Racist vitriol fizzes across social media in call to arms
BARELY half an hour after media outlets began reporting a stabbing incident on Parnell Square on Thursday, influential figures within anti-immigration groups were instructing their followers that the time had come to rise up.
As any semblance of a protest descended further into lawless chaos by the minute, social media and messaging apps fizzed with vitriolic, blatantly racist calls for maximum violence and destruction – many containing inaccurate information about the status of the attacker and many embracing disinformation and conspiracy theories.
‘Immediately after that news broke, there was an effort to mobilise people and this was before there were any solid details about what actually happened,’ said Aoife Gallagher, who is a senior analyst with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue – an international organisation that analyses and responds to extremism.
Ms Gallagher told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The calls to mobilise were largely produced and promoted by figures with a history of anti-immigrant mobilisation and there’s clear evidence of incitement to hatred and incitement to violence within that activity.’
Finglas-based local election candidate Gavin Pepper wrote on social media: ‘Everyone city centre tonight 7pm no excuses everyone out enough is enough spire #irelandisfull’ (sic), but he later deleted the post.
One X (formerly Twitter) user with around 10,000 followers wrote a post strewn with tricolour emojis that included the lines: ‘Every single politician, NGO & bought & paid for piece of filth that welcomed these foreign criminals to our shores. ON EVERY ONE OF YOUR HEADS BE IT. THIS BETTER GET PEOPLE OFF THEIR ARSES & OUT ON THE STREETS.’
Twenty-four hours later, the post had been viewed almost 750,000 times.
Rather than condemning the riots on his page – as some other well-known anti-immigration figures did – the same user shared a video of a group of Irish men viciously berating three black men who they accuse of taking part in the looting.
The MoS witnessed a tiny number of non-white people partaking in looting on Thursday evening, but the vast majority appeared to be white Irish.
Another account calling itself an ‘alternative media platform’, which has 15,000 followers and regularly posts anti-immigrant material of dubious veracity wrote: ‘The suspect outside the school in Parnell Square is nonIrish. This is a Terrorist attack. Men of Ireland, stand up immediately!’
Some of the responses to the post called for ‘war’, while others were openly racist and violent.
Elsewhere, groups on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram pinged with calls to attack emergency services and Government buildings and murder foreign people.
A user called ‘Kill all immigrants’ in a WhatsApp group with hundreds of members called Enough is Enough sent a voice clip telling rioters to splinter off into small groups around the city.
‘Seven o’clock, be in town. Everyone. Bally [balaclava] up, tool up. And any f***ing gypo, foreigner, anyone, just kill them. Just f***ing kill them.
‘Let’s get this on the f***ing news,’ the user continues.
‘Let’s show the f***ing media that we’re not a f***ing pushover, that no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country. No f***ing more. Enough is enough, as the title says.’
Another user said: ‘Them garda are scum, they know it! But them foreign bastards, blood needs to be spilt tonight in the name of that child!’
Other users even discussed plans to attack the home of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Meanwhile, the National Party posted a graphic calling for Irish men to ‘man up’ and ‘make Ireland safe for women and children’ by joining the hard right party.
‘Enough is enough. Are you happy to sit back and watch Irish children stabbed, or will you man up, and fight back?’
Other influential figures livestreamed the mayhem, adding their own running commentary for the benefit of those watching at home.
‘This is what happens when you bring in unvetted men, unvetted murderers into the country,’ said one with over 16,000 followers.
‘It’s people like myself on the alternative media have tried to wake up the ordinary person on the street. People will take this country back if they have to. We tried our best to warn you about these attacks. Little did we expect it to happen so soon.’
The live streamer repeatedly refers to an ‘agenda’ by the Irish and world governments – ‘replacement migration’, a popular conspiracy theory that the powersthat-be want to do away with caucasian people.
‘It’s an attack on the white race,’ he declared.
Ms Gallagher said social media is a ‘huge contributor’ to mob events like this week’s, but said the State and Government have to be blamed for failing to solve persistent issues like housing and healthcare – issues that could have connections to immigration.
‘They’ve given [far right actors] an open goal to be able to weaponise those issues and pull people into their way of thinking,’ she said.
The former journalist has been examining the spread of misinformation (inaccurate) and disinformation (deliberately inaccurate) online for the past six years, and said the level of disorder on display on Thursday was ‘absolutely’ predictable – contrary to Garda Commissioner Drew Harris’s claim that the response to the stabbings ‘could not have anticipated’.
‘I can’t even count how many attacks there have been on direct provision centres,’ Ms Gallagher said. ‘It’s all happening against a backdrop of a major increase in the kind of rhetoric going on online as well and the targeting of minority communities.’