Far-Right Paranoia Has Been Stewing In The UK And Ireland For A Long Time

It began with the soy milk. We were five or so months deep into the pandemic, in the midst of that strange summer of 2020, and a plumber was in the house to mend a busted pipe. He wore no mask and he spat as he spoke, which, during those early pandemic days, was a terrible worry. To escape the trajectory of his spittle, I backed into the kitchen to make us both a cup of tea, but, remembering that there was no cow’s milk in the house, I offered him a drop of soy milk instead.

“Christ,” he spluttered, eyeing my skinny wrists, “you’re not on the soy milk, are you?”

I explained that I was, indeed, on the soy milk, and that I had been for some time. “But you know it’s full of estrogen?” he replied, spraying a wave of potentially COVID-laced particles into the air. “You can’t be drinking that — it’ll turn ya soft!”

Young men, he proceeded to inform me without prompting, had been transformed into soy boys, thanks to veganism filling their bodies with womanly hormones. He wasn’t falling for it, of course, and, after several months of a meat-only diet, he’d never felt better. He sympathized with me — I was young, and lacked the critical thinking skills required to combat all the rubbish “the media” had been feeding me about woke ideology, migration, and this “COVID thing,” which, actually, was all a ruse concocted by a shadowy elite to crash the global economy for nefarious, but notably ill-defined, ends.

I had come of age during the second half of the 2010s, in an Ireland which had awoken from the strange fever dream of Catholic conservatism and was undergoing a process of rapid social liberalization. Popular youth-led movements had successfully campaigned for same-sex marriage equality and abortion rights in a sequence of referenda held in 2015 and 2018 respectively, which engendered a widespread sense among a certain contingent of college-educated youth that, as our contemporaries in the UK, Europe and America were beginning to face the scourge of the populist far right, we were on the inevitable march towards Progress. We were, in hindsight, utterly complacent, and this shifty plumber, spouting paranoid, QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories at me, proved it.

He was the first member of Ireland’s post-COVID far right that I ever met, but it wasn’t long before I began to encounter more like him on the streets of Dublin, protesting against masks and vaccines. They were an odd group, generally quite old, and before long their concerns had begun to mutate. They took on wider themes of social degradation throughout Ireland, which, in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, had been forced to endure a program of severe austerity from which it has never truly recovered.

Ireland today is riddled with social issues, but among the most serious is its profound housing crisis, which has seen home ownership among adults under 40 decline drastically, rents shoot up to unmanageably high levels, and homelessness spiral out of control. At the same time, immigration into the country now outpaces the number of people leaving, which, despite only a minority of those coming in actually being asylum seekers, has led people like the plumber to attribute all the country’s ills to them anyway.

Facts rarely get in the way of a simple, racist narrative.

I am one of those to have emigrated from Ireland, hopping across the pond to London in 2021, where, upon arrival, it became apparent that, as in Ireland, the social fabric of the UK had been ripped apart by years of austerity — and asylum seekers were similarly being scapegoated for it. The then-ruling Conservative Party, in power since 2010, had rightly calculated that fanning the flames of anti-immigrant rhetoric would distract from its own profound mismanagement of the country. Making use of the most dehumanizing language it could get away with, it committed itself to stemming the migrant “invasion” by “stopping the boats,” referring to the small vessels illegally trafficking groups of people across the English Channel from France.

In both Ireland and the UK, those who do make it in as asylum seekers face systematically appalling treatment. Despite pledging to dismantle it, the Irish government continues to maintain an inhumane system known as Direct Provision, in which people seeking asylum are placed inside overcrowded, grossly inadequate accommodation centers operated by private companies.

Then there are those who can’t even make it into the misery of Direct Provision, forced to take refuge within makeshift tent cities, which the government has repeatedly cleared using force. It is one of the country’s greatest shames. In the UK, the Tory government turned to callous schemes like the Rwanda asylum plan, which sought to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. In both instances, Ireland and the UK have fostered an environment of seething rage, which, over the last number of months, has finally begun to bubble over in remarkably similar circumstances.

Things came to a head in Ireland in November 2023, when three young children and a woman were attacked and injured by a man wielding a knife in Dublin. In the English town of Southport at the end of July this year, a 17-year-old male stabbed and murdered three young girls, injuring several others. Both crimes, separated by a matter of months, were heinous, and, naturally, left the communities in which they occurred in a state of shock; the far right quickly seized upon the grief they fostered. Disinformation began to spread online about the attackers’ respective identities, with claims they were migrants swiftly taking hold. In reality, the attacker in Dublin was a naturalized Irish citizen originally from Algeria, while the attacker in Southport was reportedly born in Wales.

In Dublin an anti-immigrant protest nonetheless formed in the wake of the attack, before quickly descending into an outright riot in which police were assaulted, fires were started, and shops were looted. The resulting photographs of the city center in flames were jarring, but, in reality, this violence was just an especially dramatic example of old and persistent far-right agitation. Since 2018 there have been repeated arson attacks against properties allocated to house asylum seekers; the rate of such attacks has increased since November’s rioting.

Protests have often coalesced outside these sites, as in the Dublin suburb of Coolock, where rioting and arson attacks again broke out last month. Most disturbingly, a group of people armed with pipes and knives attacked a line of tents on the street which sheltered migrants from Somalia and Palestine, a group already failed by a callous and ineffectual Irish state. The people were forced to flee even their tents.

A series of anti-Muslim riots in the UK followed the attack on the children in Southport. Mosques were petrol-bombed. Muslim graves were desecrated. Makeshift roadblocks were set up, where mobs checked the ethnicity of drivers to make sure they were white. Amid the Islamophobic chanting and violence, one especially recognizable phrase, directly borrowed from former prime minister Rishi Sunak, rose above the din: “Stop the boats!”

The Tories clearly bear responsibility for feeding the intense Islamophobia that presently grips Britain, but Keir Starmer’s Labour Party are hardly innocent in this story. Starmer has consistently conceded ground to the right when it comes to immigration, going so far as to declare Sunak the “most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration.” The party has since scrapped the Rwanda scheme, but on the grounds that it was an “expensive gimmick” rather than a moral outrage. All of this is to say nothing of Starmer’s appalling response to Israel’s war on Gaza, in which he has repeatedly signaled that Muslim lives don’t matter to him.

The eruption of far-right violence in the two countries I call home has been terrifying to see, but it has hardly been surprising. The ruling elites of both countries have failed their people and have scapegoated vulnerable communities for it. Both have allowed their societies to decay and for a paranoid anger to stew and take hold.

The silver lining, if we can call it that, is that the far right in both countries is a minority. As protests both in the UK and in Ireland have shown, people will resist this scourge of fascism and racism. This is an attitude that will need to be continuously fostered; as the riots showed, while relatively small in number, there is nonetheless a mass of racists who are ready to use violence in pursuit of their deranged ethno-nationalistic ideals. People will be required to stand up to it.