being educated about it, and he
says at the very end of the interview, McGregor says, oh,
there's there's been a government kind of hit job on me.
They're planning to bring me down. What he's referring to
(13:18):
is a civil trial now, not a criminal trial. A
civil trial that Connor McGregor lost when he was brought
to court for alleged rape and sexual assault and the
jury believed he's he's accuser a woman called a hairdresser
called Nikita Hand, and Connor McGregor was forced to pay
damages of a quarter of a million euro to her,
(13:38):
plus costs in the Irish High Court, which are about
one and a half million euro. Now to you or me,
that would be you some of money. To Connor McGregor,
that's nothing. And I have to say, for legal reasons
he is appealing it. But the reality is that standing
in the way of any political ambitions, Connor McGregor has,
and we just had here in the last six hour.
(13:58):
Last year, we had a lot local election for like
local councils, a general election, a European parliamentary election, any
one of those. All he needed to do was put
up one hundred and fifty quid and he could have stood.
He will be on the ballot. In fact, under Irish
electoral law, he could have stood in every single constituency
in the country and he didn't stand for election. And
(14:20):
now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the Irish
presidential race, and he's not. It's just it's an exceptionally
difficult ballot to get on. You can't just stump up
the money in America and become a third party candidate
or a writing candidate or whatever. That doesn't work here.
You need the support of a large number of democratically
elected politicians to get there. So I think McGregor's real
(14:43):
aim is not to get into the presidency, because really
he can't. He's not even going to be on the ballot.
But I think he wants to be Ireland's Ireland's answer
to Tommy Robinson. And I suppose if Tommy Robinson is
the answer, what the hell was the question.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, well, we'll get into that more in a second.
I do want throw to ads here really quickly, and
then we'll continue to talk about Connor for a moment
we're back. So you say he wants to be the
Irish answer to Tommy Robinson, which is such a like
(15:21):
aim a higher man like that. It's it's odd to
me like I had kind of I had kind of
been worried because we've had so many cases of guys
in the United States who start out as these absolute
jokes on the far right and then you just see
them pick up more and more attention over time, and
that was kind of my worry with Connor. But but
(15:44):
you're saying you're kind of concerned more that he's going
to continue to be like an organizing presence on the
far right rather than someone who has much of a
chance of picking up actual like political office.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah. I think with Connor it's it's all about his ego,
which is probably what you'd expect from an MM star.
You know, there's going to be an element of you know,
ego and show voting in kfab and so on. I mean,
it's interesting and he's interview with Tucker Carlson. He was
giving out that the Minister of Education, you know, isn't
a teacher, they're unqualified for the job. And the Irish
government's Minister for Health isn't a doctor. And it's like, well,
(16:17):
what qualifies you to be president? Connor? You're a former
plumber turned for MMA fighter, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, getting hit in the face.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah. And we've we've had ministers of education who were
teachers and ministers of health who were doctors who happened
to be totally awful. The reality is like, we have
a pr system, We've you know, a very democratic and
fair process, and we have more than a two party
system here. But I think, like as emerged during the
during that civil rate trial which McGregor lost, you know,
(16:45):
he had to admit to his cocaine use during it,
he has been sending out kind of fevered I would
imagine cocaine fever trip tweet saying as President of Ireland,
I have the power too, And it's like, man, the
election hasn't even happened yet, he's way ahead of himself.
He's not going to get in the ballot. He knows
that he wants to present it. And I mean the
(17:06):
fact that he's even talking about getting in the ballot
shows he doesn't understand the constitutional system here, which it's
not like Britain. We have a written constitution. It's not
that complex if you know the basics of the law.
He's never going to get in the ballot, but he
wants to present it that he's being denied the opportunity
to stand and unfortunately, what we have around the country
is an increasingly violent anti immigrant street movement that whenever
(17:32):
these what we call him here IPASS in International Protection
Applicant Services, these IPASS or refugee centers. Basically, when these
are picked as places of accommodation by the government while
these people's applications for refugee status they have to stay
somewhere while these are being examined, you tend to get
large protests in towns, villages, cities all over Ireland. Sometimes
(17:56):
he's turned quite violent. Sometimes there's been more than thirty
arson attacks on these centers. And I think what Connor
McGregor ultimately wants is he wants to be able to
tour the country attending these protests and having everyone queuing
up to take selfies with him and telling him what
a great hero he is, and I think I think
that's he's ultimately yeah, yeah, that makes sense, and he's
(18:18):
obviously he's going to grift off the back of it.
The guy has money already. But it was so funny
this multime multi millionaire being interviewed by Tucker Carlson saying
we're going to start fundraising from my campaign. It's like,
and you have more money than you could ever spend
on political posters and buyers and adverts, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So it almost sounds like this is like a retirement
plan for him, right, Like he's he's he's clearly past
his prime in terms of the getting hit in the
face thing for money, and now he's sort of moving
on to like grifting off of these far right events
and probably traveling just ahead of a series of riots,
you know, Like that's that's it seems like what's in
his future.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, And I mean we've had some you know, at
the time of an outbreak of rioting in Dublin anti
imigrant violence which caused twenty million euros worth of damage
and you know, trash the city center in November of
twenty twenty three, Connor and I'm not saying he directly
caused it. But he was tweeting at the same time
Ireland is a war. Yeah, and around the same time
he was tweeting like any property that's been taken over
(19:17):
by foreigners evaporated. I think really his plan is to
kind of if he can represent himself as a political
martyr figure. He's hoping that it will overshadow the you know,
his loss in the rape case, and he is of
course appealing that and claiming he has new evidence and everything.
