April 27, 2025 - 4:20pm
Dublin
It is a tradition within Irish Republicanism for Easter Week to be marked by parades and marches to commemorate the 1916 Rising against British rule. Yesterday, Ireland’s growing if electorally marginal anti-immigration movement adopted the tradition. Outside Dublin’s Gardens of Remembrance, a woman was doing brisk business selling the Irish Republic flag of the Rising, as well as tricolours adorned with “You’ll Never Beat The Irish”, as tens of thousands of anti-immigration marchers gathered for their largest protest yet.
“They need to be dragged out by their balls,” said one older woman, carrying a commemorative wreath, of the Irish government. She transpired to be the wife of the movement’s emerging leader, the veteran Republican activist and newly-elected inner city Dublin councillor Malachy Steenson. The day was to be a reassertion of nationalist credibility after the politically damaging presence of Southern anti-immigration protestors alongside Ulster Loyalists during last summer’s Belfast riots.
As the march progressed, filling central Dublin, Garda Public Order Units in blue body armour separated the protestors from the vastly outnumbered counter-protest outside the General Post Office, a sacred site in nationalist tradition. Waving LGBTQI+ and trade union flags, and hammer and sickle placards, the counter-protestors shouted “Nazi Scum Off Our Streets” at the marchers, and were heckled with shouts of “Commie Scum” in return. “Traitors!” one young woman shouted at the counter-protestors. “Youse are worse than any foreigner.”
Prominent among the counter-protestors was a Sinn Féin contingent, a surprising and last-minute addition to the roster. Sinn Féin had lately appeared to be backing away from its full-throated defence of the Irish coalition government’s mass migration policies, in an attempt to assuage the concerns of its voter base. In the Republic, though very much not in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin voters are by far the strongest anti-immigration constituency. Scattered across a broad spectrum of microparties, Ireland’s anti-immigration movement achieved electoral success last year only in winning council seats in working-class areas of Dublin. Judging by the fiery speeches, the protest’s organisers have decided to lean strongly into capturing Sinn Féin’s disaffected urban voter base.
“We don’t need big posh people to come on and represent the working class,” independent candidate Gavin Pepper roared at the vast crowd outside the grand neoclassical Custom House. “We are the working class.” Newly-elected councillor Patrick Quinlan of the National Party, an identitarian movement standing on a platform of mass deportations and re-Gaelicising Ireland, gave a speech railing against “the den of rats inside Dáil Éireann” (the Irish parliament). It was the sort of political speech that would be recognisable to historians of Ireland’s 19th-century mass movement nationalism. “They fear not chaos but our awakening,” Quinlan roared, “The holy fire that blazed in our patriot dead […] lives on here today. The heroes of 1916 triumphed, and so shall we.”
Taking his turn at the microphone, Steenson, the protest’s organiser, told the cheering crowd that “we are building a workers’ revolutionary movement to represent the working class.” Brushing away the disappointing election results, he highlighted that this movement had already beaten the government in two referendums, and that victory was now around the corner. “In generations to come, people will remember St Patrick’s Day 2025 [when Conor McGregor, now working closely with Steenson, attended the White House] as the turning point in our battle.” He went on: “When Trump comes here we will be the ones having an audience with him.”
“We’re building a movement that truly represents the working class, not the middle classes leading the working classes to the trough and then not letting them drink,” Steenson told me after the speeches had ended. “We will be a true following on from our forefathers in 1916 who had a workers revolution, and that was defeated then in 1922 by what now passes for government,” he added, reflecting his family background in the anti-Treaty Official IRA and Workers Party, from which the Provisional IRA and today’s Sinn Féin split at the beginning of the Troubles.
“Electoral politics, in and of itself, is not gonna save the Irish people,” the National Party’s Patrick Quinlan told me. He cited the example of the early 20th-century Irish language movement: “The Irish fight has always been a cultural fight. If it’s not electoral politics alone, it’s about social cohesion, getting that fabric of what it means to be Irish back.”
Yet while a boost to an amorphous anti-immigration movement bruised by electoral failure, the purpose of these mass protests remains unclear. Coming together to maximise protest turnout, the anti-immigration movement’s different party leaders compete for the same narrow vote share at elections, diluting their effectiveness.
Neither will Steenson’s links to McGregor — and by association the Trump administration — win over the middle classes. Yet, from Steenson’s “Make Ireland Great Again” baseball cap down, the movement’s increasing tilt to Ireland’s largely conservative American diaspora for funding and political influence reflects another longstanding tradition in Irish nationalism. It’s also a front against both the Irish coalition government and its Sinn Féin challenger.
“This is very much a battle for the heart and soul of nationalism. Well, it’s for the heart and soul of the Irish people,” Steenson said. “We are the new nationalist movement. Sinn Féin no longer represent nationalism — they’re globalists.”
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