We need a few of the TFK big hearts to clear out the junk room and take in families.
They’d have to move the computer from the spare room and then wouldn’t be able to spend time on TFK !
Yeah, maybe sending a leaflet all over the world saying come to Ireland and you’ll get a free gaff within 4 months wasn’t a great idea?
Maybe it made his bleeding heart feel good but it certainly wasn’t in the interests of Irish citizens.
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What are you on about dumdum?
What dont you understand?
That was taken from the Indo.
Roderic is saying #irelandisfull?
Did he find it on his parents coffee table again?
Classic virtue signalling. Rural Ireland had the greens figured out a long time ago.
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It was bizarre in the extreme. He had a come to Ireland open letter translated into about 40 different languages including Albanian, Arabic, Somali, Urdu and Georgian. Even translating Céad míle Failte into Swahili. The man is a creep.
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Sending it in Georgian and Albanian was bizarre. Both are safe countries
Can someone copy and paste up?
Georgia is safe if you exclude an agressive russia ready to attack them
The far right on twitter delighted chrsity dignam is in pallative care as he took the vaccine
Bizarre
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Look at theresecahill1, she is calling them out
Not all protesters are far right. Make an effort to understand before you condemn
Colin Murphy
Castigating protesters against asylum-seekers and refugees is the knee-jerk response of many, but it risks backfiring badly and then inflaming tensions
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“It requires empathy and engagement - a slow and nuanced process”
January 22 2023 02:30 AM
When the protests against asylum-seekers in Ballymun started, Caroline Conroy, a local Green Party councillor who is Lord Mayor of Dublin, called a meeting to work out how to respond. As well as political representatives, there were people there from local schools, youth groups, sports clubs and community services.
They agreed a basic strategy, one community activist who was at the meeting told me. “We didn’t want to have a counter-march. We didn’t want to label people. We didn’t want to use terms like ‘hard right’ and ‘racist’,” the activist said.
Instead, the group opted for a “non-confrontational approach”. (Despite this, the community activist asked not to be named for fear his home could be targeted, as was that of Vincent Jackson, an independent councillor in Ballyfermot.)
They would seek opportunities to talk to people in the community who had taken part in the protests, with whom they had “relationships of trust”, and start conversations designed to “take on board people’s concerns”. The crucial point was to recognise that these concerns were genuine.
“If you’re told your children are in danger, you will want to protect your children — that doesn’t make you a racist,” the activist said.
“We don’t want people to become entrenched. We want them to feel they’re a normal part of the community.”
In the neighbouring constituency of Dublin Central, Gary Gannon, a Social Democrats TD, had come to a similar conclusion. His initial response to the protests against asylum-seekers in East Wall had been clouded with anger.
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A protest against the housing of 100 migrants at the former ESB office block in East Wall, Dublin. Protesters and some residents claimed there was not enough consultation with local people. Photo: Niall Carson
“I don’t like to see a group of people in an old abandoned building being shouted at,” he said, but gradually he realised most people involved in the protests “were just there through fear, and for what they believe to be reasonable and good intentions”.
He noticed that social media platforms he had neglected, such as Facebook and YouTube, were being used to spread that fear through the community. He had a “Eureka!” moment. “You have to meet people where they are,” he said.
Eoin O’Malley:
Government needs to stop allowing Sinn Féin to control the narrative – and start believing in itself
He decided to up his Facebook game and throw himself into the debate online — even if it brought abuse on him. “We all have to get better at the medium. We can’t consider ourselves to be too highbrow for that. We really are in a battle for hearts and minds and understanding. We can’t let those people go — we have to try and bring them back.”
Back from where? Just what is it that is making people afraid? I asked Aoife Gallagher, author of Web of Lies: The Lure and Danger of Conspiracy Theories, whose day job involves monitoring online debate (in Ireland and elsewhere) for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international think-tank focusing on extremism and polarisation.
Gallagher observed a pattern, or “playbook”, during the recent protests. A video of a group of migrant men arriving in the local community, or simply on a local street, would be posted on a channel on the social media platform Telegram. The men would be described as “military-aged” and “unvetted” and their arrival claimed to be evidence of “invasion” or “plantation”. This video and message would then be picked up by influential Telegram channels and be reposted on the more mainstream social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.