But I think really that's what it's about.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about the way
far right violence has looked in Ireland, like when these
when these protests have really kicked off, because it seems
like there's been this kind of fairly significant acceleration in
the last three or four years in terms of it,
particularly arsynotacks. And one thing that I was kind of
struck by in your notes was the degree to which like,
(20:00):
no one's been arrested for any of these yet.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
No, what happens. These started around twenty eighteen, so maybe
just before COVID you had one or two of them,
And my book went to print in December twenty twenty four,
so I stopped counting in December and by then I
had over thirty arson attacks and there hasn't been a
single conviction for any of them. So it's when usually
(20:24):
former hotels that have been closed down with years are
that the government moves in or some local person moves
in to renovate them and use them as one of
these centers. They'll just go up and smoke in the
middle of the night. And I mean, we have already
a very significant homeless problem here. I mean there's more
than ten thousand people homeless in Dublin, both Irish and refugee,
(20:46):
and I mean that probably sounds small to someone listening
in a big American city. We thought we had a
housing crisis when we had two thousand people homeless, and
we got more than ten almost fifteen thousand people homeless now.
And some of these the immigrant protesters have actually burnt
down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people in the
(21:07):
mistake and belief that it was going to be used
for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to the housing crisis.
You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes. Sometimes
it's just pickets, sometimes it's graffiti. In the case of
Martin Kenny who's an opposition TD. He'd be from shin
Fein party. Most of your listeners would probably have heard
(21:28):
of an Irish Republican kind of left wing Irish Republican party.
There was a refugee center plan for where he lived
in Letram, and in fairness to him, he spoke out
against it and he condemned what he called, quote the
far right ideology that has been peddled in this country
about asylum seekers. A week later he was sleeping in
his house with his wife and kids, and his car
(21:51):
in the driveway was petrol band was firebanned, and they
came back a few months later and did it again
and he was forced to move house. So arson attacks
and politicians is something we haven't seen here since the
original fascists around in the thirties as well. And this
violence again, like as I said, there hasn't been a
single arrest. And I give you a perfect example. The
title for the book Burned Them Out is from an
(22:13):
event that happened in February twenty twenty three. A guy
stood up in front of a Garda police station here
in Fingles, which would be a big suburb of Dublin,
and there was a huge crowd of anti immigrant protesters around.
One of them was waving a swastika flag, and this
guy stood up in front of them with a megaphone
in front of the police station said there is no
point standing here outside the Garda station. The only way
(22:36):
to deal with refugees is to burn them out. Go
where they're fucking staying and burn down fucking cunts out.
That's a direct quote. And of course, had he been
threatening that violence against the guardy, had he been threatening
that violence against a private business or a politician, I
have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away.
But this masked guy threatening violence in arson was just
(22:57):
allowed to walk off, So there you go. They're certainly
not on the ball. And we've even had during the
COVID pandemic when there was a cop nearly killed that
had a firework shot at him during one of these riots.
The police commissioner in the South of Ireland, who's formerly
a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a very controversial
pro British police force that used to be in the North.
(23:20):
This guy's our new police commissioner down South, and he
tried to blame Republicans and the Ira for the violence
and left wing extremists for the violence that was happening,
and it was so clear that you know, Republicans, Irish
Republicans have been on the streets opposing these people and
their marches for years.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. Like the
actual organizing of the anti fascist movement in Ireland, how
is it kind of responded to the mean explosion in
some cases a literal explosion in far right violence on
the street, Like are you seeing it kind of reach
like New Heights or does it kind of seem like
(23:58):
it's unprepared for the moment that we're hitting, because, like
I mean, in the United States, it's kind of hard
to tell because things have changed so much since twenty twenty, right,
Like a lot of the fascist violence that we're seeing
is now explicitly from the state, and so there's just
not a lot of on the ground. There's not the
same kind of on the ground response to it that
(24:19):
you were seeing when it was groups like the Proud Boys.
And I'm wondering kind of how things have changed since
twenty eighteen in that regard in Ireland.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
I suppose, like if you think back as far as
twenty fifteen, Tommy Robinson, friend of the Pod, attempted to
organize He's Anti Islamic, He's Islamophobic Pigida movement tried to
launch a branch of it in Dublin and they couldn't
even get to their rallying point because there were five
thousand anti fascists on the street. They're against them, Irish Republicans,
(24:48):
Irish language activists, Muslim community from Dublin were their LGBT
activists and they couldn't even get to have their events.
So up until COVID, certainly the anti fascists and groups
like Antie Fascist Action Ireland were excellent at closing down
small groups. You have a lot of people who are
doing online research and exposing these people's sorted histories and
(25:11):
their international connections. So that's one thing we're pretty good at.
And what it turns out is that a lot of
these guys, like one of the main proponents of the
QAnon conspiracy theory here was a guy called Rowan Croft
who just happened to be a former British Army soldier.
So that doesn't fly too well in Ireland from somebody
standing up saying I'm a great Irish patriot and I'm
(25:32):
going to stop the foreigners, like, well, hang out a minute.
When you chose to fight in the military, you chose
to serve the Queen of England. So you have big
national groups like Anti Fascist Action, you have groups like
Anti Imperialist Action Ireland. Thankfully, as these protests have sprung
up around the country, these far right anti immigrant protests,
they have always been countered. And I'm thinking of in
(25:55):
Cork City when the library was being attacked and it
would actually had to be closed down for a period,
and it was the first time that the Court Library
had closed since the British burnt it down during our
revolution in the nineteen twenties. And you know, you had
a crowd of maybe one hundred far rights and people
on the opposite side, the anti fascist scene kept building
and building until by the end, and I was there
(26:16):
for some of these protests, we had four or five
hundred against them, and eventually we decided, right, we're going
to stand and protect the library. And that happened in
other places like Limerick, and it happened in Dublin, and
eventually the far right said, well, we can't even get
near the library to have our protest. Anymore, and they dissipated.
