False prophets are peddling conspiracy theories about Ireland’s history. Here’s the truth
Western liberal democracies are apparently inhabited by vast and increasing numbers of disaffected, dissatisfied citizens who could conceivably put populists in power on both sides of the Atlantic over the coming year. Donald Trump’s White House comeback bid should be the stuff of dystopian fantasy, not a news story. But as Naomi Klein describes brilliantly in her new book, Doppelganger, our collective trajectory away from reality seems to be in freefall.
Why are populist narratives gaining so much traction even in mainstream political discourse? Perhaps the truth is too boring or complex for our shortened attention spans: after all, who has the time to make sense of realitywhen we can entertain ourselves with fantasy? Vanishingly few politicians keep their promises, which fuels a sense that we may as well just listen to the best storyteller, or the best shit-poster, whoever gets us riled up most effectively. Ireland has so far been spared a farright or anti-immigrant political party. But the Dublin riots last November, and a more recent spate of blockades and arson attacks on buildings meant for the accommodation of asylum seekers, or rumoured to be such, suggest a mood change. It is not far-fetched to imagine a Trump presidency radicalising this mood to produce a more menacing populist landscape. The one we have is already being contaminated by imported far-right tropes and conspiracy theories.
Russell Brand and Steve Bannon were quick to chime in after the riots, interpreting and distorting the significance of events in Ireland for international consumption. According to their “alt-right” narrative, the violence had nothing to do with racism against refugees – despite unambiguous messages of incitement such as “kill foreigners, kill migrants” circulating online at the time. Rather, Brand told his millions of devoted YouTube subscribers, the events were an outpouring of the entirely reasonable concerns of honest, ordinary working-class people, people who need to protect themselves
and their children, because the remote elites that govern them have no intention of doing so.
That Ireland would rebel against what Brand calls “globalism” with recourse to its own ethno-nationalism was not only reasonable but honourable, he added, because of past centuries of oppression and the fact that Irish nationalism was forged fighting British colonialism.
It will hardly trouble fans of his conspiracy theories, but Brand’s invocation of an Irish nationalist exceptionalism reveals serious gaps in his knowledge. Contrary to Brand’s claims, including his attempt to position Ireland as somehow existing outside of global events (weird flex, bro), the revolutionary vision espoused by James Connolly, for example, or previous generations of rebels such as the United Irishmen of 1798, was characterised by a rejection of ethnicity or blood as the basis for self-determination.
Brand is right that Ireland is a unique case among majority white, English-speaking nations in that it was not itself a coloniser. In many respects, Ireland has more in common with other colonised countries than it does with imperialist ones.
Nonetheless, while Ireland was subjugated, Irish people also came to be racialised as white. Their inclusion within the hierarchy of race as “white” means Irish people can be manipulated emotively to believe that Irishness and whiteness are the same thing. The constant refrain I heard growing up, despite being born and raised in Dublin, and my mother and maternal ancestry being Irish, was that I couldn’t reallybe Irish because my father was Nigerian. I was not white, and therefore not Irish. The same argument was not made to friends who, like me, had one non-Irish parent when that parent was white.
In the space of just two decades, Ireland has transformed from the almost entirely homogeneous country it was when I was a child into one that is far more diverse. According to the last census, 20% of Ireland’s population were born elsewhere. A discussion about where or how asylum seekers are accommodated and helped to integrate is entirely justified, but that requires clear progressive leadership.
In its absence, populists are able to misdirect legitimate public anger away from the government to powerless migrants and refugees. Ireland has one of Europe’s worst housing crises, while its public services, education, hospitals and mental health services are all chronically underfunded. Combined with an asylum system near breaking point, this means that an “Ireland is full” rallying cry can easily whip up resentment.
The relatively new diversity provides an age-old scapegoat. Ideas promoted online by ideologues, demagogues, rightwing grifters and bad-faith actors seeking to cultivate a power base – many of them UK- and USbased – are spreading a nativist ideology. Take a dehumanising and racist trope about asylum seekers that refers to “single, unvetted, military-age men”. These men are supposedly arriving in frightening numbers, posing a grave threat to sovereignty, security and the purity of the Irish people, leaving women supposedly afraid to venture out at night.
No mention, of course, of black Irish women such as Alanna Quinn, who lost her eye in an unprovoked attack by a group of white Irish men, or Mia O’Neill, who took her own life after years of racist bullying by white Irish neighbours in Tipperary. I suppose in the eyes of those who spuriously claim to want to protect Irish women and children, they’re “not really Irish”.
There are good reasons why younger men fleeing war often have no choice but to make their way to the west alone. But the “single, male, unvetted” idea resides in an old prejudice that is seductively powerful for racists and xenophobes.
