On November 23, 2023, a far-right riot broke out in the streets of Dublin. Earlier that day, a knife attack on a small group of primary school age children in Dublin city centre had taken place. The attacker was a 50-year-old man with history of mental illness, who was born in Algeria but had been living in Ireland long and also become a naturalised Irish citizen. False rumours about the attacker being an ‘illegal’ immigrant started spreading on social media and Telegram. A few hours later, fuelled by false rumours and speculations, the far-right started gathering in the city centre in Dublin. The gathering quickly escalated into a riot, during which Garda cars, buses and a tram were set on fire, over 60 businesses were looted, as well as several buildings used to house asylum seekers targeted. The total damage of the riot was nearly 20 million euro. An Garda Síochána (the Irish police force) initially arrested 34 people out of hundreds of rioters. A year later, in November 2024, the total number of arrested people had risen to 57, with photos of 99 ‘persons of interest’ published by the Gardaí.
What has led to this situation in a country with no remarkable historical fascist tradition? We meet Peadar in Dublin for a chat about Irish fascism and anti-fascism. Peadar is an Irish language activist, supporter of Palestinian liberation – and an antifascist. While Ireland has not been and is not by any means immune to fascist influence, historically the far-right has been small and fragmented. So much so that in research, Irish anti-fascists have been described as ‘antifa without fascism.’ There are a couple of different analyses as to why this is, but Ireland’s history of colonialism no doubt is one of the reasons why the far-right have not gained a similar foothold in Ireland as in many other countries in Europe – at least until now. Nationalism, a central element of fascism, has a very different meaning in Ireland than, say, Finland or the Nordic countries. Due to the centuries-long and still on-going history of British occupation and governance in Ireland, the Irish nationalist movement has been anti-colonialist, often with strong socialist politics and an understanding of a shared struggle for liberation and freedom. That is not to say that Irish nationalism would not have contained reactionary, yet not always fascist, elements, too – for instance, the power and influence of the Catholic Church had been immense in Ireland since the creation of the Free State (free from the British rule, now the Republic of Ireland) in 1921, up until the last couple of decades, and closely linked with Irish national identity. It also varies how well the nationalist movement has incorporated feminist principles and the rights of women as well as gender and sexual minorities into its objectives. Still, all aspects of Irish society have been shaped by centuries of British colonialism, and its legacy can still be seen and felt. Because of this, the meaning of nationalism is anchored in a desire for liberation from colonial rule.
Internationalist orientation of Irish fascism and anti-fascism
We start talking with Peadar about what makes Irish fascism and anti-fascism unique compared to their other manifestations in Europe, historically as well as in the present day. Irish fascism and anti-fascism have always existed in internationalist spaces, says Peadar. Irish fascists have always been importing their politics from abroad, starting from the proto-fascist Blueshirt movement in the 1930s, which was a direct copy of the Nazi party in Germany – just wearing blue instead of brown. The contemporary far-right, on the other hand, copy their politics from the US and the UK, the most obvious example of which is bringing British far-right activists over in order to benefit from their influence. Irish ‘nationalists’ participated in the far-right, anti-immigration riots in Belfast in August 2024 that had started in Southport, England the previous month. Members of the Dublin-based ‘Coolock Says No’ anti-immigrant group marched in Belfast together with members of loyalist paramilitary groups (supporters of the British rule in the North of Ireland), some of whom had been convicted of killing Catholics during the Troubles in the 1990s. This shows the simultaneously hollow and contradictory nature of the kind of nationalism the Irish far-right promotes, when they are happy to march side by side with those who just a few decades earlier used extreme violence in an attempt to stifle the Irish nationalist movement.
The Irish language and colonial mentality of the far-right
What further highlights the absurdity and irony of this copied Irish fascism is the disregard (bar few historical exceptions) for the Irish language, a now minority language that the British colonial government tried to brutally suppress. Irish was spoken widely in across Ireland up until the 1600s, when it started declining. It did so particularly in the period following the famine between 1845 and 1852 (known as the Great Hunger, ‘an gorta mór’ in Irish), during which about a million people emigrated and another million died. During the colonial rule, the use of Irish was not only discouraged, but also made illegal in various governmental, judicial and educational contexts by the British government. Even though the number of Irish speakers has decreased dramatically, today some 40 % of people living in Ireland speak it to some extent. The number of fluent Irish speakers is, however, smaller and only 72,000 use it daily, according to the 2022 census in the Republic of Ireland. The situation in the North of Ireland is somewhat different, around 12 % of people having at least some knowledge of Irish, but only 0.3 % speak it as their main language.
You might be excused for thinking that upholding the Irish language is something that ‘nationalists’ of the far-right would care about. True enough, in the 1940s, a fascist party Altirí na hAiséirighe (‘Architects of the Resurrection’) was formed, and one of its central aims was to promote the Irish language and eradicate the use of English in Ireland entirely. The party took, somewhat surprisingly, 9 seats in local elections in 1945 – at a time when fascism was not particularly popular elsewhere in Europe, to say the least. Interestingly, there is no contemporary equivalent of a fascist group emphasising the Irish language in the same way. In fact, much of the far-right do not care about the language at all, and consider it useless and of no value. A video from 2023 shows the Black left-wing politician Darragh Adelaide confronting a well-known far-right activist in Irish. In a rather embarrassing manner, the far-right agitator is only able to respond: “I don’t understand.” In the recent years, Ireland has been experiencing a revival of the Irish language, music and culture especially among young people, and it has nothing to do with the far-right. On the contrary: it is largely thanks to the hard work of Irish language activists, many of whom have left-wing politics to varying degrees. Here too we can see how nationalism, after a long time of colonialist violence, takes more of a left-wing form, leaving the far-right and fascists on the side of the coloniser.