One thing that's very interesting here is the optics, and
sometimes on the lefts and on the anti fascist side
(26:38):
were not as good at the imagery and the using
new technology and stuff. And one thing you'll always see is,
you know when anti fascists are mobilizing in Ireland, and
you know they'll have often red flags, they'll have the
Palestinian flag, they'll have Irish left wing republican flags like
the plow and the stars, but often we don't carry
our national flag the tricolor as much. And of course
(27:00):
the far right love fetishizing flags and they have the green,
white and orange Irish tricolor everywhere. Often of course these
people are so ignorant they fly it wrong way around
and it's the orange, white and green, so it's like
vive lookout Divoir. It's the Ivory Coast flag if you
have it the wrong way. But it's interesting in some
of the clashes you'll have anti fascists with the Irish
(27:21):
flag and fascists with the Irish flag. But I think
just in terms of optics, it sometimes looks very bad
when the far right are able to clip out a
section of the opposing crowd and say, look, they have
Palestinian flags, they have all other LGBT Pride flags, but
they're not proud to be Irish. They don't have Irish flags,
and there could be some Irish flags kipped off of
the side. So these people in the far right are
(27:42):
very good at using the history of Irish politics and
resistance to Britain and using the imagery of that struggle
and co opping it. And I think it's very important
that we on the anti fascist side don't surrender any
of that to them. And I mean the Irish flag
what it stands for. The green bit is for Catholics
who want independence, the orange bit is for Protestants who
(28:02):
wanted to be linked with Britain, and the white was
for peace and unity. So it's a flag that at
it's for the essence, you know, talks about respecting a
religious minority of people from a colonial or or immigrant
background to arrived here a strangers. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, well I want to I want to continue this
discussion and then close things out, but first we've got
one more ad break.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
To do.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
So yeah, I kind of wanted to end this by
looking into a little like what are you kind of
looking for in the future, like in the in the
kind of the the next year or two in in Ireland,
like what are you what are you expecting? What do
you what are you worried to see? Like, yeah, what
what do you kind of see? Cut moving forward here.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
I think what's tending to happen now is genius out
of the bottle and far right message is spreading. And
you had this big far right rally of you know,
ten thousand and five to ten thousand people at its
maximum that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main
street in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards,
(29:12):
but it is worrying. I think we're going to see
that grow. And I think on the left sometimes and
particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea
that all this is a flash in the pan and
will organize a few big rallies and they'll go away.
They won't. This is like the National Front in Britain.
You know, these people are going to be around haunting
Irish politics for least a decade, and then they're never
going to fully go away. They'll pop back up again.
(29:36):
I think we're going to continue to see the regional protests,
and I think as well, we have started seeing the
Irish government, which is a coalition of two center right parties,
kind of tighten up their own language on immigration. We're
starting seeing an increasing number of deportations as well. The
police really still aren't fully on the ball. They are,
(29:59):
of course, being given new policing powers by the government
to deal with violent protests that are being issued with
things like, you know, new non legal technologies, you know,
pepper splay and extra equipment and body cameras that they
wouldn't have had before. But of course the classic thing
is that these will always be used as much, if
not more so against the left and the anti fascist
(30:20):
side than they will be against the racists. Thankfully, these groups,
you know, they're all in fighting with each other. They
have tried to do like electoral packs and to plan
out political strategies, but thankfully they're all so fixated on
wanting to be the furire that never really works. But
what I was going to say a minute ago is
that that ten thousand people, if there were that many
(30:41):
on the street, not everyone in that is far right.
You know, Some of the people are from working class
communities that have been betrayed by the government and have
been abandoned, and they are starting they've just fallen down
the rabbit hole. And I can think of an incident.
I was in the gym a couple of months back
and just sitting there, and there were a few guys.
Didn't know they were around chatting. Obviously we were in
(31:03):
the gym. None of us are in the sauna, none
of us have many clothes on, and none of these
guys had like questionable far right tattoos or anything like that.
But the conversation suddenly started about immigrants and how they
were bringing crime, and how they were bringing disease and
all this kind of stuff. And I listened to it
for a minute or two and I just stood up
and said, lads, everything you are saying about immigrants in
(31:23):
Ireland now is what was said about Irish people in
America in the nineteenth century and in England in like
the seventies and the eighties. So I think it's important
that even in our workplaces on public transport, when we
hear it this kind of talk, we call it out
if it's a friend of ours who's fallen down the
rabbit hole into these conspiracies. Because that's how their message
(31:44):
is spreading now. Often when you see people involved in
some of this anti immigrant rioting, they have no history
of involvement in far right groups, but it's that message
has spread beyond those groups thanks to our friends in
the nerd Reich. And I think if we have a
work colleague or a brother or somebody who falls into that,
but we don't abandon them, we don't immediately start calling
(32:06):
them a Nazi and whatever that, we try to talk
top them round to it. But look, I suppose the
thing is there is hope, and everywhere these people have organized,
there have been anti fascists there to meet them. I
think we need to get better at planning that in
a national scale. Of course, on the left you always
get this factionalism and in fighting. I'm not standing beside him,
he's tratskis well, I don't like his views in the north.
(32:28):
Whatever we need to kind of say, as long as
we're fighting with each other, the fascists are winning. Thankfully,
none of these people have ever gotten more than two
percent in an election. They have nobody elected in our
national parliament. They only have four or five, maybe six
councilors elected in the entire of the southern part of
the country and that's out of nine hundred and forty
(32:49):
nine councilors. But we can't just laugh at them. We
can't worry the CITA threat because when the Nazis stood
for election the first time, I think they only got
two percent of the vote as well, and look how
that turned out.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Well yeah, and as we've seen in the US, like
what starts as this tiny, tiny number of freaks and
weirdos can wind up being a mass movement if it's
not you know, cauterized, right, Like that's and that's that's
kind of the challenge in front of Irish anti fascists
right now is ensuring that that quarterization happens absolutely.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
And I mean, look, if you think of this, you know,
Elon Musks tip McGregor for president and we're all laughing
at it now, but you know, it wouldn't be the
first time that Elon Musk has tipped a reality TV
star with a questionable sexual and criminal history for high
office and they got.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
There, right yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, thank you so much.
Do you want to have anything you want to plug
here at the end of the episode, I mean your
book obviously.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, Well, obviously I'm not. I'm not on ex Twitter
anything like that. I don't have a substack or anything.