There are two ideas here: one is a distortion, the other a conspiracy theory. The idea of unvetted, military-aged men is a rhetorical construct designed to evoke fear. Thousands of unvetted, military-aged men will arrive in Dublin in a few weeks, but they will hardly be seen as a threat — they will be here to support France in the Six Nations.
The idea of “plantation” invokes the conspiracy theory known as the “Great Replacement”, which posits that global elites are working to replace indigenous white populations with non-whites. The key point here is not that this is nonsense, but that the belief is genuine.
Gallagher said: “What psychologists have found is that people will tend to engage in conspiratorial thinking when certain psychological needs aren’t being met.”
There are three key needs. “The need to feel safe and secure in the world you’re living in; the need to feel confident you know what is going on in the world; and the need to feel good in your social circles.” Joining a community with a shared cause and belief system gives people a sense of fulfilling those needs.
This poses a challenge to those who wish to counter such ideas: how to fight disinformation and to challenge conspiratorial thinking without further marginalising or antagonising those who are susceptible to it.
For Gannon and those on the ground in communities such as East Wall and Ballymun, it is obvious this requires empathy and individual engagement — a slow and nuanced process. But such nuance is absent from much of the media debate. The far right are “preying” on local people, or the protests have been “orchestrated” by the far right, or there is a “rising threat” from the far right, the headlines say. But what does “far right” even mean?
For Gallagher, at the core is the idea of “ethno-nationalism”, which entails seeing Irish nationality in terms of ethnicity and race, coupled with hostility to those who don’t fit that.
Kevin Cunningham, a political scientist at TU Dublin and pollster, agrees support for the far right across Europe is strongly correlated with the salience of the issue of immigration, and observes that attitudes on other issues tend to correlate with this, such as scepticism about the EU, vaccines and key institutions, particularly the judiciary and the media.
Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, one of the leading writers on populism and the far right, separates the far right into the extreme right and the radical right. The extreme right follows in the tradition of fascism, rejecting democracy and seeking to subvert or overthrow it, whereas the radical right — like its counterpart on the Irish left — may be hostile to fundamental elements of liberal democracy, but seeks to win power through democratic means. This is a distinction that may be difficult to discern in practice, but is crucial in principle: some elements of the far right are a threat to democracy, but others are a natural part of a democracy that contains a wide spectrum of opinion.
This is an uncomfortable truth for many on the left: some of the ideas underlying these protests — that Ireland should look after its own first, or that there is a natural limit to the number of immigrants Ireland can take — are legitimate. Remove the disinformation and conspiracy theories and those ideas will remain as the essence of a more conservative approach to immigration than that which is currently mainstream opinion.
Elsewhere — in the US, UK and Italy, for example — political entrepreneurs on the right have exploited this gap between public sentiment and mainstream politics and successfully stoked fears about immigration to achieve power. In the US and UK, the initial response by the mainstream was to dismiss these fears as racist and unworthy of engagement. The effect was to confirm the populist labelling of the mainstream as out-of-touch elites and to drive more people into the arms of the right-wing entrepreneurs.
Despite the prominence of these protests, the political potency of the far right in Ireland appears low. Parties and groups such as the Irish Freedom Party and National Party have negligible support and low-profile leaders. Our electoral system, which is proportional to an almost unique degree, inhibits the sudden emergence of political forces and incentivises moderation rather than polarisation, while the degree to which the system facilitates the election of independents acts as something of a safety valve (or a canary in the coalmine) for tensions in the body politic.
That is not to say the far right poses no threat. But the greater risk may be that we drive people to them by refusing to engage with people’s fears.
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Theres llenty of side effects of the vaccines being highlighted by medical professionals. Links to cancer have not been one of them. In fact mRNA technology was working towards curing it. Madness latching onto a national icons illness to push their own agenda. Disgusting really
A fair central view. Nodding the way through. Not fair to label everyone as far right, but the far right are trying to weaponise the issue for support. Attacking people who are concerned and labelling them isnt the way to counter the issue
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I wonder is there such a thing as simply “The Right” anymore? Does anyone know what it looks like?
Everything that isn’t left or woke is seemingly far-right nowadays.
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