The shooting in Carlow last Sunday was shocking, but what followed online was depressingly familiar. As soon as word emerged of an incident at the Fairgreen Shopping Centre, far-right agitators surfaced online, like moths to a flame, spouting confident falsehoods before any facts were known. How could they know the details so quickly? They couldn’t, but that didn’t deter them.
Offline, figures from the same ideological milieu travelled to the town to use the backdrop of the shooting as an opportunity to rant about immigration, the Government or the media – again, a well-established playbook that by now is both predictable and exhausting. And all details that had little to nothing to do with the incident itself.
Just one hour after the incident in Carlow, Derek Blighe, formerly the president of the minor far-right Ireland First political party, posting on X, claimed – without evidence, because there was none – that “apparently 7 people including a child have been shot”. This post has been viewed just shy of 400,000 times on the platform, but at the time of writing includes no note by X stating that it is false.
Philip Dwyer, once associated with Ireland First, travelled to Carlow and livestreamed himself shouting at members of the fire brigade outside the shopping centre for not furnishing him with details about the supposed number of casualties. He then returned to a familiar topic. “The country is going to the dogs. Everyday there’s something going on … crime, mental health … migrant crime. I’m looking around me here in Carlow … good God. The diversity … the non-Irish people,” he said.
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Back online, British far-right agitator Tommy Robinson posted on X that there were “multiple reports of a suspected terror attack in Carlow, Ireland … gunman shot dead by Gardaí”. Another viral post, viewed over 200,000 times on X.
Journalists, gardaí and emergency responders at the scene were berated for not releasing details about the incident fast enough. And when they did release details, they were admonished when those details didn’t match the narrative circulating on social media.
Carlow has quickly become another case study in how false and misleading information pollutes our online information environment, and why our democratic institutions must better equip themselves to counter this challenge.
By now, we have a good grasp of the facts. Shortly after 6.15pm last Sunday, a man entered the Fairgreen Shopping Centre and fired a number of shots into the air. In the ensuing panic, a young girl suffered a minor leg injury when fleeing the scene. Outside the shopping centre, the man used his firearm again and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No one else was shot and gardaí did not discharge their firearms.
The gunman was later named as Evan Fitzgerald, from Kiltegan, Co Wicklow, a 22-year-old who appeared in court last month on charges related to offences associated with purchasing firearms on the dark web last year. This was established through media reporting and garda statements, four of which were released by Monday lunchtime. In the second of those statements , gardaí confirmed the ethnicity and nationality – white Irish – of the man who died at the scene. In their fourth statement, they shared detailed information about the incident. Media reports described him as “vulnerable”.
The practice of gardaí sharing such specific information regarding a suspect and an unfolding situation is unprecedented. It signals the force’s attempts to combat the spread of harmful misinformation before it has potentially deadly consequences.
We don’t have to look too far back to recall how online misinformation and hate can fuel offline violence in the space of a few hours. Rioting broke out across the UK last summer after the Southport stabbing when anti-migrant and anti-Muslim narratives helped instigate violence, while closer to home, we all remember the Dublin riots of November 2023. More recently, police in Merseyside acted similarly in the aftermath of the car ramming incident at the Liverpool FC parade.
Blighe, Dwyer and Robinson have a track record of portraying their respective countries as places of lawlessness, neglected by authorities and riven by (typically migrant) crime. They opportunistically jump on any purported incident they believe – usually incorrectly – reinforces this sentiment and, in the words of Steve Bannon, accordingly “flood the zone with shit” online.
It is, at its heart, part of a wider nativist, populist strategy employed internationally by the far right to appeal to the public for political support, monetised subscriptions and broader cultural influence.
While evidence was still being gathered, none of these figures could have been aware of what had transpired. Yet they – and many others – worked swiftly to fill an information vacuum that develops after such incidents while gardaí, local services and the media work to establish the facts.
It is no coincidence that the three operate ‘blue tick’ accounts on X. The platform offers financial rewards for creating viral, sensationalist content, with few repercussions when that content later turns out to be wrong. These posts are then weaponised by far-right figures for their own ideological agendas, and sometimes used to exploit tragic cases such as this one.
There is an ongoing conflict between old and new media systems here. The slower, methodical practices of police and media in reporting on such incidents is rarely a match for the rapid sharing of content online that includes serious and potentially harmful claims with no factual basis. All of this signals how fundamentally broken our online information ecosystem has become.
This is best encapsulated in the tiring trope that is typically found in online spaces after reports of an incident like the Carlow shooting emerge: repeated cries that the gardaí or mainstream media are deliberately not releasing information about an incident. Delay is interpreted as deceit and fact checking becomes censorship.
This week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said this kind of misinformation can result in a lot of “public disquiet” and needs to be addressed. “There is a family in mourning right now. The level of misinformation on Sunday was quite shocking, and we can’t just ignore that and say: ‘Well, we don’t have to do anything about that.’”
This wasn’t a question of freedom of speech, he said. “I wouldn’t overstate the impact on clamping down on blatant lies online as a sort of incursion or an undermining of freedom of speech.”
The Carlow shooting has quickly become another reminder that unless we address these imbalances – between old and new media, the power of social media and the need to stop misinformation – trust in our core democratic principles and institutions will continue to erode.
Ciarán O’Connor is a researcher and journalist who focuses on extremism and technology