So just the main thing I want to plug is
my book Burned Them Out, a history of fascism and
the far right in Ireland. It is published by Bloomsbury
head of Zeus, so it should be available in any
to order via any bookshop. Obviously. If you are going
to support a bookshop, support a small independent one Robert
(34:07):
and Barnes and Noble. And if you are buying it online,
obviously buy it from direct from the publishers Bloomsbury. Don't
buy it off Amazon if you can, because God knows
Jeff Besis has enough money.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah certainly, bloody Well, thank you so much. And yeah
that's that's our episode. Everybody come back tomorrow and we'll
have another one.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening
All Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about
it Happening Here, which is normally focused on the United
States because that's where we all live. However, we do
like to cover the rest of the world and the
ongoing struggle against the global far right movement. And today
we're going to talk about a place that we don't
cover often on this show, Ireland. And it's not because
(00:27):
Ireland doesn't have a problem with the far right, because
as our guest today is going to talk to us
about it, most certainly does. And so I would like
to welcome to the program a great guy, Padre O'Rourke,
author of Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and
the far right in Ireland. Thank you so much for
being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
No problem, delice to be here. Thanks very much, Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, you know, there's this attitude and I think, as
you noted in some note use of the long, there's
a degree to which it's true that Ireland has some
resistance to the far right that has led to maybe
it growing slower or taking a little longer to get
off the ground to the same extent that it has
in the UK or the US. As a result, of
kind of the history of Irish Republicanism, but that's not
(01:11):
comprehensively true across the island, and that that's you know,
certainly has not stopped it from having some pretty significant problems,
which we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah, Sadly, as long as fascism has existed, since Mussolini's
March on Rome and his political rise, we have had
fascist groups here of one sort or another. We've had
fascist groups in Ireland that were pro British and politics,
fascist groups in Ireland that were pro Irish or Irish independents.
You know, obviously we were neutral during World War Two.
(01:41):
We weren't occupied by Nazi Germany or anything like that.
We did have one very big fascist group here in
the nineteen thirties, the Blue Shirts, who were extremely violent
and got sixty eight members of parliament elected. They were
the main political opposition. They were kind of the largest
non governing fascist organization in the world per capita. But
as you said, Irish republicanism has kind of inoculated us
(02:04):
against a lot of the far right stuff we'd have
seen in Britain and Germany and France in the nineties
because you know, while the conflict was going on in
the North of Ireland. Basically, if you were an angry
young man with very strong patriotic feelings who was given
towards political violence, you would probably end up in the
Provisional IRA and their politics were very left wing and internationalist.
(02:28):
I mean I remember going into their political wing Shinfein's
bookshop in Dublin in the nineteen nineties and it was
all pictures of you know, yes Er Arafat, and it
was pictures of Nelson Mandela and like the Zapatistas, and
you know, it was very much about Irish independence being
an anti colonial struggle. You do, of course get like
(02:50):
on the opposite side of that, on kind of the
loyalist pro British side. In the North, you did get
as kind of reaction to that, pro British paramilitaries, the
Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDA, Ulster Defense Association, the Ulster
Volunteer Force, the UVF. They would have linked up with
neo Nazi groups like Combat eighteen in England to get guns,
(03:11):
to get finances, to get their hands on explosives and
things which were easier to get in England than in
the North of Ireland. But really we never had a
party here, either in the north or in the south
that was as successful as groups like the Front National
in France or the British National Party in England. Both
sadly in recent years, certainly in the last ten years,
(03:32):
the far right are kind of back. They're alive and kicking,
and they're taken to the streets.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
And so what do you credit that? I mean, it
seems like there's a mix of things. First off, you
suddenly do have people immigrating into Ireland from elsewhere in
the world in significant numbers for you know, the first
time in quite a while. And then on the other head,
it sounds like there's also the kind of as we
see everywhere, all the conscious exporting of far right figures
(03:59):
in id is into the country.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah. Well, Ireland's greatest export was always people, and you know,
we a few Irish American communities in you know, Chicago,
New York, you know, all over Ebi, Irish people in
Australia and Canada and England, all over the continent. So
in the early you know, twenty tens, we started like
there had always been a trickle of migration and people
(04:22):
coming back and forward, like we had some you know
Vietnamese refugees here. We had you know, historically we had
Russian Jews coming here and so on, escaping pilgrims in Zaras, Russia.
But really the first time that we had very large
numbers of people coming was in the twenty teens, and
it was things like the Mediterranean migrant crisis. It was
people fleeing climate change in Africa, the Syrian civil War,
(04:45):
Teliban in Afghanistan, and more recently, of course Putant's invasion
of Ukraine and the fire Heights. Had always been these
tiny little fringe parties and figures. It was a very
active anti fascist group here called Anti Fascist Action Ireland.
And anytime these groups tried to organize or take to
the streets, they were challenged and they were run off.
But really what brought them all together Ireland's kind of
(05:07):
attempt to unite the right was the COVID nineteen pandemic,
because we had one of the strictest COVID lockdowns in Europe.
You're talking about. Originally you weren't allowed to travel more
than two kilometers from your home. That's one of the
quarter miles for you Americans, and basically you could go
to the store, but other than that, you couldn't you know,
(05:29):
you couldn't travel very far. And of course everyone was
locked at home with their with their internet and started
going down the rabbit hole. And what we saw was
the anti vaxer COVID conspiracy movement took to the streets
in Ireland very quickly, and that brought together all of
the disparate tiny far right and neo fascist factions, the
(05:50):
closet neo Nazis, the anti vaxers, the fundamentalist Catholics like
the Society of Saint Pias, the tenth, the sovereign citizen types,
the people who were on about five G conspiracies and
chemtrails all got onto the streets, all got active on
the Irish left and the anti fascist side. We kind
of dropped the ball because we were following the healthcare
advice and the cops were quite happy to ignore the
(06:14):
far right mobilizing on the street. But there were striking
workers like Debenhams and Clearies who'd been striking before COVID struck,
and the cops were going up and moving these trade
unionissan saying, you know, you're breaking the pandemic. So it
wasn't released even Lee and you know, suddenly, for the
first time during the pandemic, we were starting to see
groups of three four hundred far right in Dublin, which
(06:35):
doesn't sound like much, but I mean last weekend there
was a march in Dublin City and they had probably
around five thousand, maybe up to ten thousand people marching,
and that's something we haven't seen here since the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, and that's such I think an important point. The
degree to which, because this is a global issue, the
degree to which everyone else attempting to abide by public
safety measures during COVID nineteen strengthened the far right because
they were out in the streets this kind of organizing
equivalent of getting to steal a march on the enemy.