From 1930s Spain to football pitches and working-class communities
Where Irish fascists are merely copying their counterparts abroad, Irish antifascists have long rooted their politics and actions in international solidarity, Peadar tells us. In the 1930s, a number of Irish anti-fascists and anarchists travelled to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascist regime. Many of them fought in the XV International Brigades in the Connolly Column, named after James Connolly, a socialist and trade unionist, who was executed following the Easter Rising against British colonial rule in 1916 – illustrating the interwoven nature of Irish nationalism and anti-fascism. Besides Republican nationalism, Irish anti-fascism is also characterised by solidarity with Palestine and the Basque country. The burning of Oswald Mosley’s house is a delightful example in the history of Irish anti-fascism that shows the connection between militant anti-fascism and Republican nationalism. Members of the IRA burnt down the house of Oswald Mosley, Clonfert Palace in County Galway, in the 1950s, although the action was unsanctioned by the IRA. The contemporary fascists’ attempts to claim nationalism are extremely contradictory to the actual, historical nature of Irish nationalism – perhaps this is one of the reasons why contemporary Irish fascism import their politics from elsewhere.
Fascist organising continued in Ireland after the end of WWII, generally speaking with little success. AFA Ireland was formed in 1991, even though fascist activity in Ireland was minimal in the 1980s and 1990s. Irish anti-fascists living in London in the 1980s gained experience in the militant anti-fascist group Red Action; experience they had when they returned to Ireland. What’s especially noteworthy about AFA Ireland is that, similar to Red Action, they started to organise within working class communities and spaces. AFA Ireland also focused on football and organised within football supporters. They make their goals clear in the booklet Undertones: Anti-fascism and the far-right in Ireland 1945-2012, published by AFA Ireland in 2012, as they state: ‘AFA believed that it was vital for us to promote progressive views on racism in all areas where it had influence. By making our views known we were cutting the ground from under those who would hope to advance reactionary ideas in those areas.’
AFA Ireland have done a fantastic job at preventing fascists from organising, says Peadar, and as an example mentions the way in which Pegida’s attempt to launch an Irish branch in 2016 (with the help of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson) was quashed. A far-right protest had been planned in Dublin to kick off the launch, but its organisers were met with staunch opposition as thousands of antifascists and anti-racists gathered in the streets. A group of antifascists also confronted the racists and Islamophobes and, to paraphrase a certain popular Wolfe Tones song, made them run like hell away. In the 2010s, there were also attempts by Eastern European racists, who’d brought far-right politics from their home countries with them, to start organising in Ireland. They had also been involved in Pegida’s organising attempt, but the utter failure it became meant that they lost their interest in trying to continue to work together with the Irish far-right.
Coalitions and communities: anti-racism as anti-fascism
Despite the work of AFA Ireland and other anti-fascists, the far-right has been on the rise in recent years. Since 2018, approximately 30 properties in use, planned for use, or rumoured to be in use to accommodate asylum seekers have been burnt down across Ireland, the vast majority of arsons occurring in 2023 and 2024. When Covid hit in 2020, fascists started to crawl out of their holes in order to oppose Covid restrictions and spread anti-vaxx disinformation. However, the groundwork that has enabled the rise of the far-right has been done years ago already. As an example of an event that helped create ideal circumstances for the far-right to emerge, Peadar mentions a referendum on birthright citizenship in 2004 in Ireland, which changed the eligibility for citizenship. Prior to 2004, all babies born in Ireland were eligible for Irish citizenship, but following the referendum having born in Ireland was no longer enough to qualify for an Irish citizenship. This advanced the racialisation of migrants, argues Peadar. Children could be considered ‘not Irish’ even if they had been born and raised in Ireland on the basis of not having Irish – white – parents. What creates ideal conditions for fascism to grow, in Peadar’s view, is an actively racist society. Anti-fascist work, then, ultimately needs to be anti-racist work.
This is where organisations such as CATU Ireland and Le Chéile are very important, argues Peadar. CATU, Community Action Tenants Union, is an all-Ireland union for tenants, mortgage holders and homeowners. It is a union for defending communities and fighting for better housing in the form of direct, collective action. On the other hand, Le Chéile (‘together’ in English) is a coalition of organisations and individuals opposing the rise of the far-right. Le Chéile aims to build a movement based on solidarity, social and economic justice and the unity of working people. At the time of writing, it consists of 100 organisations across Ireland. CATU and Le Chéile can certainly be understood to continue the tradition of organising the working class, similarly to AFA Ireland, and building strong movements that offer people a vision and a way of building a better, more just society.
We started the conversation by noting the internationalist inclinations of both fascism and anti-fascism in Ireland. Contemporary Irish anti-fascism strongly takes the form of anti-Zionism, which, Peadar argues, has become deeply engrained in Irish society. ‘Anti-Zionism is a form of anti-racism,’ Peadar says, ‘You can’t be pro-Palestine and not like Arabs.’ Anti-Zionism and opposing the settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel is keeping with the tradition of Irish anti-fascism that goes back to the Irish volunteers fighting against Franco in Spain. As Irish and Palestinian people share many similar experiences of colonial oppression and violence, anti-Zionism also resonates with Republican nationalism: there’s an understanding of a shared struggle. We can understand grassroots approach, collective action, and anti-colonial nationalism as the building blocks of Irish anti-fascism, and these elements are present in the Palestinian solidarity movement also. What’s important for the present moment is that anti-Zionism has been adopted by all sections of Irish grassroots society, as Peadar notes. This is clear from the many different solidarity actions that have taken place in Ireland, and while marches are but one example of such actions, the participants in the biggest pro-Palestine marches in Dublin have been in the tens of thousands, with people travelling to attend from all across the country – a very different picture of Irish people than the 2023 Dublin riot (and others that followed) paints.