The French post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959 of how “the deep cultural fear of the black … figured in the psychic trembling of Western sexuality”. Certainly, a lot of the racism I have experienced growing up and online as an adult has been organised around an imagined “depravity” borne of being the product of a “defiled white woman” and an N-word, a lovely thing to be told about yourself. I have observed this same vitriol directed at other Irish women who have white mothers and black fathers.
White nationalism in Ireland’s recent anti-immigrant discourse is expressed too in the word “plantation”. Researchers on disinformation at Dublin City University (DCU) who have tracked its use by far-right activists online say it is intended to invoke the 16th- and 17th-century colonial plantations of Ireland, when English settlers were given confiscated Irish land.
This could be, they suggest, a localised variant of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, whose supporters claim that white Europeans and Americans are deliberately being “replaced” by non-white and Muslim migrants. Like “plantation”, the “colonisation” hashtag has moved from the far-right online fringes to the mainstream.
Such language, intended to turn the rage of disadvantaged people on other marginalised groups is a perversion of Ireland’s history. We still rightly memorialise our past oppression as colonised people in poetry and songs about the Famine, about starving people imprisoned for stealing “Trevelyan’s corn”, but atrocities committed against the Irish people were deeply connected to the struggles of colonised people in other parts of the world. Our histories remain intimately interwoven: many of today’s refugees are fleeing the kind of dispossession and injustice Irish people fled in their millions in previous centuries. The legacy of Irish republicanism, an internationalist, secular, socialist ideology, should give us a unique basis for framing contemporary Irishness in an inclusive and progressive way.
We are not immune to the predatory machinations of false prophets and those who want to reinterpret our nationalist history. But confronting their lies and insisting on the truth of our common ground with other formerly colonised peoples is a potent first step in resistance to the far right.
Emma Dabiri is an Irish academic and broadcaster, and the author of Don’t Touch My Hair and Disobedient Bodies. She is a Guardian Europe columnist
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animals known to eat their own faeces. But there are good business reasons for this astonishing attention to detail. The bowl of kibble or wet mix placed in front of pets each day is the end result of months, if not years, of research and experimentation into pet nutrition, food chemistry and veterinary science. And it is this process that companies believe will give them the edge in the increasingly lucrative world of pet food. * **
When Waltham opened its first nutritional facility in the UK in 1960, the commercial pet food industry was about 100 years old. Before the mid-19th century, household pets survived mostly on table scraps, while working animals received heartier fare. (For the fluffy white toy dogs who acted as status symbols for the rich, the 16thcentury French court employed a “boulanger des petits chiens blancs” – a baker whose job was specifically baking bread for these pooches.)
Then came James Spratt. An American electrician and lightning-rod salesman in England, he was horrified to see malnourished dogs at the docks surviving on the sailors’ leftover hardtack – the dense, tasteless biscuits taken on long sea voyages specifically for their durability. In the early 1860s, he launched the patented Spratt’s Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes – a mixture of wheat meal, vegetables, beetroot and beef blood – thus inventing the commercial pet food industry. From the beginning, Spratt advertised his meat fibrin cakes as the food of show dogs – animals with sleek coats, in peak health and form. The association was already there: your dog will be the best because of what it eats.
Following Spratt’s success, others began their own ventures into pet food, which they marketed to the growing middle class. In 1922, Ken-L Ration introduced canned dog food in the US, largely made of horse meat. Canned pet food became the norm until the rationing of tin during the second world war forced the industry to look for alternatives. The result was dry pet food, which had a longer shelf life and could be left out in bowls overnight. In 1956, Purina reformulated its core brand Dog Chow as a dry kibble, the first of its kind. Kibble has dominated the industry ever since.
Waltham opened at a time when veterinarians in the UK were seeing a lot of dogs and cats with vitamin D deficiencies and rickets. The centre has always focused on nutrition, and it was at Waltham that scientists made a number of discoveries that have shaped the composition of pet food throughout the world. It’s possible you’ve spotted chicory root or chicory extract on the ingredient list of some pet food or another. That came about after Waltham researchers demonstrated, in 1997, the prebiotic digestion benefits of the nutrient-dense fibre. All cat food now includes taurine, an amino acid critical for heart function, vision and digestion that cats cannot produce naturally – and it was at Waltham, in the 1980s, that researchers determined the levels required in dry and wet food.
This research extends beyond mere nutrition. In the 1990s, Mars scientists developed the first nutritional supplement to make dog farts less odorous. And today, a major part of the research at Waltham is about how to make healthy food actually taste good to pets. “If they won’t eat it, they won’t get the nutrients they need,” Darren Logan, vice-president of research at the Mars Advanced Research Institute and Global Food Safety Centre, told me. He equated the process to adding soy sauce to plain noodles – the soy sauce doesn’t add much nutritional value, but it entices you to finish your meal.
