July 16, 2024 - 1:15pm

It would have been reasonable to assume that the relatively poor showing for anti-immigration candidates in Ireland’s local elections last month, like the unexpectedly strong performance by the governing coalition, marked the beginning of a decline for Ireland’s nascent populist movement. But yesterday’s serious disorder in Coolock, a working-class community in North Dublin, proves that the issue is very far from defused.

The clashes were sparked early yesterday morning when police moved in to remove a months-long protest encampment at Coolock’s disused Crown Paints factory, which is undergoing preparatory work to be used as an accommodation centre for migrants. In response, protestors burned excavating equipment at the site, injuring a worker, according to video released by Arab migrant construction workers sheltering in a van.

Over the course of the afternoon, protestors clashed with Gardaí at cordons erected to block the site, throwing bricks and using fireworks against police lines, while the authorities attempted to break up the demonstration using pepper spray and baton charges. Numbers grew as protestors confronted Gardaí until the evening, when demonstrators, blocked from the site, marched to the local police station, attacking and attempting to burn parked patrol cars.

While the Gardaí took control of the paint factory by nightfall, the disorder was a new benchmark in both Ireland’s anti-immigration movement and the state’s response. Dublin’s newly elected anti-immigration councillors — independents Gavin Pepper and Malachy Steenson and the identitarian National Party’s Patrick Quinlan — were prominent at the scene, recording videos backing the protests, and berating the police. All three were pepper sprayed. Pepper later accused Gardaí Commissioner Drew Harris, an Ulster Protestant and former PSNI Deputy Chief Constable, of “bringing sectarian violence from Northern Ireland to our streets” and employing “the bully boy tactics that the RUC used for years against Catholic and Nationalist residents”.

Yet while those supporting the protests accuse the Gardaí of excessively heavy-handed policing, the Irish media has accused Harris, who was present at the clashes, of not using enough force from the start, allowing the disorder to escalate. This morning, Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris condemned the “sheer thuggery” of the rioters, and criticised journalists for describing the attendees as “protestors”, stating that “when you decide to use a petrol bomb, you lose the right to be called a protestor.”

Ireland’s anti-migration movement has been marked so far by a series of mass protests and peaceful sit-ins, interspersed with occasional but dramatic outbursts of violence like those in Dublin last November, Newtownmountkennedy in April, and now Coolock. The imagery from yesterday, of ski-masked youths attacking lines of riot police, resembles Northern Ireland more than it does the hitherto-placid Republic, and presents a major challenge to the country’s political leadership. Attempts to relocate migrants to both rural constituencies and deprived urban communities have sparked violent reaction, yet the Irish government evidently feels that abandoning its distribution policies would mean surrendering initiative to the mob.

For Ireland’s largest opposition party, Sinn Féin, the protest movement remains a headache. Its leader Mary Lou McDonald last week attempted a reboot following the party’s lacklustre performance in the local elections, stating that “on the issue of immigration, we have failed to reflect where most people are at.” Following yesterday’s disorder, however, the party’s Justice spokesperson, Pa Daly, insisted — perhaps ironically —  that “no matter what grievances people may have, they do not have the right to hold local communities to ransom with violence and intimidation,” urging a police crackdown to bring order to the streets.

Rather than defusing tensions, the limited degree of electoral representation the anti-immigration movement has now achieved has added a new element to the already combustible mix. Meanwhile, the Irish state finds itself grappling with the unenviable task of forcing through unpopular migration policies with police batons, always uncertain whether Gardaí deployment will quell the protests, as in Newtownmountkennedy, or escalate them, as in Coolock.

With Irish security sources reportedly exploring terrorism charges against those involved in yesterday’s disorder, and Ireland’s Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) today terming the events “an attack on our state and our democracy”, it seems that the ratcheting up of tensions between the Irish state and anti-immigration activists is still far from over.


Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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