The Dublin riots shocked Ireland – but some of us saw this creep to the far right coming

Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

A strange duality characterised Thursday’s riots in Dublin: the level of violence caught most people by surprise, and yet there was also a feeling of inevitability about it. Ireland’s Booker prize-winning novelist Paul Lynch captured the mood in his acceptance speech on Sunday, when he said he was “astonished” by the disturbances but that the possibility for such disquiet to break out is “always under the surface”.

Few expected to see the capital descend into a violent hellscape during evening rush hour. But factcheckers like myself who monitor Ireland’s far right – as part of our work verifying online content and debunking misinformation – have witnessed how the movement instigated city-wide destruction after building on anti-immigrant sentiment over the past year.

I could sense trouble in the air as soon as I heard about a multiple stabbing in Dublin’s north inner city that preceded the riot. Far-right agitators, speculating that the attack bore the hallmarks of Islamist terrorism, whipped up a frenzy on social media and urged their followers to protest.

They also referenced schoolteacher Ashling Murphy, whose murder in 2022 by a Slovakian-born man – convicted this month – led to a national conversation about women’s safety and is regularly cited by the far right as exemplifying the apparent threat that foreign men pose to Irish women.

Unconfirmed reports on Thursday that the perpetrator was an immigrant to Ireland poured fuel on the fire (it’s since been reported that although the suspect is Algerian-born, he is a naturalised Irish citizen who has lived here for two decades).

As vehicles were burned, shops were looted and gardaí were attacked, I watched what felt like the endpoint of years of complacency towards the far right in Ireland. Factcheckers and other long-time observers of the movement have spent years calling for it to be taken more seriously.

Yet politicians and elements of the media often see the far right as as a harmless group of conspiracy nuts, rather than recognising it as a growing political faction. This is partly short-termism; Ireland’s far-right parties have only emerged within the past decade, and none of their candidates have ever been elected. In the most recent general election in 2020, the best-performing far-right candidate won just 2% of first-preference votes.

That election fell a month before the Covid pandemic, when the movement swelled its ranks via anti-lockdown groups on social media, drawing together anti-vaxxers and conspiracy communities. Post-pandemic, the government’s failure to deal with ongoing social problems has given the far right further opportunity to grow.

Swaths of people can’t afford homes as a result of a housing crisis; parents struggle to find adequate childcare; GPs can’t take new patients; farmers worry about environmental policies. Those problems preceded the current government, but in festering they have created fertile conditions for fearmongering around a newer issue: immigration.

A 2020 election exit poll showed that just 1% of people considered immigration when they voted. It is now one of the dominant political subjects in Ireland – a country that sent so many people abroad after the Great Famine that our population is still smaller than it was in 1846.

The catalyst was the arrival of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees alongside a record number of asylum seekers from other countries in 2022. Initially, the government scrambled to find accommodation for them all and repurposed community facilities, industrial buildings and hotels to manage the influx.

At one point last year, politicians admitted they were struggling to accommodate everyone, prompting anti-immigrant groups to declare “Ireland is full”.

It set the scene for a wave of protests beginning last November, when far-right agitators instigated demonstrations in working-class areas where refugees were being accommodated. Pairing up with local people, they picketed refugee housing and asked why communities were not being consulted, while making racist claims that it would be unsafe for women and children to live near so many men from minority communities.

Sinn Féin – which has never been in government – was also targeted, as far-right figures sought to hoover up its working-class, nationalist-minded vote by portraying the party as leftwing traitors.

The demos were a huge propaganda win for the movement, with videos shared across social media showing mobs baying “get them out”, and burning a makeshift refugee camp. The English far-right leader Tommy Robinson has also added to the furore, travelling to Ireland earlier this year to make a documentary about immigration called Plantation 2, a title evoking the 16th-century colonisation of Ireland by Protestant British settlers, which had a significant role in the subjugation of Irish Catholics in subsequent centuries.

Emboldened, the movement has since broadened its horizons. Earlier this year, an angry group shuttered a public library in Cork for stocking LGBTQ+ books. In September, far-right protesters sent Dáil Éireann, parliament’s lower house, into lockdown while carting around a noose prop outside featuring images of politicians.

Gardaí have mostly policed these demonstrations passively, ostensibly to uphold the democratic right to protest and so as not to strengthen the movement by feeding propaganda – an approach that seemed to have backfired spectacularly last week.

Most people still believe Ireland has an obligation towards refugees, but the government seems unable to allay lingering concerns about the wider impact on social services. It is frustrating for factcheckers and others who observe the far right to have to keep fighting the deluge of misinformation that crops up as a result, and to see the far right continue to build off the back of it.

Local, European and general plebiscites are all due in Ireland over the next 18 months. If any delivers electoral success for the far right, there should be far less surprise than there was about the riots in Dublin.