All the alarms went off when in September a couple of hundred elements of the ultra-right blocked the building of the Parliament (Oireachtas), preventing the entrance and exit of the deputies and harassing passers-by with neo-fascist gestures and shouts such as “ Ireland first’, ‘Ireland for the Irish’ and ‘Immigrants, come home’. But now they have gone even further, with the destruction of police cars, a tram and several buses, the assault of a central hotel and the looting of shops.
The pretext was the attack by an individual – an Irish national who has been in the country for twenty years – on children in a primary school, which left a five-year-old girl in a serious condition and the teacher who tried to defend her, and minor injuries to two other children of a similar age. The assailant was tackled by a Brazilian immigrant passing by on his Deliveroo bike and hit him on the head with his helmet; then other people kicked him until common sense prevailed and tempers calmed down.
It didn’t stop there, though. Rumors began to circulate on social networks that the person responsible was an immigrant, far-right groups mobilized and at night they gathered on O’Connell Street, Ireland’s most historic street, where the office is located of posts that was the heart of the Easter Uprising of 1916, precursor to the war of independence.
In scenes not seen in decades and more typical of troubled Belfast than Dublin, young neo-fascists attacked police with sticks, flares, tools and Molotov cocktails, burned vehicles, robbed shops and destroyed what they found in their step, encouraged by older men who applauded them. All this in front of the monument to the fallen, in O’Connell, Grafton Street and Parnell Square, streets that bear the names of the heroes of the Irish homeland and were closed throughout the night.
Thirty-four people were arrested and appeared in court yesterday to be charged, and now face up to twelve years in prison. The reputation of the Gardai (Irish police), which deployed four hundred troops but suffered enormously to control the situation, has not yet come out unscathed, due to the sense of defenselessness of the citizens, who watched surprised by the level of destruction or unable to get home from work due to the suspension of public transport. For hours, a helicopter flew over the center of Dublin, and the authorities have asked Belfast for a water cannon in case there are riots again.
“Ireland is not that, the Irish are not that”, said the prime minister, Leo Varadkar (of Indian origin), composedly, to a country that has not quite assimilated what has happened. In the same vein, President Michael O’Higgins described the events as an unforgivable attack against democracy and social inclusion.
But the truth is that populism has long been on the rise in the Republic of Ireland for the same reasons as everywhere else, people’s discontent with the rising cost of living, inflation, rent prices, the deterioration of health and education, the lack of affordable housing and the poor state of public services. Traditionally an exporting country of emigrants, prosperity has turned the situation upside down and now twenty percent of the population was born abroad.
The pro-establishment centre-right parties that have historically dominated the country’s politics (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) are paying the biggest electoral price. Despite its historical links to IRA terrorism, Sinn Féin, with a left-wing program that its critics describe as populist, won the most votes in the last election (although it failed to form a government) and is the favorite to win next year or 2025.
On the other side of the spectrum, groups such as the Freedom Party, the National Party or the Anticorruption Party have emerged, which do not have enough support to have parliamentary representation but are making noise, and organized the assault on Parliament. They agree in the denunciation of globalization, the political and intellectual elites, gays and transsexuals, the attachment to the “traditional Christian family”, the phobia of immigration, the opposition to sex education in schools , vaccines and aid to Ukraine. In several locations, his followers have gone to public libraries to demand the destruction of children’s books that, in their opinion, promote homosexuality and pedophilia, and have demonstrated violently in front of refugee reception centers, hotels and hostels where asylum seekers live while their applications are processed.
Ireland has undergone a major modernization in recent decades, the Catholic Church has lost much of its influence, divorce and abortion have been legalized, and gay relationships have been normalized. But much of its society is insular and nationalist, liable to fall into the hands of an increasingly organized extreme right in a climate of social discontent. This, pessimists warn, could be just the beginning.
