The far right is intensifying its activity with a slew of recent arson attacks. From Dublin to Galway, from Donegal to Cork to Wexford and Wicklow, fascist activists have set fire to hotels, schools, and apartment buildings.
The attacks on these sites, planned to house migrants and asylum seekers or merely rumored to be planned for such, have shaken communities and raised fears of further violence against those seeking safety in Ireland. These disgusting displays frequently follow anti-migrant protests at the same locations and have become rallying points for the far right, with gleeful statements against refugees and calls to “keep up the good work” and “light them all up”.
Leading figures in the far right have taken to the streets to recruit and stir up hatred, then retreat to spread their messages on social media when organized communities run them out of town. These fascist figureheads, homegrown as well as imported from the US and UK, travel the country to inflate their numbers at protests, agitate their audiences to the point of violence, then disappear before any following destruction can be pinned to their words.
This practice is better known as stochastic terrorism, by which these infamous organizations like the National Party, Irish Freedom Party, and Ireland First Party and their members can goad individuals toward these attacks, while maintaining enough legal distance to evade accountability. These instigators start fires in the minds of their listeners, then claim innocence when real fires destroy community centres and undo efforts to protect migrants and refugees.
Working-class concerns
The far right typically organizes by snatching up working-class concerns over employment, housing, healthcare, and education, then exploiting these anxieties for people’s families and communities into fear and anger. Their aim is to split off refugees and asylum seekers from the working class and then paint them as the enemy.
The megaphone-wielding demagogues of this movement have no solutions for workers’ struggles and have no interest in building a society that supports workers using the resources stolen from them by the ruling class.
Instead, by distracting workers from the roots of our oppression, the far right advance the aims of the ruling class and strengthen their position over the working class.
Our politicians paid by bosses and landlords will never engage in a serious struggle against a far right, even as they set society ablaze. Nothing short of organization for an independent working-class politics can excise this far right malignancy and break the bosses’ power.
Every effort must be made to ensure the targets of this violence and intimidation are kept safe and supported, and that the talking points and actions of the far right find no further foothold in our communities and in our society.
This task falls to the workers’ movement who must now move decisively to halt any further advances for the far right by building a mass movement for jobs, homes and free healthcare for all to under cut racism and division.