It makes sense to me that it was because in
(07:10):
the US that was interrupted at least by the George
Floyd uprisings. But in Ireland, you know, it seems like
there was a much more significant period of time where
these folks were essentially acting and organizing unopposed, and the
police were, when they chose to act at all, acting
against folks on the opposite side of things who were
organizing during COVID.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Yeah, it was let kind of rum belong to the police.
The cops didn't really start taking action on any of
this stuff until I would say it was nearly November
twenty twenty three when they had this rally called I
think it was called to the Doll or maybe slightly
earlier than that. In September twenty twenty three. The Doll
is the Gaeacord for our Parliament, and basically the dregs
(07:52):
of the COVID movement kind of came together again. You
had all these tiny far rice and fascist parties popping up,
and the best thing of about them is they all
get into furior fights. They all start arguing with each
other about who's going to be the leader, and they
haven't united. But they took to the streets in the autumn,
in the fall of twenty twenty three, and there was
one really violent and disgusting riot outside the outside the
(08:16):
Parliament where the far right were throwing bottles of your
line at politicians trying to get in, were shouting racial
abuse at anybody who wasn't white, who was working in
the building as a cleaner or a parliamentary assistant or anything.
Any opposition politicians they could see. They were screaming at
them in imitation of you guys. And January the sixth
(08:39):
they had built a mock noose and they were using
it to hang effigies of politicians, and you also had
police cops being attacked for the first time by the
far right. Really, there'd been one or two other incidents,
but it's only when cops started getting attacked by them
and politicians were being directly their safety was being threatened,
then the cops start to act, maybe in the last
(09:01):
eighteen months or so, but it was really closing the
stable door about five years after the violent fire right
horse had already bolted.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, and you know, so I'm kind of thinking here,
this is part of why you've started to see you know,
guys like we started this conversation before being recording talking
about Tucker Carlson coming over to talk to Connor McGregor,
who's becoming an increasingly large part of this. And I
wonder if it's if it's maybe these these different kind
(09:29):
of international folks in the international movement sort of sniffing that,
you know, they're hoping that the cancer has metastasized, so
to speak. I mean, is that kind of what you
how you see it?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Well, they definitely have an influence here. I mean the politics,
the talking points, the buzzwords that the far right use
in Ireland have all been learned from the likes of
Alec Jones, have all been learned from watching you know,
crazy stuff on Twitter. And it's all American and British
(10:01):
farrelight talking points that are being replayed here. Stuff about
the Clergy Plan, stuff about the Great Replacement and and
so on. I mean, one hundred years ago was the
protocols of the Elders of Zion, and now they're just
spinning the same conspiracy, same talking points again. Like for example,
one of the things we had here was we had
a party called the Irish People's Party and some of
(10:23):
our campaigners were really fundamentalist Latin mass set of Acantas Catholics,
and they were going down and protesting about drag queen
story time at Irish libraries. We don't even have drag
queen story time. These guys have been so inspired by
what was happening in America and I just went in
and started taking books off the shelves, you know, and
(10:46):
anything to do with any LGBT plus team, even basic
sex education guides for kids. Stuff that's pretty mild and
perfectly happy to give my own my own kids, and
I'm not the most woke guy, but it's not ripping
them up. They'd start taking them out in the library,
filming themselves, burning books at home. It was really crazy stuff.
(11:06):
And at that stage again you did get anti anti
fascist organizing. But what you kind of get is figures
like Connor McGregor being amplified by the likes of Elon
Musk being amplified by you know, Tucker Carlson coming over
interviewing him, or Donald Trump of course inviting him to
the to the White House, I mean the Prime Minister
(11:27):
of Ireland as we'd say, Gail, like the teacher Meehall Martin.
He was invited to the White House on the twelfth
of March. But the guy that Trump chose to actually
have there on Patrick's Day itself was of course Connor McGregor.
And McGregor has links to I wouldn't say far right figures,
but certainly very populist figures. And McGregor has kind of
(11:48):
started he's become God pilled and he started rambling on
about you know, rosary beads and the power of Christ
and all this kind of stuff, and he doesn't strike
me as a particularly religious man. And now with the
head of soccer Carlson, you know, and Elon Muskin others,
he says he's going to run for president, and we
have a presidential election coming up here in six months.
(12:09):
Did you watch the interview, Robert.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
No, No, I haven't yet. I caught some clips of
it all on social media. Yeah, but I haven't gotten
to sit through the whole thing.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
It's wild. Bear's absolutely no resemblance like what Connor puts
across bears no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland.
Like he starts ranting about how the police are so corrupt.
Element that's true, but he starts talking about how the
traffic cor the road cops who give you like speeding
tickets and stuff, they're the most violent and repressive and
(12:37):
all this kind of stuff. And it just so happens
that Connor McGregor has a string of speeding violations in
his sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson chips in and says, oh,
my god, you've got these armed cops and they're they're
repressing the Irish people, but they're letting these immigrants do whatever.
My dad was a copier for thirty years. My dad
(12:57):
was on the border in the nineteen seventies with the
iron ray shooting at him and he didn't even get
a gun. Her cops aren't armed. But Carlson is just
trying this stuff out, being educated about it, and he
says at the very end of the interview, McGregor says, oh,
there's there's been a government kind of hit job on me.
They're planning to bring me down. What he's referring to
(13:18):
is a civil trial now, not a criminal trial. A
civil trial that Connor McGregor lost when he was brought
to court for alleged rape and sexual assault and the
jury believed he's he's accuser a woman called a hairdresser
called Nikita Hand, and Connor McGregor was forced to pay
damages of a quarter of a million euro to her,
(13:38):
plus costs in the Irish High Court, which are about
one and a half million euro. Now to you or me,
that would be you some of money. To Connor McGregor,
that's nothing. And I have to say, for legal reasons
he is appealing it. But the reality is that standing
in the way of any political ambitions, Connor McGregor has,
and we just had here in the last six hour.
