The conspiracy theory that the stabbing was a planned event by Gardai is doing the rounds on far right Telegram groups.
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Fucking head the balls. “Fuck Palestine” again shouted, along with lots of other deranged stuff.
https://twitter.com/IrlagainstFash/status/1729277830557475151
Arse whipping up race hatred on national television now. Ireland’s Goebbels.
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Yeah the conspiracy theories on the go lately are shit, you need to make them some bit believable. Like aliens building the pyramids, theres no evidence they didnt do it
The conspiracy theory that the stabbing was a planned event by Gardai is doing the rounds on Far left groups on telegram. The assailant was a white Irish citizen and the kids he stabbed weren’t kids at all but transgender babies. You approve of that as well?
You went to the the trouble of typing this shite out knowing it is absolute bullshit
Irish fascism is not a reaction to immigration or poverty. It’s not even new
It is grossly unfair to inner city communities to stigmatise them as the sources of a shameful night in Dublin
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One chunk of analytic wreckage is that “this was a reaction to immigration”. Another is “this is about inner city poverty”. It wasn’t and it isn’t. Photo: Chris Maddaloni/The Irish Times
Tue Nov 28 2023 - 06:00
As the physical debris of a shameful night in Dublin is cleared from the streets of the inner city, perhaps we can also begin to clear the mental debris. One chunk of analytic wreckage is that “this was a reaction to immigration”. Another is “this is about inner city poverty”. It wasn’t and it isn’t.
First: there were fascist riots in Dublin long before the city had any substantial population of immigrants. Ninety years ago, when the city had scarcely a person of colour, or even a foreigner, there were admirers of Mussolini and Hitler out on the streets setting things ablaze and baying for the blood of the enemy.
In March 1933, in the worst political violence in the city since the Civil War, a crowd of about five thousand supporters of the far-right St Patrick’s Anti-Communist League laid siege to Connolly House on Great Strand Street, headquarters of the tiny Irish Communist Party. They attacked it for three successive nights.
They eventually stormed the building and set fire to it and to a factory next door. The mobs tried to do the same to the Workers’ College in Eccles Street and the Workers Union of Ireland office in Marlborough Street.
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Among the agitators were Catholic priests. According to the historian Brian Hanley, James Connolly’s daughter Nora Connolly O’Brien collected accounts from churchgoers of the sermons they had heard that week, urging parishioners, among other things, to “take the law into your own hands”.
The Department of Justice subsequently concluded that such sermons had inspired “crowds, mostly of the young hooligan type” to riot in the city. The Garda reported that the far-right gangs were “hooligans, pure and simple” – but it was as obvious then as now that the line between yobbery and street-level fascism is highly porous.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? Social media (once routed through pulpits, now through Telegram, X and TikTok) connecting “young hooligan types” to each other and to an invitation to save Ireland by wrecking parts of its capital?
A rather apt phrase for the thugs who tried to set Dublin alight last Thursday while claiming to represent Irish virtue might be “pious hooligans”. I found it in a letter from Barcelona, where he was fighting fascism in 1937, written by Jack White, the man who organised the Irish Citizen Army that fought in the 1916 Rising.
He was recalling fascist violence in Ireland the previous year: “Last Easter Sunday, I had myself to fight for three kilometers against the Catholic actionists, who attacked us on the streets as we were marching to honour the memory of the Republican dead who fell in Easter week 1916. The pious hooligans actually came inside the cemetery and tore up the grave rails to attack us.”
Yes: the nativist far-right wrenched the railings from the graves of the patriot dead to use as weapons for a riot in Glasnevin Cemetery. What had that to do with immigration?
All through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, we had these openly fascist gangs trying to rouse popular rage against a Them that mostly consisted of Irish people who took seriously the promise of the Republic. They channelled themselves into different groupings, depending on which would-be Duce or Führer was on the rise – the most important being the Blueshirts, the Irish Christian Front, Maria Duce and Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (Architects of the Resurrection). There were also weird offshoots like the St Mary’s Anti-Communist Pipe Band (really) who went off to Spain to serenade the fascists fighting to overthrow its democratically elected government.
These movements were actually far larger and more mainstream than their spiritual heirs today. So, no. Fascism in Ireland is not a “reaction” to immigration. It’s an indigenous strain of nativism and pious hooliganism that has been in the subsoil of Irish political life for nearly a century.
And its support base is actually much smaller now than it used to be when Ireland had virtually no inward migration. Blowing it up into some kind of dramatic consequence of this century’s demographic change distorts both history and the present.
