‘The Irish elites think the working class should go to hell’

Months before riots erupted in the UK, Dublin was rocked by its worst street violence in decades. On 23 November 2023, more than 60 officers were assaulted, buses and a tram were destroyed, and over a dozen shops were looted or vandalised when an anti-immigration protest turned into a riot. Earlier that day, a man stabbed three children and a care assistant at a Dublin primary school. He was rumoured to be an illegal migrant. Since then, anger over Ireland’s migration crisis has only grown. Asylum applications rose fivefold between 2019 and 2023, with tens of thousands of newcomers now arriving each year, placing pressure on already strained services and adding to an already chronic housing shortage. Asylum hotels in deprived and rural areas have become targets of both peaceful protests and, despicably, arson attacks.

How has the Irish government responded to all this? By pursuing a censorious crusade against the law-abiding majority, naturally. Concerns about migration have been dismissed as ‘racist’ and ‘far right’, as ordinary people are lumped in with the violent troublemakers. New hate-speech laws are in the offing, too. All the while, the Irish elite appears determined to ignore a burgeoning migration crisis, produced by its own poorly thought-through policies.

Ian O’Doherty – columnist for the Irish Independent – joined Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of his podcast to discuss the riots in Ireland and Britain. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What did the Irish media, and the Irish people, make of the recent riots in England?

Ian O’Doherty: The riots have played straight into the hands of an awful lot of the Irish media. While they like to pretend otherwise, they really don’t like the English – and they especially don’t like the English working class. Brexit, in many ways, gave these middle-class clowns licence to unleash one of the last acceptable forms of racism in Ireland: anti-English racism.

There has almost been a sense of glee among the chattering classes, especially among the Irish political elite, the media and academia. They are trying to spin the English riots into proof that they were right, saying: ‘We told you that if you voted for Brexit, the UK was going to become a fascist hellhole, and people of colour wouldn’t be safe.’ In many ways, the Irish Times is like the Guardian, and RTÉ operates like the BBC. Their agenda basically boils down to class contempt. They don’t trust the working classes. They don’t know them, they don’t like them and they don’t respect them.

You can see this contempt in how the Irish establishment responded to the riots in Coolock over the past year, a very deprived area in Dublin that has become one of Ireland’s biggest hotspots over immigration issues. Coolock used to have several major local employers – Crown Paints being one of them. The Crown Paints warehouse has been disused for a few years now, and the area has fallen into serious decline. The Irish government decided, in its infinite wisdom, that it was going to turn the factory into another asylum hotel. This really added insult to injury to the people who already felt neglected. Then, the media and the politicians expressed absolute outrage when incensed locals protested and then rioted. They were denounced as members of the far right.

What the establishment doesn’t seem to realise is that the far right is irrelevant in Ireland. It is the thugs that they should worry about. After the Dublin riots last November, people were charged for looting, not for committing hate speech. The most interesting thing to remember about the riots on O’Connell Street was that it was places like Foot Locker that were looted. Whereas Easons, one of the biggest bookstores in Ireland, went unscathed. The rioters were looking for cheap trainers.

O’Neill: Why are the elites so indifferent to the concerns of working-class communities?

O’Doherty: I’ve always felt like an outlier in Irish journalism. I didn’t go to college. I started as a tea boy at Hot Press magazine. The difference I see in journalists today is that they now refer to their job as their profession, while I still call it my trade. Ireland’s a small country, Dublin’s a small town, and the Dublin journalistic community is even smaller. Most writers have all gone to the same college. A lot of them will have been in the same class and were taught by the same lecturers. And most of those lecturers, who I know, are only lecturing because they couldn’t cut it in a newsroom.

This has basically created a generation of Borg-like journalists. They like to sneer at religion, because that’s the trendy thing to do. Catholicism is treated as the root of everything that is regressive and nasty. But they cling to their articles of faith just as stubbornly as the old-school Catholics clung to their catechism. You see this attitude when you read British publications like the Guardian, or when you read most of the Irish media.

This has a real political impact. If you look at the areas that are most impacted by immigration in the UK, it is working-class areas. If you look at the areas that are most affected by immigration in Ireland, it is working-class or rural areas. The journalists and politicians in both countries do not live in these areas. The only time the Irish elites see Coolock is when they’re on their way to the airport, off to some nice junket. The only working-class person they meet is the cleaner who comes around to their house twice a week.

For the Anglo-Irish establishment, immigration is a nice, theoretical notion that we should all be lovely to everybody. But they are not moving international-protection camps into Donnybrook or Sandymount, the very leafy suburbs where a lot of the journalists and politicians happen to live. I can guarantee you that, if they did, a lot of these elites would suddenly have some objections. As far as they’re concerned, the working class can go to hell. It’s as simple as that.

Ian O’Doherty was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: