Dublin Riots Are Far Right's Official Launch Party

Who were those young people who ran amok in Dublin last night, torching vehicles, looting businesses and chanting anti-immigration slogans? How did an attack on three young children serve as the spark to unleash a night of violence the likes of which is rarely seen in our country? Maybe the? factors that led these mainly young men to behave in such a feral manner can be explained by a mixture of social mis-cohesion, entitlement, fear stoked by the far right’s thought-leaders and the echo chambers of social media. And the housing crisis.

Social mis-cohesion refers to these young men growing up in an economy where the trappings of wealth and success are all around them but they feel they have not shared in this bounty to the extent which they feel they deserve. Perhaps through generational unemployment or substance abuse in their homes and communities they have not had the same positive experience of being raised in Ireland as their contemporaries.??

Marry this to the belief that they are entitled to have what they see paraded before them on social media and television; money, cars, a lavish lifestyle, the means to consume in a way and to the extent that they desire. Maybe they are still living at home, playing Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations in the box room of their parents’ house, dreaming of moving out but unable to afford or find another place to live.? This in their view is the fault of the government, their parents, the authorities, the ‘man’. The response of most people who find themselves in a similar situation is to put a plan in place to dig themselves out and to improve their lot. They will get a job, save up a deposit for a rented flat and take their first steps into adulthood. But the response of those who laid siege to our capital last night was not a rational or informed one. They seethe with misdirected rage and angst.

It is this rage and angst that makes them susceptible. We need only look at history to see how disaffected young men have been corralled to a cause by older men with their own axes to grind. But at the heart of all this is housing, or more to the point the lack of affordable housing. Our government’s abject failure to read the demographic direction our country has been taking for the last 30 or more years, their sleeping at the wheel, their failure to see that the market is not the answer to the country’s housing crisis until it is too late, is to blame for radicalising last night’s rioters. In other countries at other times when immigrants arrived the battle cry of the disaffected was that the ‘foreigners are stealing our jobs’. But Ireland has full employment so that argument has never caught on, but arguing that the immigrants are responsible for the disaffected not being able to afford to move out of his parent’s box room? That’s much easier to sell.

For the thought leaders of the far right it is simple to point to the Asylum Seekers and Ukrainian Refugees as the cause of our nation’s problems. They argue that if it weren’t for them everyone would have an affordable place to live.? It is the immigrants’ fault, according to the far right rhetoric that house prices are rising, that rents are so high and that ordinary decent people can’t find a place to live.?

But if this is what they are arguing, why are you and I not seeing their rationales, their arguments so we can counter them and explain that it is not the immigrants’ fault, it is the fault of poor housing policy by successive governments over decades? Because the far right does not take to the airwaves of RTE or your local station to make their views heard. Why would they? They would be faced with counter arguments that don’t fit with their world view. It’s much easier to go on social media and record a video railing against immigration. Whether we realise it or not, our social media feeds are echo chambers of the views we’ve already expressed, be that a like on a post or a comment on a video. Social media learns that this is the type of content you’re interested in so it gives you more of that. Which is why my social media feed is full of dogs and classic motorbikes. These young men’s feeds are full of racist and xenophobic bile, and with every view, or like or comment, the social media algorithm doubles down and gives them more of what they like.

Yesterday afternoon’s attack on those poor school children in Parnell Square was appropriated by the far right and used as the spark to start the fire that raged through Dublin last night. The tinder the spark met was bone-dry, and we never knew. But this is not happening in isolation. All across Europe the far right has been quietly refining and concentrating its power away from traditional media in the echo chambers of social media pages. While their Irish equivalents were marauding through Dublin last night, far right voters in the Netherlands were celebrating the unexpected and breakthrough success of the Freedom Party (PVV) led by Geert Wilders in the Dutch General Election. Elsewhere in Europe the far right is already in power in Hungary, in Italy and even in that bastion of tolerance and openness, Sweden.

Ireland’s electoral system is designed to allow all voices to have their say. It should therefore be no surprise if a candidate is elected to Dail Eireann in the next General Election on a far-right, anti-immigration ticket. Until now we have as a nation appeared to be impervious to the advances of far right rhetoric. But unless a meaningful improvement is seen in our housing situation, then the door to this type of minority targeting blame-gaming is wide open.? The government makes its assertions about improvements in the housing situation. I don’t doubt that they are true, but it is coming off the back of decades of a laissez faire, market driven attitude which means that these improvements are not and cannot be the panacea we need to stop the rise of the right.? Not until two medium-income salaries can comfortably afford a family home close to work, will the inexorable march of the far right be halted. The only way that will happen is if county councils are allowed and resourced to go back to what they did in the past, which is to build houses for workers and lots of them.? Yes it will be difficult and yes there will be challenges, but if the alternative is the far right in government, I know which way I’m voting.