(13:58):
Last year, we had a lot local election for like
local councils, a general election, a European parliamentary election, any
one of those. All he needed to do was put
up one hundred and fifty quid and he could have stood.
He will be on the ballot. In fact, under Irish
electoral law, he could have stood in every single constituency
in the country and he didn't stand for election. And
(14:20):
now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the Irish
presidential race, and he's not. It's just it's an exceptionally
difficult ballot to get on. You can't just stump up
the money in America and become a third party candidate
or a writing candidate or whatever. That doesn't work here.
You need the support of a large number of democratically
elected politicians to get there. So I think McGregor's real
(14:43):
aim is not to get into the presidency, because really
he can't. He's not even going to be on the ballot.
But I think he wants to be Ireland's Ireland's answer
to Tommy Robinson. And I suppose if Tommy Robinson is
the answer, what the hell was the question.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, well, we'll get into that more in a second.
I do want throw to ads here really quickly, and
then we'll continue to talk about Connor for a moment
we're back. So you say he wants to be the
Irish answer to Tommy Robinson, which is such a like
(15:21):
aim a higher man like that. It's it's odd to
me like I had kind of I had kind of
been worried because we've had so many cases of guys
in the United States who start out as these absolute
jokes on the far right and then you just see
them pick up more and more attention over time, and
that was kind of my worry with Connor. But but
(15:44):
you're saying you're kind of concerned more that he's going
to continue to be like an organizing presence on the
far right rather than someone who has much of a
chance of picking up actual like political office.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Yeah. I think with Connor it's it's all about his ego,
which is probably what you'd expect from an MM star.
You know, there's going to be an element of you know,
ego and show voting in kfab and so on. I mean,
it's interesting and he's interview with Tucker Carlson. He was
giving out that the Minister of Education, you know, isn't
a teacher, they're unqualified for the job. And the Irish
government's Minister for Health isn't a doctor. And it's like, well,
(16:17):
what qualifies you to be president? Connor? You're a former
plumber turned for MMA fighter, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, getting hit in the face.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yeah. And we've we've had ministers of education who were
teachers and ministers of health who were doctors who happened
to be totally awful. The reality is like, we have
a pr system, We've you know, a very democratic and
fair process, and we have more than a two party
system here. But I think, like as emerged during the
during that civil rate trial which McGregor lost, you know,
(16:45):
he had to admit to his cocaine use during it,
he has been sending out kind of fevered I would
imagine cocaine fever trip tweet saying as President of Ireland,
I have the power too, And it's like, man, the
election hasn't even happened yet, he's way ahead of himself.
He's not going to get in the ballot. He knows
that he wants to present it. And I mean the
(17:06):
fact that he's even talking about getting in the ballot
shows he doesn't understand the constitutional system here, which it's
not like Britain. We have a written constitution. It's not
that complex if you know the basics of the law.
He's never going to get in the ballot, but he
wants to present it that he's being denied the opportunity
to stand and unfortunately, what we have around the country
is an increasingly violent anti immigrant street movement that whenever
(17:32):
these what we call him here IPASS in International Protection
Applicant Services, these IPASS or refugee centers. Basically, when these
are picked as places of accommodation by the government while
these people's applications for refugee status they have to stay
somewhere while these are being examined, you tend to get
large protests in towns, villages, cities all over Ireland. Sometimes
(17:56):
he's turned quite violent. Sometimes there's been more than thirty
arson attacks on these centers. And I think what Connor
McGregor ultimately wants is he wants to be able to
tour the country attending these protests and having everyone queuing
up to take selfies with him and telling him what
a great hero he is, and I think I think
that's he's ultimately yeah, yeah, that makes sense, and he's
(18:18):
obviously he's going to grift off the back of it.
The guy has money already. But it was so funny
this multime multi millionaire being interviewed by Tucker Carlson saying
we're going to start fundraising from my campaign. It's like,
and you have more money than you could ever spend
on political posters and buyers and adverts, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
So it almost sounds like this is like a retirement
plan for him, right, Like he's he's he's clearly past
his prime in terms of the getting hit in the
face thing for money, and now he's sort of moving
on to like grifting off of these far right events
and probably traveling just ahead of a series of riots,
you know, Like that's that's it seems like what's in
his future.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, And I mean we've had some you know, at
the time of an outbreak of rioting in Dublin anti
imigrant violence which caused twenty million euros worth of damage
and you know, trash the city center in November of
twenty twenty three, Connor and I'm not saying he directly
caused it. But he was tweeting at the same time
Ireland is a war. Yeah, and around the same time
he was tweeting like any property that's been taken over
(19:17):
by foreigners evaporated. I think really his plan is to
kind of if he can represent himself as a political
martyr figure. He's hoping that it will overshadow the you know,
his loss in the rape case, and he is of
course appealing that and claiming he has new evidence and everything.
But I think really that's what it's about.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Yeah, So let's talk a little bit about the way
far right violence has looked in Ireland, like when these
when these protests have really kicked off, because it seems
like there's been this kind of fairly significant acceleration in
the last three or four years in terms of it,
particularly arsynotacks. And one thing that I was kind of
struck by in your notes was the degree to which like,
(20:00):
no one's been arrested for any of these yet.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
No, what happens. These started around twenty eighteen, so maybe
just before COVID you had one or two of them,
And my book went to print in December twenty twenty four,
so I stopped counting in December and by then I
had over thirty arson attacks and there hasn't been a
single conviction for any of them. So it's when usually
(20:24):
former hotels that have been closed down with years are
that the government moves in or some local person moves
in to renovate them and use them as one of
these centers. They'll just go up and smoke in the
middle of the night. And I mean, we have already
a very significant homeless problem here. I mean there's more
than ten thousand people homeless in Dublin, both Irish and refugee,
(20:46):
and I mean that probably sounds small to someone listening
in a big American city. We thought we had a
housing crisis when we had two thousand people homeless, and
we got more than ten almost fifteen thousand people homeless now.
