Far-right
call to arms over Southport has echoes of Dublin stabbings aftermath
Shane
Harrison
in Dublin
Misinformation
and disinformation played major part in riots after stabbings involving
children
Fri 2 Aug
2024 11.20 BST
Anyone in
Ireland sitting in front of their television screen or checking their mobile
phone about events unfolding in Southport this week could not help but be
struck by the similarities to what happened in Dublin in November last year.
On both
occasions young children were repeatedly stabbed.
In
Southport,Axel Rudakubana, 17, has been charged with the murders of three girls
– Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven –
as they attended a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in the north-west of
England. He also faces 10 counts of attempted murder.
Eight other
children sustained knife wounds, with five of them in a critical condition
while two adults were also seriously injured.
In Dublin on
23 November, parents had gathered outside an Irish language school to collect
their children.
What
happened next is also the subject of court proceedings, but it is alleged that
a foreign-born Irish citizen in his 50s started stabbing two girls and a boy,
aged five and six, as well as their care assistant, who was trying to protect
them.
It wasn’t
long before false narratives about what happened spread and the far right
issued a call to arms.
Ciarán
O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that
specialises in online disinformation and extremism, said word of the Dublin
stabbing spread before any news media outlet had reported it or Garda Síochána
(Irish police force) statement had been made.
Muslims and
foreigners were being blamed and one man was later falsely identified as the
attacker.
O’Connor
said less than half an hour after the incident a post on Telegram stated: “If a
minor has been killed by one of those animals this would be the beginning of
the end of this govt and their immigration. Now, if this is true, buildings
will burn.”
As time
passed the level of vitriol and misinformation intensified on a private
Telegram group chat and was shared on X.
The group
included a member whose username is “Kill All Immigrants”.
Misinformation
and disinformation literally fuelled the flames of hatred as young men answered
far-right calls to arms and gathered in the centre of Dublin. What followed was
the worst rioting the Irish capital, normally a peaceful place, had seen in decades.
Masked
rioters attacked gardaí protecting a crime scene, and torched police vehicles
and public transport before smashing their way into shops, with some stealing
as much as they could carry away.
A line of
about five police in hi-vis jackets line up opposite protesters, one with an
Irish flag behind a placard saying ‘Irish lives matter’
Telegram
says users only receive content to which they subscribe, and calls to violence
are “explicitly forbidden” and removed once moderators are made aware of them.
The same
far-right playbook appears to have been used in Southport and other parts of
England.
As the
Guardian has reported, an account called Europe Invasion, known to publish
anti-immigrant and Islamophobic content, posted on X at 1.49pm, soon after news
of the Southport attack emerged, that the suspect was “alleged to be a Muslim
immigrant”. There was also a false claim that he was an asylum seeker.
Those posts
have since been viewed nearly 7m times.
While
far-right protesters on one side of the Irish Sea hold placards saying:
“Ireland is full”; in England they say: “We want our country back”.
Fear of
change, a housing crisis and nostalgia are powerful emotions for those who have
taken to the streets and claim to feel threatened.
Similar
sentiments were expressed in the violence in Dublin, the north-west of England
and London.
Disinformation
is a huge concern in Ireland as more people abandon traditional news outlets
and get their information from the echo chambers of social media that
frequently exist in a parallel world.
While making
a documentary for the BBC radio File on 4 programme about the Dublin riots and
the far right, my producers and I approached a group of men and women
protesting outside a disused pub they said was going to be used to house asylum
seekers.
When we told
them the building was to be used for homeless families at a time of a housing
crisis they refused to believe us or any official who told them otherwise. A
short time later the pub was burnt down.
Susan Daly,
from the Journal, said: “You cannot stop the disinformation. That horse has
bolted. But you can build better communities and you can build better
resilience to counteract those attempts in the future.”
Although
many of the world’s biggest social media platforms have their European
headquarters in Dublin, the Irish government has introduced legislation aimed
at stopping the spread of false information.
The
penalties include fines of up to €20m (£17m) or imprisonment.
The UK
government’s Online Safety Act 2023 is a similar piece of legislation. It
requires social media platforms to tackle illegal content, such as threats
against people of a particular race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, and
to protect users from an offence known as “false communications”.
As in
Ireland, the success of the legislation largely depends on the social media
platforms almost immediately taking down dangerous and misleading content and
enforcing their own guidelines.
That is
probably easier said than done and the recent events on both sides of the Irish
Sea show that false information still spreads far more quickly than the truth,
with too many people hearing what they want to hear.
While there
are many striking similarities between what is happening in Ireland and
England, there are also some differences shaped by history.
Until very
recently Ireland was a country of emigration as some people fled relative
poverty, others the stifling influence of a once dominant Catholic church. But
in recent years there has been massive immigration, with one in five people now
born abroad.
As the Irish
Times columnist Fintan O’Toole has noted, the number of foreign-born residents
is much higher in Ireland now than “in the great age of immigration in the US”.
And this all
happened without – until now – immigration becoming a matter of political
debate. But a housing crisis has helped to change that.
Nostalgia
may play well in England but not in Ireland.
On his
podcast, the economist and commentator David McWilliams once wondered what the
Irish equivalent of Donald Trump’s slogan: “Make America great again” might be.
Could it be, he joked: “make Ireland shite again”?
No doubt as
more houses are built the attraction of the “Ireland is full” argument will
diminish but the far-right genie is out of the bottle.
Some believe
the government would be better advised to promote the benefits of immigration
by highlighting the roles of foreign doctors and nurses, builders and
hospitality workers.
Britain, as
a former imperial power, has more experience as a society with multiculturalism
than Ireland, but both have benefited economically, politically and socially
from immigrants.
And as
people in both countries sit down in front of their televisions and watch
Olympic athletes from different backgrounds successfully representing both
countries, surely it is worth highlighting and celebrating that message, rather
than one of hatred.
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