The Irish Far Right/Neo-Nazi Movement

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.

in the UK or the US. As a result, of kind of the history of Irish Republicanism, but that's not 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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, the far right are kind of back. They're alive and kicking, and they're taken to the streets.

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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 eighteen months or so, but it was really closing the stable door about five years after the violent fire right horse had already bolted.

to speak. I mean, is that kind of what you how you see it?

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 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 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.

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 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 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. Did you watch the interview, Robert.

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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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.

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 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.

what qualifies you to be president? Connor? You're a former plumber turned for MMA fighter, you know.

system here. But I think, like as emerged during the during that civil rate trial which McGregor lost, you know, 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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.

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, 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

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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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.