And some of these the immigrant protesters have actually burnt
down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people in the
(21:07):
mistake and belief that it was going to be used
for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to the housing crisis.
You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes. Sometimes
it's just pickets, sometimes it's graffiti. In the case of
Martin Kenny who's an opposition TD. He'd be from shin
Fein party. Most of your listeners would probably have heard
(21:28):
of an Irish Republican kind of left wing Irish Republican party.
There was a refugee center plan for where he lived
in Letram, and in fairness to him, he spoke out
against it and he condemned what he called, quote the
far right ideology that has been peddled in this country
about asylum seekers. A week later he was sleeping in
his house with his wife and kids, and his car
(21:51):
in the driveway was petrol band was firebanned, and they
came back a few months later and did it again
and he was forced to move house. So arson attacks
and politicians is something we haven't seen here since the
original fascists around in the thirties as well. And this
violence again, like as I said, there hasn't been a
single arrest. And I give you a perfect example. The
title for the book Burned Them Out is from an
(22:13):
event that happened in February twenty twenty three. A guy
stood up in front of a Garda police station here
in Fingles, which would be a big suburb of Dublin,
and there was a huge crowd of anti immigrant protesters around.
One of them was waving a swastika flag, and this
guy stood up in front of them with a megaphone
in front of the police station said there is no
point standing here outside the Garda station. The only way
(22:36):
to deal with refugees is to burn them out. Go
where they're fucking staying and burn down fucking cunts out.
That's a direct quote. And of course, had he been
threatening that violence against the guardy, had he been threatening
that violence against a private business or a politician, I
have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away.
But this masked guy threatening violence in arson was just
(22:57):
allowed to walk off, So there you go. They're certainly
not on the ball. And we've even had during the
COVID pandemic when there was a cop nearly killed that
had a firework shot at him during one of these riots.
The police commissioner in the South of Ireland, who's formerly
a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a very controversial
pro British police force that used to be in the North.
(23:20):
This guy's our new police commissioner down South, and he
tried to blame Republicans and the Ira for the violence
and left wing extremists for the violence that was happening,
and it was so clear that you know, Republicans, Irish
Republicans have been on the streets opposing these people and
their marches for years.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. Like the
actual organizing of the anti fascist movement in Ireland, how
is it kind of responded to the mean explosion in
some cases a literal explosion in far right violence on
the street, Like are you seeing it kind of reach
like New Heights or does it kind of seem like
(23:58):
it's unprepared for the moment that we're hitting, because, like
I mean, in the United States, it's kind of hard
to tell because things have changed so much since twenty twenty, right,
Like a lot of the fascist violence that we're seeing
is now explicitly from the state, and so there's just
not a lot of on the ground. There's not the
same kind of on the ground response to it that
(24:19):
you were seeing when it was groups like the Proud Boys.
And I'm wondering kind of how things have changed since
twenty eighteen in that regard in Ireland.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
I suppose, like if you think back as far as
twenty fifteen, Tommy Robinson, friend of the Pod, attempted to
organize He's Anti Islamic, He's Islamophobic Pigida movement tried to
launch a branch of it in Dublin and they couldn't
even get to their rallying point because there were five
thousand anti fascists on the street. They're against them, Irish Republicans,
(24:48):
Irish language activists, Muslim community from Dublin were their LGBT
activists and they couldn't even get to have their events.
So up until COVID, certainly the anti fascists and groups
like Antie Fascist Action Ireland were excellent at closing down
small groups. You have a lot of people who are
doing online research and exposing these people's sorted histories and
(25:11):
their international connections. So that's one thing we're pretty good at.
And what it turns out is that a lot of
these guys, like one of the main proponents of the
QAnon conspiracy theory here was a guy called Rowan Croft
who just happened to be a former British Army soldier.
So that doesn't fly too well in Ireland from somebody
standing up saying I'm a great Irish patriot and I'm
(25:32):
going to stop the foreigners, like, well, hang out a minute.
When you chose to fight in the military, you chose
to serve the Queen of England. So you have big
national groups like Anti Fascist Action, you have groups like
Anti Imperialist Action Ireland. Thankfully, as these protests have sprung
up around the country, these far right anti immigrant protests,
they have always been countered. And I'm thinking of in
(25:55):
Cork City when the library was being attacked and it
would actually had to be closed down for a period,
and it was the first time that the Court Library
had closed since the British burnt it down during our
revolution in the nineteen twenties. And you know, you had
a crowd of maybe one hundred far rights and people
on the opposite side, the anti fascist scene kept building
and building until by the end, and I was there
(26:16):
for some of these protests, we had four or five
hundred against them, and eventually we decided, right, we're going
to stand and protect the library. And that happened in
other places like Limerick, and it happened in Dublin, and
eventually the far right said, well, we can't even get
near the library to have our protest. Anymore, and they dissipated.
