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“Ireland is on the brink of civil war,” white nationalist Nick Fuentes declared Monday during his show on Rumble. “It’s going to be ugly.”
Ireland is not on the brink of a civil war, but riots did break out in Dublin last week following a stabbing outside a school that left three children and two adults hospitalized. Despite an unknown attack motive, the situation spiraled.
Ireland’s far-right community quickly claimed that this proved immigrants pose an inherent danger to Irish society: Within minutes of the stabbing, far-right Telegram channels lit up with questions about the attacker’s ethnicity. It was eventually reported that the attacker was a naturalized Irish citizen who came to Ireland from Algeria in 2003. Less than two hours later, well-known figures within the Irish far-right community were organizing their followers to meet up in Dublin’s city center that evening. The riots quickly turned violent with police cars, buses, and trams set on fire. Dozens of shops were looted, and a number of police officers were injured. In total, 34 people were arrested on November 23.
Ireland’s own far-right community, like the far-right in the US, has been fueling anti-immigrant sentiments in the country for years. And this dark international alliance of far-right, anti-asylum American and Irish influencers is unsurprising. During his show, Fuentes, the leader of the America First movement, said that Conor McGregor, an Irish MMA star who called for war in Ireland in response to a report that noncitizens could vote in Irish elections prior to last week’s Dublin riot, should “rise up.”
McGregor, Fuentes said, needed to “salvage the country because it’s either going to be the Irish or it’s going to be the blacks … only one side is going to come out of this alive.”
Some far-right influencers in the US have also pushed elements of the great replacement theory, a conspiracy claiming that a globalist elite is working with Western governments to force out native populations through immigration.
Tucker Carlson, who now broadcasts his show on X, told his millions of followers that “the Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the third world.”
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Former White House adviser and 2020 election conspiracist Steve Bannon, who is currently strategizing for former US president Donald Trump, responded to Carlson by declaring: “Ireland is a powder keg.”
Meanwhile, Catturd, the hugely influential pro-Trump account on X run by Florida shitposter Phillip Buchanan, told his 2 million followers to make the hashtag #IrishLivesMatter trend—which many duly did.
Elon Musk, who this week told X advertisers to “go fuck yourself,” also weighed in, claiming on X that the Irish prime minister “hates the Irish people,” and agreeing with another far-right influencer who posted on X saying Ireland needed McGregor to run for office. “Not a bad idea,” Musk wrote in reply.
McGregor, who, just 24 hours before the riots broke out, posted “Ireland, we are at war” to his 10 million followers on X, has become a lightning rod for international and local far-right support. McGregor has not fought an MMA fight for more than two years and has since spent much of his time outside of Ireland, including in his home in Florida. His social media posts over the past year have become increasingly political and have been directly influenced by many of the same far–right figures who encouraged their followers to meet in the center of Dublin ahead of the riots. The Irish police are currently investigating the riots, and McGregor is one of many currently under investigation for alleged incitement to hatred.
In far-right Telegram channels, poorly-generated AI images of McGregor proliferated, showing him in various poses ranging from standing patriotically in front of a burning bus to debating in parliament, as well as ones of a bare-chested McGregor holding a rifle and leading a mob of similarly-armed Irishmen. “Rebellion 2023?” wrote the operator of the far-right Telegram channel who posted an image.
Some experts believe that all of the attention that US far-right figures are giving to Ireland’s far-right community is now emboldening Irish figures to continue pushing their rhetoric. “In Ireland, this international attention appears to have been largely welcomed by far-right communities here who see such attention and promotion of their cause as a positive, and are drawing on this attention as further support for their campaign to target asylum seekers and migrants based on lies and falsehoods,” Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank, tells WIRED.
Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, has maintained relationships with the far right in the US. O’Brien has become a leading figure within the Irish far-right movement in recent years, and spoke at a notorious white supremacist conference in Tennessee this summer. Over the past 12 months, his profile has grown internationally too, thanks in large part to both Fuentes and Musk. Fuentes has hosted O’Brien on his online show several times, while Musk has responded directly to O’Brien on X, particularly around a new anti-hate-speech law that is set to come into force in Ireland soon.
O’Brien, who did not attend the riots in person, told his Telegram followers that they were the government’s fault. “They flooded our country with unsustainable levels of migrants, planted small communities with migrant centers, responded to legitimate concerns by labeling all opposition ‘far right,’ and passed the most draconian hate speech laws in the world to shut us up,” he wrote. “When you deny people an outlet to express concerns they know are reasonable, you make them desperate.”
While two of the children injured in the stabbing attack have been released from hospital, a 5-year-old girl is still there with critical injuries.
