Western liberal democracies are apparently inhabited by vast and increasing numbers of disaffected, dissatisfied citizens who could conceivably put populists in power on both sides of the Atlantic over the coming year. Donald Trump’s White House comeback bid should be the stuff of dystopian fantasy, not a news story. But as Naomi Klein describes brilliantly in her new book, Doppelganger, our collective trajectory away from reality seems to be in freefall.
Why are populist narratives gaining so much traction even in mainstream political discourse? Perhaps the truth is too boring or complex for our shortened attention spans: after all, who has the time to make sense of reality when we can entertain ourselves with fantasy? Vanishingly few politicians keep their promises, which fuels a sense that we may as well just listen to the best storyteller, or the best shit-poster, whoever gets us riled up most effectively.
Ireland has so far been spared a far-right or anti-immigrant political party. But the Dublin riots last November, and a more recent spate of blockades and arson attacks on buildings meant for the accommodation of asylum seekers, or rumoured to be such, suggest a mood change. It is not far-fetched to imagine a Trump presidency radicalising this mood to produce a more menacing populist landscape. The one we have is already being contaminated by imported far-right tropes and conspiracy theories.
Russell Brand and Steve Bannon were quick to chime in after the riots, interpreting and distorting the significance of events in Ireland for international consumption. According to their “alt-right” narrative, the violence had nothing to do with racism against refugees – despite unambiguous messages of incitement such as “kill foreigners, kill migrants” circulating online at the time. Rather, Brand told his millions of devoted YouTube subscribers, the events were an outpouring of the entirely reasonable concerns of honest, ordinary working-class people, people who need to protect themselves and their children, because the remote elites that govern them have no intention of doing so.
That Ireland would rebel against what Brand calls “globalism” with recourse to its own ethno-nationalism was not only reasonable but honourable, he added, because of past centuries of oppression and the fact that Irish nationalism was forged fighting British colonialism.
It will hardly trouble fans of his conspiracy theories, but Brand’s invocation of an Irish nationalist exceptionalism reveals serious gaps in his knowledge. Contrary to Brand’s claims, including his attempt to position Ireland as somehow existing outside of global events (weird flex, bro), the revolutionary vision espoused by James Connolly, for example, or previous generations of rebels such as the United Irishmen of 1798, was characterised by a rejection of ethnicity or blood as the basis for self-determination.
Brand is right that Ireland is a unique case among majority white, English-speaking nations in that it was not itself a coloniser. In many respects, Ireland has more in common with other colonised countries than it does with imperialist ones.
Nonetheless, while Ireland was subjugated, Irish people also came to be racialised as white. Their inclusion within the hierarchy of race as “white” means Irish people can be manipulated emotively to believe that Irishness and whiteness are the same thing. The constant refrain I heard growing up, despite being born and raised in Dublin, and my mother and maternal ancestry being Irish, was that I couldn’t really be Irish because my father was Nigerian. I was not white, and therefore not Irish. The same argument was not made to friends who, like me, had one non-Irish parent when that parent was white.
In the space of just two decades, Ireland has transformed from the almost entirely homogeneous country it was when I was a child into one that is far more diverse. According to the last census, 20% of Ireland’s population were born elsewhere. A discussion about where or how asylum seekers are accommodated and helped to integrate is entirely justified, but that requires clear progressive leadership.
In its absence, populists are able to misdirect legitimate public anger away from the government to powerless migrants and refugees. Ireland has one of Europe’s worst housing crises, while its public services, education, hospitals and mental health services are all chronically underfunded. Combined with an asylum system near breaking point, this means that an “Ireland is full” rallying cry can easily whip up resentment.
The relatively new diversity provides an age-old scapegoat. Ideas promoted online by ideologues, demagogues, rightwing grifters and bad-faith actors seeking to cultivate a power base – many of them UK- and US-based – are spreading a nativist ideology. Take a dehumanising and racist trope about asylum seekers that refers to “single, unvetted, military-age men”. These men are supposedly arriving in frightening numbers, posing a grave threat to sovereignty, security and the purity of the Irish people, leaving women supposedly afraid to venture out at night.
No mention, of course, of black Irish women such as Alanna Quinn, who lost her eye in an unprovoked attack by a group of white Irish men, or Mia O’Neill, who took her own life after years of racist bullying by white Irish neighbours in Tipperary. I suppose in the eyes of those who spuriously claim to want to protect Irish women and children, they’re “not really Irish”.
There are good reasons why younger men fleeing war often have no choice but to make their way to the west alone. But the “single, male, unvetted” idea resides in an old prejudice that is seductively powerful for racists and xenophobes.
The French post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon wrote in 1959 of how “the deep cultural fear of the black … figured in the psychic trembling of Western sexuality”. Certainly, a lot of the racism I have experienced growing up and online as an adult has been organised around an imagined “depravity” borne of being the product of a “defiled white woman” and an N-word, a lovely thing to be told about yourself. I have observed this same vitriol directed at other Irish women who have white mothers and black fathers.
White nationalism in Ireland’s recent anti-immigrant discourse is expressed too in the word “plantation”. Researchers on disinformation at Dublin City University (DCU) who have tracked its use by far-right activists online say it is intended to invoke the 16th- and 17th-century colonial plantations of Ireland, when English settlers were given confiscated Irish land.
This could be, they suggest, a localised variant of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, whose supporters claim that white Europeans and Americans are deliberately being “replaced” by non-white and Muslim migrants. Like “plantation”, the “colonisation” hashtag has moved from the far-right online fringes to the mainstream.
Such language, intended to turn the rage of disadvantaged people on other marginalised groups is a perversion of Ireland’s history. We still rightly memorialise our past oppression as colonised people in poetry and songs about the Famine, about starving people imprisoned for stealing “Trevelyan’s corn”, but atrocities committed against the Irish people were deeply connected to the struggles of colonised people in other parts of the world. Our histories remain intimately interwoven: many of today’s refugees are fleeing the kind of dispossession and injustice Irish people fled in their millions in previous centuries. The legacy of Irish republicanism, an internationalist, secular, socialist ideology, should give us a unique basis for framing contemporary Irishness in an inclusive and progressive way.
We are not immune to the predatory machinations of false prophets and those who want to reinterpret our nationalist history. But confronting their lies and insisting on the truth of our common ground with other formerly colonised peoples is a potent first step in resistance to the far right.
Emma Dabiri is an Irish academic and broadcaster, and the author of Don’t Touch My Hair and Disobedient Bodies. She is a Guardian Europe columnist
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