The other day, I came across a video on social media of a scene that had recently played out on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal, at Mount Street Bridge. In the video, uploaded online as a live stream, two anti-immigration activists approach a group of male asylum seekers living in tents clustered around the bridge.
At the centre of the group, who are mostly non-white, a white woman is handing out food to the men from a pair of casserole dishes that sit on the narrow wooden arm of the canal lock. The activist filming zeros in on this woman, and immediately begins to question her about why she is giving food to the men.
“What happens when you feed the pigeons?” he asks her. Her only response is to tell him he is being hostile. Undeterred, and clearly pleased with the pest-control framing of his question, he repeats it a number of times. “What happens when you feed the pigeons? They breed more! Look at the f**king amount of them you have down here,” he says.
Absurdly, even as he films – and even as he rants incoherently about the danger of “people getting raped and murdered” by the asylum seekers – the man is helping himself to a selection of chocolates from a large box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray.
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As the woman walks away, taking out her phone to call the guards, he follows her along the canal bank, informing her that she is being streamed live on YouTube. His fellow anti-immigration activist, similarly unseen behind the camera, can be heard shouting as she walks away. “Everybody, make this woman famous!” he cries – addressing, presumably, the proud Irish patriots watching the live-stream as it unfolds. “Find out who she is! Name and shame her!”
Elsewhere in the recording, the man approaches a male volunteer and tells him to “get the f**k out”, and never to come back to feed “any of these animals”. “Youse are encouraging these dangerous men to come down along the canal,” he says, working himself up into a fever pitch of righteousness about the danger to young Irish women and children. The whole thing concludes when two gardaí arrive, having received a call about another man threatening refugees with an iron bar, and place the man filming the stream under arrest for possession of an offensive weapon.
There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here – even leaving aside the Cadbury’s Milk Tray. The thing that struck me most forcefully about this clip, when I watched it earlier this week, was how it illuminates certain peculiarities and ironies of the anti-immigrant right in Ireland. The most glaring of these involves the crude tactic whereby, in stoking fear about migrants and other foreigners, they relentlessly invoke anxieties of sexual predation.
It is they themselves who present a threat to our communities, who relish violence and intimidation; who embody precisely the kind of animalistic societal element they want to attribute to racialised foreigners
These foreign men, they frequently say – “unvetted men”, “military-age men”, “fighting-age men” – present an unacceptable risk to Irish women and children. Their mere presence on the streets of our towns and cities is a threat. They are, as the man in the clip insists, vermin who must not be fed and must not be encouraged. They are animals, driven by animal hungers and appetites, from whom Irish – by which they mean white – women and children must be defended.
I have no doubt that among the tens of thousands of men who come to make new lives in Ireland every year, a number of them will at some point commit violent crimes and sexual assaults. Not because they are Somalian or Afghan – or for that matter Belgian or Canadian or Italian – but because they are men, a category of people among whom it is famously quite common to commit sexual assault. There is, of course, no evidence that any of the migrants the activist in the video accuses of being a risk to “Irish women and children” are anything of the sort; in fact they are themselves unusually vulnerable to acts of feral violence from the far right.
The person in the video who we know to be intimidating to women is the man filming it; we know this because the woman he harasses tells him he is being hostile and upsetting her, and the viewer of the video can see with their own eyes that this is the case.
This illuminates one of the obvious structural flaws of how the far right conduct themselves as a would-be populist movement. Among their main rhetorical moves is to conjure the spectre of chaos and violence – of hordes of feral non-white men roaming the streets, threatening the safety and sexual purity of white women. And yet it is they themselves who, under the laughably transparent pretext of protecting their communities, create a climate of gleeful intimidation and sometimes violence.
This rhetoric is increasingly an issue for international protection applicants, and for the people working to make their situations less miserable. According to a report in this paper earlier in the week, the locations of makeshift campsites are being shared on social media, leading to tents being slashed and urinated on. A few weeks ago, a group of asylum seekers was assaulted in Finglas with hammers, knives and sticks, leading to the hospitalisation of two Palestinian men.
I suspect there is some measure of psychological projection at work in how the far right are attempting to portray migrants. Because it is they themselves who present a threat to our communities, who relish violence and intimidation; who embody precisely the kind of animalistic societal element they want to attribute to racialised foreigners.
The clusters of tents in public parks and along waterways, representing the Government’s total failure to deal with a housing crisis and with rising numbers of asylum seekers, are certainly a blight on our national conscience, but nothing could be uglier than the sight of these hate-filled weirdos threatening and abusing citizens and non-citizens alike.
I suspect, too, that these people don’t even really want what they claim to want, though they may believe themselves to want it. I suspect that the presence of these vulnerable foreigners in tents on our streets is, to them, a source of unmentionable joy. Their presence gives them licence, as they see it, to unleash their own inner animals, to satisfy their own grubby desire for predation and violence.
And as long as the Government fails to solve this problem, it provides them with a source of political capital from which their movement will continue to draw interest.