Séamas O'Reilly: I think anti-racists are right to be on high alert

Later, he drew a line between immigration and towns and cities becoming less safe, albeit with the caveat that immigration is not the sole factor in this situation.

“Communities all over Ireland are concerned… And when you continually suppress what people are feeling, you turn them towards more extreme beliefs,” he said.

There are two versions of what happened once he hit send. In one, a well-liked Irish media personality said something loaded with anti-immigration dog whistles, and was sharply criticised for this by his fans. Overwhelmed, he shut his accounts and returned with a second video that many of those disappointed fans still found unconvincing.

In another telling, that well-liked Irish media personality dared to say the unsayable, and was savaged by a woke mob for stepping out of line. Bullied into submission, he shut his accounts, and even when he came back to try and explain himself, those same baying hordes refused to be satisfied and continued to blackguard him as a racist.

To set my stall out here and now, I’m not interested in litigating whether Garron Noone is, himself, racist. I do, however, believe many of his comments were ill-informed and very, very close in content to the far-right loons now claiming him as a hero for saying them. I’m less concerned with why Noone said what he said, than with whether it’s true or not.

An Garda Siochana and CSO figures show that no causal link between immigration and any form of crime or delinquency has ever been recorded in Ireland. What they do show is a 12% uptick in hate crimes between 2022 and 2023, and a massive surge in misinformation surrounding migrants and criminality.

The idea that “concerned” communities are not being listened to, or are actively being suppressed by the Government, is not merely fatuous — there was an entire TV debate about immigration before last year’s election, despite it being a key issue for just 6% of the electorate — it’s also a central plank in the far-right worldview: their “concerns” aren’t based on scapegoating foreigners for the structural failures of society. No, there is a woke elite made up of our nation’s police force, statistics office, government and media, and they are lying to us.

Noone’s comeback video addressed some of those concerns, but stopped short of accounting for the falsehoods he’d uttered as facts, nor on the effects their spread would have on the most vulnerable people in our society. It was more certainly measured and introspective but, as journalist Philip O'Connor put it on Monday: “If we say something online that we later regret, we can lock our accounts, say sorry and move on, but that option is not open to anyone whose identity is as an immigrant in a foreign country — if you have any doubt about that, ask any of your relatives that lived in England in the 70s and 80s.”

Much more striking than the critiques Noone received, were the far-right grifters applauding him for his bravery, not least a Tate brother mentioning him by name on X. Jarring, too, were the centrist scolds in major newspapers decrying the lefty mob for overreacting. Unmentioned in this critique was that Noone’s comments were embraced by, and served to embolden, the people mentioned above — a very good reason to be appalled, above and beyond anyone’s feelings of Noone as an individual.

Racist vigilante groups are popping up all over Ireland, and the Government has caved to their demands to stop placing asylum centres in certain parts of the country. All this, without addressing any of the structural issues that affect housing, healthcare, or social cohesion, means I think anti-racists are right to be on high alert. When a popular media personality starts laundering far-right talking points, inadvertently or not, to his three million followers, we’re right to be alarmed.

We’re lucky that Ireland does not currently have the far-right infrastructure seen in almost every other European nation you can name. Many of those countries were once where we are now. In every case, fraudulent concerns, based on unfounded fears, peddled by bad faith actors, or just misinformed people with large platforms and affable voices, have been part of getting them where they are now.

To put it another way: we’ve been gifted decades to look at everybody else’s homework, before we take the final exam they’ve all failed. We owe it to ourselves to study those failures. To speak and think with responsibility, to act and react with vigilance. Because, increasingly, it feels like we’re sitting that exam right now.