In 2005, Waltham scientists, in conjunction with the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia, discovered that cats do not have taste receptors for sugar. They tend to go for umami and kokumi – a taste of fullness and richness that flavour scientists purport to be the sixth taste after sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. “Cats, as it turns out, have a very similar palate to what Asian cuisine is based around,” said Logan. (While Mars can’t go into detail about how that information translates into the products you see on supermarket shelves, the flavour profiles that the team at Waltham came up with have recently found their way into the worldwide Whiskas brand.)
The enthusiasm of the Waltham cats and dogs as they eat a given product provides crucial data, but taste research goes far beyond this. Taste receptors are encoded in DNA, which means that scientists can use a particular animal’s DNA sequence to see which flavours it will respond to. As with humans, dogs and cats’ palates vary. Building individual taste profiles offer answers when some pets don’t respond well to certain foods: if only one or two cats out of a panel of 40 seem to dislike what they’re tasting, researchers can look at their taste profiles and determine which specific flavour in the product is causing the cat’s aversion. The goal isn’t to develop a food that will please every cat, but one that will appeal to most.
For pets as well as for humans, there are elements other than taste that contribute to the enjoyment of a meal: texture, consistency, appearance, temperature and aroma. Laboratory scientist Freya Grondinger’s main role at Waltham is to smell. The majority of her sniffing is done in front of a gas chromatograph that isolates the individual scents coming from the pet food in order to build an aroma profile. The day I visited, she handed me a small container and asked me to describe the smell. “I would describe it … as dog food,” I said tentatively – it smelled of dry kibble. She laughed. “Potato,” she said. “Starch.”
Grondinger’s job is to note which smell is the strongest in each pet food recipe. She can’t say for sure how a cat or dog will perceive any given smell, but researchers believe that the relative strength of each part of the aroma is similar between people and pets. The notes that smell strongest to Grodinger are typically the ones that are further researched for their appeal to cats and dogs.
The research done in the labs at Waltham then goes to the recipe formulators at the innovation centres, who produce a new “flavour formulation”. This formulation then goes back to Waltham for testing on the dogs and cats. If the pets respond positively, the company’s corporate teams assess the feasibility of producing that formulation on a large scale, and figure out which of Mars’ numerous brands should produce it. These brands are located throughout the world, and different regions have different preferences. “Some countries like dry food, some like wet food. And Japanese markets are very different from North American and South American markets,” Logan said. The formulations also have to change according to what is and isn’t available at any given moment. “We work in a world that has lots of supply challenges,” Logan said. “You have to make sure that you can make adjustments based upon the local sourcing of your ingredients.”
All this means that it can take years for a recipe to go from passing testing at Waltham to being stocked on supermarket shelves.
* * *
Protein is at the heart of the pet food industry. Cats are obligate carnivores, meaning that they must have meat, and though dogs have evolved into omnivore scavengers, they also require protein-rich diets. But for the products that dominate the industry, no animal is actually slaughtered solely for pet food. “We’ve always been, as an industry, a kind of reuse and recycling mechanism to deal with excess in the human food chain,” said Michael Bellingham, the chief executive of the industry association UK Pet Food. “If you look at an animal that you’re going to eat, you’re not going to use all of it … our industry uses those materials in a constructive way.” Cooked and processed organ meat and bones, all of which still retains nutritional value for the pet, are the main components of pet food and appear on ingredient lists as “animal by-products”.
But there are those who say our pets deserve better than our leftovers. These are the raw food evangelists: owners and pet companies who argue that we should go back to feeding dogs and cats what they ate in the wild – chiefly a mix of raw meat and bone. Raw food fans denounce kibble as junk food and equate it to eating McDonald’s every day. “Imagine getting optimal nutrition from one bag of food your entire life,” wrote Dr Karen Shaw Becker and Rodney Habib in their book, The Forever Dog: Surprising New Science to Help Your Canine Companion Live Younger, Healthier & Longer. “Sound impossible? It is.” This perspective is becoming increasingly popular. In the UK, the raw pet food sector has grown by about 20% in the past year, and is now worth about £200m, around 5% of the UK sector as a whole.
The concept began gaining popularity in the 1990s when an Australian veterinarian, Ian Billinghurst, introduced it as the Barf diet – “biologically appropriate raw food” or “bones and raw food”. Proponents of raw feeding tend to be critical of the modern pet food industry, and the power of its major companies. In addition to producing food, companies such as Mars fund a number of veterinary schools and clinics, which, raw food advocates claim, push the companies’ products on trainee vets and pet owners, regardless of pet health. (“When any of our veterinary professionals provide nutrition advice, they have the freedom to recommend the best product for that pet, regardless of brand,” said a spokesperson for Linnaeus, a veterinary group that’s part of Mars Veterinary Health.)