One thing that's very interesting here is the optics, and
sometimes on the lefts and on the anti fascist side
(26:38):
were not as good at the imagery and the using
new technology and stuff. And one thing you'll always see is,
you know when anti fascists are mobilizing in Ireland, and
you know they'll have often red flags, they'll have the
Palestinian flag, they'll have Irish left wing republican flags like
the plow and the stars, but often we don't carry
our national flag the tricolor as much. And of course
(27:00):
the far right love fetishizing flags and they have the green,
white and orange Irish tricolor everywhere. Often of course these
people are so ignorant they fly it wrong way around
and it's the orange, white and green, so it's like
vive lookout Divoir. It's the Ivory Coast flag if you
have it the wrong way. But it's interesting in some
of the clashes you'll have anti fascists with the Irish
(27:21):
flag and fascists with the Irish flag. But I think
just in terms of optics, it sometimes looks very bad
when the far right are able to clip out a
section of the opposing crowd and say, look, they have
Palestinian flags, they have all other LGBT Pride flags, but
they're not proud to be Irish. They don't have Irish flags,
and there could be some Irish flags kipped off of
the side. So these people in the far right are
(27:42):
very good at using the history of Irish politics and
resistance to Britain and using the imagery of that struggle
and co opping it. And I think it's very important
that we on the anti fascist side don't surrender any
of that to them. And I mean the Irish flag
what it stands for. The green bit is for Catholics
who want independence, the orange bit is for Protestants who
(28:02):
wanted to be linked with Britain, and the white was
for peace and unity. So it's a flag that at
it's for the essence, you know, talks about respecting a
religious minority of people from a colonial or or immigrant
background to arrived here a strangers. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:17):
Yeah, well I want to I want to continue this
discussion and then close things out, but first we've got
one more ad break.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
To do.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
So yeah, I kind of wanted to end this by
looking into a little like what are you kind of
looking for in the future, like in the in the
kind of the the next year or two in in Ireland,
like what are you what are you expecting? What do
you what are you worried to see? Like, yeah, what
what do you kind of see? Cut moving forward here.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
I think what's tending to happen now is genius out
of the bottle and far right message is spreading. And
you had this big far right rally of you know,
ten thousand and five to ten thousand people at its
maximum that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main
street in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards,
(29:12):
but it is worrying. I think we're going to see
that grow. And I think on the left sometimes and
particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea
that all this is a flash in the pan and
will organize a few big rallies and they'll go away.
They won't. This is like the National Front in Britain.
You know, these people are going to be around haunting
Irish politics for least a decade, and then they're never
going to fully go away. They'll pop back up again.
(29:36):
I think we're going to continue to see the regional protests,
and I think as well, we have started seeing the
Irish government, which is a coalition of two center right parties,
kind of tighten up their own language on immigration. We're
starting seeing an increasing number of deportations as well. The
police really still aren't fully on the ball. They are,
(29:59):
of course, being given new policing powers by the government
to deal with violent protests that are being issued with
things like, you know, new non legal technologies, you know,
pepper splay and extra equipment and body cameras that they
wouldn't have had before. But of course the classic thing
is that these will always be used as much, if
not more so against the left and the anti fascist
(30:20):
side than they will be against the racists. Thankfully, these groups,
you know, they're all in fighting with each other. They
have tried to do like electoral packs and to plan
out political strategies, but thankfully they're all so fixated on
wanting to be the furire that never really works. But
what I was going to say a minute ago is
that that ten thousand people, if there were that many
(30:41):
on the street, not everyone in that is far right.
You know, Some of the people are from working class
communities that have been betrayed by the government and have
been abandoned, and they are starting they've just fallen down
the rabbit hole. And I can think of an incident.
I was in the gym a couple of months back
and just sitting there, and there were a few guys.
Didn't know they were around chatting. Obviously we were in
(31:03):
the gym. None of us are in the sauna, none
of us have many clothes on, and none of these
guys had like questionable far right tattoos or anything like that.
But the conversation suddenly started about immigrants and how they
were bringing crime, and how they were bringing disease and
all this kind of stuff. And I listened to it
for a minute or two and I just stood up
and said, lads, everything you are saying about immigrants in
(31:23):
Ireland now is what was said about Irish people in
America in the nineteenth century and in England in like
the seventies and the eighties. So I think it's important
that even in our workplaces on public transport, when we
hear it this kind of talk, we call it out
if it's a friend of ours who's fallen down the
rabbit hole into these conspiracies. Because that's how their message
(31:44):
is spreading now. Often when you see people involved in
some of this anti immigrant rioting, they have no history
of involvement in far right groups, but it's that message
has spread beyond those groups thanks to our friends in
the nerd Reich. And I think if we have a
work colleague or a brother or somebody who falls into that,
but we don't abandon them, we don't immediately start calling
(32:06):
them a Nazi and whatever that, we try to talk
top them round to it. But look, I suppose the
thing is there is hope, and everywhere these people have organized,
there have been anti fascists there to meet them. I
think we need to get better at planning that in
a national scale. Of course, on the left you always
get this factionalism and in fighting. I'm not standing beside him,
he's tratskis well, I don't like his views in the north.
(32:28):
Whatever we need to kind of say, as long as
we're fighting with each other, the fascists are winning. Thankfully,
none of these people have ever gotten more than two
percent in an election. They have nobody elected in our
national parliament. They only have four or five, maybe six
councilors elected in the entire of the southern part of
the country and that's out of nine hundred and forty
(32:49):
nine councilors. But we can't just laugh at them. We
can't worry the CITA threat because when the Nazis stood
for election the first time, I think they only got
two percent of the vote as well, and look how
that turned out.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Well yeah, and as we've seen in the US, like
what starts as this tiny, tiny number of freaks and
weirdos can wind up being a mass movement if it's
not you know, cauterized, right, Like that's and that's that's
kind of the challenge in front of Irish anti fascists
right now is ensuring that that quarterization happens absolutely.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
And I mean, look, if you think of this, you know,
Elon Musks tip McGregor for president and we're all laughing
at it now, but you know, it wouldn't be the
first time that Elon Musk has tipped a reality TV
star with a questionable sexual and criminal history for high
office and they got.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
There, right yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, thank you so much.
Do you want to have anything you want to plug
here at the end of the episode, I mean your
book obviously.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, Well, obviously I'm not. I'm not on ex Twitter
anything like that. I don't have a substack or anything.
So just the main thing I want to plug is
my book Burned Them Out, a history of fascism and
the far right in Ireland. It is published by Bloomsbury
head of Zeus, so it should be available in any
to order via any bookshop. Obviously. If you are going
to support a bookshop, support a small independent one Robert
(34:07):
and Barnes and Noble. And if you are buying it online,
obviously buy it from direct from the publishers Bloomsbury. Don't
buy it off Amazon if you can, because God knows
Jeff Besis has enough money.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Yeah certainly, bloody Well, thank you so much. And yeah
that's that's our episode. Everybody come back tomorrow and we'll
have another one.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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