Nor were the riots, as one opinion piece in the Irish Times claimed, “the result of simmering tensions in the north inner city finally hitting boiling point”. Where is the evidence that it was the people of the north inner city who were responsible for the violence? Why did the far-right activists have to summon their supporters into the city centre if they were already there?
How could the courts have issued orders for people charged with alleged offences related to the riots to stay out of the inner city if those people actually lived there? How could others be “given permission to enter the city centre to attend work or travel to work” if they are from that city centre?
The addresses of those charged include a few in inner Dublin but also in Rathmines, Tallaght, Dún Laoghaire, Celbridge, Swords and towns as far away as Bray, Navan, Longford and even Waterford. It’s grossly unfair to inner city communities to stigmatise them as the sources of this disgrace.
There are huge problems of social exclusion in Dublin’s north inner city. There are also genuine tensions in many parts of Ireland as the State struggles to cope with refugees and asylum seekers amidst a chronic housing crisis. But neither of these realities caused the riots. Fascists did.
We have in Ireland a few hundred hardcore fascists who will use every available opportunity, whether it’s a shocking crime or a library book they don’t like, to try to build their competing cliques of zealots into large-scale ethnonationalist movements. Framing their violence as somehow representative of what is happening either in city communities or in Irish society as a whole merely feeds their delusions.
A tiny gang of malignant narcissists is not an expression of where Ireland is or who we are. Its “Ireland is at war” rhetoric is a toxic lie that should not be amplified by hyped-up commentary.
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apologies, I was being ironic using an oft used phrase from South Park that generally apportions blame to migrants for a range of things. I’ll be clearer in future.
Just try making sense instead
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cant promise that.
Duckaduhrrr!
My goodness, that’s a belter of an article by Fintan. Good to see him calling out the awkward squad’s “just thugs” narrative too.
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The (online ) world is gone raving mad. Trans alliances falling apart because of isreal. Trannies for Palestine or trannies for isreal. Antisemitic trans fighters and pro genocide trans activists…
Hate mobs and hate figures are tagging everyone as a ‘traitor’ … Mary Lou got hijacked by a screaming mob last night and she’s a traitor for not answering questions. Leo is a TRAITOR. Mick Martin - TRAITOR. The guy in Tesco who served an immigrant - TRAITOR.
Far right, far left, far right, far left…
Then a stream of hateful isreali bastards pushing propaganda and in response there’s videos of children blown to bits being posted by Palestinian supporters.
I’m beginning to doubt the internet. Besides the TFK Limerick secret group getting the Limerick hurlers over the line in 2018, what has the internet ever done for us?
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Twitter is an nawful place
Ahem. The Friday Fashion forum
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The Paris Mayor quitting Twitter, calling it a ‘gigantic global sewer’ was the best description of the site yet. It’s TikTok for adults. Not great for the brain.
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I agree with a lot of the article but I think he underestimates the spread of fascist propaganda online and how pervasive and persuasive it is. I was handed down those stories of priests imploring young men to “fight for Franco against communism in the sunny land of Spain”. But it’s like everything now. The stuff you used to have to be there in person to hear or organise, all that stuff is done at the touch of a button now.
Ireland now has very powerful forces lining up against it, which include Israel, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and pretty much the whole of the spectrum of the English right wing. Russian propaganda of course. And the general madness of the internet. Conor McGregor is a significant threat from within, not to run for the Dail, or probably even for president, but to serve as a spiritual leader of Irish fascism.
Dropped and reinstated Gearoid Hegarty
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It’s interesting too that the Fintan O’Toole article points out there’s a history in Ireland of communists and fascists fighting.
I’ve never really had the difference between a communist and a fascist explained to me properly. They are both authoritarian ideologies who believe the state should run the economy and which suppress political opposition usually violently.
Fascists seemed to be better dressed and have more style.
I’d argue the lack of style of the rioters marks them out as likely more hard left than hard right.
I can see now why my careful curatorship of the Friday Fashion thread has played into the hands of Marxist agitators on tfk such as @Little_Lord_Fauntleroy who accuse me of being “far right” when my only crime is being really well dressed.
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Tucker and Bannon are on it… They’ve put Ireland on the map
Where once Ireland was a European battle ground for religious expression, now we’re the current battlefield for freedom of expression. The winners will supplant the orange order and will march yearly either silently while dressed in the colours of the rainbow or with pro murder memes on phones held aloft in a Nazi like salute.
A fascinating battle awaits.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1729272962627379219?t=5QO_KBLZ2CR8PeEA1Q7pQQ&s=19
Clickbait sensationalism
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