Many owners claim that switching their pets to raw food has given them more energy, made their coats shinier and resulted in healthy, nonmessy bowel movements. But scientists at places like Nestlé Purina maintain that “there is no scientific evidence that [raw meat diets] provide any specific health benefits”. Instead, these companies have warned against the dangers of raw feeding and possibly exposing your pet to salmonella or E coli. In turn, raw-feeding companies and owners point at the number of recalls of processed pet foods in recent years.
Jonathan Self, who has been feeding his various dogs raw food for 17 years, launched Honey’s Real Dog Food in 2009. A former livestock farmer who went vegetarian after struggling to slaughter his pigs, he understands that though he may not need meat to survive, his dogs do. I made a trip out to Honey’s a few months after my Waltham visit. Situated on the site of an old fish processing plant in the countryside west of London, the company has no team of highly studied cats and dogs – just whichever of the staff’s dogs decided to accompany their owners into work that day.
Before the pandemic and remote work, six or seven dogs could be found trotting about Honey’s offices above the processing room on an average day. When I visited, however, it was just Blue, a one-year-old border collie belonging to the general manager. In the processing room, heaps of raw lamb ribs sat in vats, tinging the refrigeratorchilled air with the rich, metallic scent of blood. The processing typically takes about five hours; lamb takes longer than that because the bones are harder. Three staff members were overseeing the processing of almost three tonnes of food. The meat went into the mincer, bone and all, along with carrots, parsnips and a leafy green. From there, the meat, bone and vegetable blend went into the mixer, then into the casing machine that shaped the mixture into a sausage-like package. The package is frozen before being shipped to customers.
Honey’s pork comes from the “organic pig farmer down the road”, and its goat meat from “the gourmet goat farm in Norfolk”, Self said. The average Honey’s customer spends £70-£80 a month on pet food – in comparison with the £43 a month spent by the average British household. Honey’s is by no means the priciest raw food option: if your pet is large and you choose one of the more expensive brands, you could find yourself spending in excess of £300 a month. That sum doesn’t include the treats and supplements that some owners add to their pets’ raw food bowls: on social media, you can see pet food influencers garnishing their offerings with quail eggs, freeze-dried organ meat, green-lipped mussels and smelt.
Self admits that Honey’s clientele includes a royal and some well-known actors, but the company also serves pensioners and manual workers who don’t have high incomes. “They’re often feeding their dogs better than they’re feeding themselves, in my opinion,” Self said.
* * *
Soon after her arrival, I brought Florence Meowmalade to a vet, who voiced some concerns about the impact kibble would have on her gums. A different vet told us not to worry: if she enjoyed kibble, we should continue giving it to her. But by then I had become the sort of neurotic owner who regularly Googled phrases like “is my cat depressed” or “cat ears cold is cat sick”. It didn’t help that whenever I told raw-feeding advocates that I fed my cat kibble, they would respond with some variation of “oh you mustn’t blame yourself”. I began searching for an affordable wet food Florence would like.
I started Florence on Whiskas, which she seemed to like well enough – she finished her morning and evening bowls that first day. The next day, she took about two bites and walked away. “I think she doesn’t like the fish flavour,” I told my husband. I gave her only the chicken flavour; she started sticking her paw into the bowl and flicking bits of it on to the floor. “Maybe it’s the brand,” I said, and changed her over to a more expensive mix, which she left in the bowl until it hardened and congealed.
I had discussed with Self whether I could try Florence on Honey’s, but we realised that without teeth, she wouldn’t be able to get through the bits of bone. I remembered the pet influencers whose reels I had watched on Instagram, but I was unable to afford the delicacies they served up. I settled on a small pouch of powdered bone broth and soaked Florence’s kibble in it. But it was no good: the broth-soaked kibble sat there uneaten, attracting flies.
It was hard for me to not project my own experiences on to my cat. I try not to eat overly processed food, nor do I enjoy eating the same thing every day. Why would she? Yet here was my weird little toothless cat who just seems to love kibble.
Frustrated, I recalled the meal I made Florence on the day she arrived: boiled chicken breast, hand-torn into tiny, digestible pieces. She had licked the bowl clean. With that meal, I had been telling her I could take care of her. I could make her happy. Remembering that chicken, and the satisfaction I felt watching Florence eat it, I began to understand my mother’s compulsion to serve me plate after plate of hand-wrapped dumplings even when I’m close to bursting.
A person can let you know directly what food they like, and why; not so a cat. Florence cannot tell me that she prefers to graze rather than eat big meals – something I only realised somewhere between the second and third wet food brands we tried. Nor can she tell me that she actually enjoys the feel of the kibble on her gums – a theory I’ve been running with for the past few months. So we’ve gone back to kibble, though in the morning I give her a bowl of hand-shredded boiled chicken as well. She’d be happy with just kibble – I know this now. Even so, every morning I carefully shred another chicken breast – just in case.
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