OPINION: Dealing with the Irish far right

I READ in The Mayo News last Tuesday about a young Castlebar woman who was affected by the street rioting in Dublin on the evening of Thursday, November 23. She was a student, but in Maynooth, not Dublin. The problem was her route home for the weekend. To get home, she had to travel across a chaotic city from Connolly to Heuston to catch the train to Castlebar. Returning the following Monday, she took the bus for fear of what she might encounter in Dublin city centre.
There are parts of Dublin’s inner city that I myself would never walk through late in the evening or at night. In the aftermath of a previous vicious attack on an American visitor, photographs of the Minister for Justice walking in these areas, surrounded by Garda top brass (and perhaps even some snipers on the adjacent roofs!) were in no way reassuring.

Riot’s roots
THE riots that took place in the centre city, which led to destruction of property and vicious attacks on Gardaí, were an almost inevitable consequence of two main issues: growth of a disaffected minority whose people have convinced themselves that they are society’s losers, and the ease with which small far-right political groups can use social media to goad this minority into attacks against immigrants, refugees and other minority groups whom they blame as the root cause of their problems.
The speed with which the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, blamed the ‘far right’ for the Dublin riots was disturbing, since it was only partially correct.
If you believe that far-right groups bear sole responsibility, dealing with them leads inevitably down the road to increased repressive measures to suppress rioters, such as face recognition software, stop and search, tasers, water-cannon and, perhaps eventually, rubber bullets.
Have we learned nothing from the prolonged history of violence in Northern Ireland since 1968? Have we not learned that oppression by forces of law and order when faced with actual violence or the possibility of violence simply generates further and more extreme violence if the underlying causes are not recognised and addressed?
The battle lines in Northern Ireland were more clearly drawn than those in Irish society today, and until they were addressed by reforms ushered in by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, violence continued, even in the face of draconian policing and military actions that would be inconceivable in Ireland. Surely, that experience has given us a better understanding of the dangers associated with extreme ethnic nationalism and guidance on how to mitigate it?

Rhetoric
THE Ireland of my youth was a narrow, intellectually confined space where pluralism and dissent of any kind were discouraged or suppressed. Ireland today is a more open, intellectually vibrant space where pluralism thrives and debate is encouraged. The far right want to drag us back to that earlier Ireland where culture and race are homogeneous and outsiders are perceived to be threatening to our welfare and identity.
The rhetoric of the far right becomes attractive to groups who feel vulnerable in the face of rapid change. We saw this in the US with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, when Democrats were too busy ridiculing and laughing at Trump’s crazy behaviour to see their own vulnerability. Next year we will have local, national and European elections in Ireland. The mainstream parties represented in Dáil Éireann need to acknowledge and address failures in their form of remote, top-down governance that have fanned support for far right views in the wider population.
To take a concrete example, a suggestion recently made by Brian Fanning, Professor of Migration and Social Policy at UCD, was that integration of refugees and migrants should happen in local communities, and communities should be consulted about services, facilities and infrastructure. If a Direct Provision facility is going into a town, it should be tied to community development, so nobody is seen as a burden.

Dangerous opening
BUT policy failures have created openings for the far right and perhaps the temptation for mainstream parties to move towards the far right increases. The UK experience shows how a party like UKIP or Reform UK, with no representation in parliament, dragged the Tory party to the right and facilitated the adoption of nativist, authoritarian and populist policies.
The dilemma of the young Castlebar student illustrates the sheer idiocy of the radial rail network in Ireland that forces people on the west coast to transit Dublin for journeys that should be possible by shorter and more direct routes. It will come as no surprise to readers that the Strategic Rail Review has not addressed this problem, and that no improvements are likely before 2050.
And it will come as no surprise to readers that the failure in public policy which fuelled the Dublin riots is all of a piece with the gaps in the Strategic Rail Review and the more pervasive lack of any real, effective local democracy in our country.

John Bradley is a former ESRI professor and has published on the island economy of Ireland, EU development policy, industrial strategy and economic modelling.