A recent series of attacks on Indians in Ireland has prompted significant outrage and brought renewed attention to an increasingly hostile atmosphere for immigrants and people of color in the “Land of a Hundred Thousand Welcomes.” The phrase has historically symbolized Ireland’s global reputation for warmth, hospitality, and openness.
In the most brutal assault, an Indian man in Tallaght was left bleeding, robbed and stripped of his trousers when a group of young men descended on him in the street as he was walking to the temple. He was falsely accused, both before and after the attack, of inappropriate behaviour around children, echoing a previous assault on an Afghan refugee in Limerick targeted by fringe vigilantes who filmed him while basely accusing him of trying to approach children.
The Tallaght attack, on July 19, was followed in short order by similar attacks on Indians including a data researcher in Clondalkin, a taxi driver in Ballymun, and a six-year-old girl in Waterford. A man assaulted just days ago is returning to India in the hopes he can finish his thesis there in peace.
Hate crimes have been on the rise in Ireland in recent years, and these are far from the first instances of racist violence against immigrants. Last March, a Croatian man named Josip Strok was beaten to death in the street for not speaking English, while his best friend survived with life-changing injuries. In November, a Nigerian architect was assaulted and robbed of his phone in broad daylight. When police arrived at the scene, they arrested him while his assailant walked away.
These attacks are the inevitable outcome of a decade of far right organizing that has gone seriously underreported by the press, and which many in the Irish political establishment view less as a threat to democracy and more as an opportunity for them to tack rightward.
But outcry about this cluster of attacks from the Irish Indian community has been substantial, with a number of protests in recent weeks, and it has attracted the kind of international media attention that tends to spook our political establishment. The Indian Embassy in Ireland went so far as to issue a safety warning.
Nigeria is just a market for the Irish dairy industry to dump its byproducts, but India is a serious trading partner, particularly in the pharma realm, and any threat to our reputation as the “best small country in the world to do business” is a threat to what our ruling class truly values: their own bottom line. And so we have seen an unusual number of government figures expressing condemnation of attacks on Indians, and a raft of opinion pieces in the press to the effect that the level of racism in Ireland is becoming a bit much.
These are good things, of course, and if this moment can become a turning point against rising bigotry and growing far right political activity, then shallow motives can be forgiven. But there will be no turn unless both the political establishment and the press reckon with their own roles in creating the hostile atmosphere in which violent racists feel empowered to attack people with impunity.
Instead, the focus has been on the old bugbears of social media and misinformation. Obviously, these are important factors, though it would behove our understanding to place less emphasis on content and more emphasis on content delivery, i.e. algorithmic recommendation systems that decide what content we do or don’t see. These systems should be, if not banned, at least regulated as editorial content for which companies have legal liability as publishers, not just as platforms.
But social media only reflects and accelerates what society puts into it in the first place, and it is absurd to speak as if politicians and the press haven’t played a primary role in causing the rise in hate they’re now outraged about. The Irish far right remain tiny in numbers, but they’ve been able to punch above their weight in impact on public discourse thanks to the complacency and complicity of the political establishment and mainstream media.
A recent court case in Clare is instructive: while the victims were terrorized by a man spreading false allegations of attempted child abduction against them online, his claims were amplified when a local newspaper, The Clare Echo, interviewed him under the headline “Shannon man offers reward of €1k to try track down alleged kidnappers”.
On a larger scale, public broadcaster RTÉ decided one of its televised general election debates last year would be on immigration, even though polls consistently showed only a tiny minority of people considered it one of their major concerns. The debate gave government leaders who’ve overseen a catastrophic rise in homelessness and a collapsing healthcare system a chance to thump their chests about immigration and blame newcomers for old problems.
Indeed, while the far right may be the most vocal and vulgar in their scapegoating of immigrants and refugees, it is the government that leads the way. Prior to last year’s budget, Micheál Martin, who rotates as leader in a coalition government, blamed rising immigration for increasingly austere budgets, even as his government ran consecutive surpluses. Twenty years ago, as Minister for Health, he pushed the bogus idea that “anchor babies” were putting a strain on maternity services as part of the government’s successful campaign to abolish birthright citizenship.
Louis Brandeis called government “the potent, the omnipresent teacher” in a famous Supreme Court dissent. “For good or ill,” he wrote, “it teaches the whole people by its example.”
If so, those attacking immigrants in Ireland have no greater teacher than the Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, who has made a “crackdown” on asylum seekers a signature policy. Since the start of the year, he has filled three chartered planes with asylum seekers for deportation flights: two to Georgia, and a third to Nigeria, which had no human rights monitor on board. Many men targeted for removal were held in prison for weeks beforehand, separated from their families until the day police showed up to take their wives and children from accommodation centres in front of their weeping friends.
After the third flight caused significant backlash from the communities who had welcomed these asylum seekers, O’Callaghan blamed the asylum seekers for not self-deporting. But many deportation orders were in the process of appeals, and at least one man on the Nigeria flight has since been granted asylum – if he can make it back to Ireland alive. When young Irish men learn it is okay to brutalise immigrants, then blame immigrants for their brutalisation, they’re learning from the best.
O’Callaghan has been conspicuously silent about the recent attacks, even as puff pieces in the media praise him as the standout performer of the government this year, mainly for his actions against immigrants. The upper echelons of politics and the press remain in lockstep as ever, and show little appetite to reckon with their responsibility.
But a reckoning will come regardless. These attacks on immigrants in Ireland wound us all, whether in the street or in the high halls of power. We must resist and defeat hate, both on the fringes of our politics and at its heart.