Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin argues that racism of the far right is also picked up by the political mainstream, which makes a clear anti-racist opposition to it all the more urgent.
A week ago, the Irish Times reported that “Former Ku Klux Klan ‘grand dragon’ is mentoring Irish far-right extremists”. Frank L Silva, a leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the KKK and a founding member of a neo-Nazi group “the Order”, is reported to be among a number of US white supremacists “offering advice to Irish activists on issues including how to maximise publicity for their cause and avoid prosecution in the courts.”
Whether or not Silva has been directly advising some of the people who have instigated riots and arson attacks in Coolock over the past few weeks, it is clear that the kinds of tactics he and others have been advocating are being used. Far-right agitators arrive at a building that is earmarked, or said to be earmarked, to accommodate asylum seekers. They spread racist lies and fear on social media. Buildings are attacked and burned down. Away from accommodation centres, we see an increase in racist, physical attacks on immigrants and particularly, asylum seekers who have been left to camp out on the streets by the Government.
There have been multiple arson attacks on Crown Paints in Coolock. Far-right agitators like Gavin Pepper, Malachy Steenson and members of the fascist National Party have driven the racist propaganda that has been central to creating the current situation. They are following the same kind of playbook used by far right leaders internationally, riling things up but largely staying out of trouble themselves.
In Dundalk, over the past two weekends, Steenson and Irish Freedom Party leader, Hermann Kelly, helped orchestrate protests over a building that accommodates asylum seekers in Dundalk. Three people were arrested at the first protest. Of course, Steenson and Kelly did not face any Garda response and were later found dining at The Clermont, an expensive restaurant owned by billionaire Larry Goodman.
The State Won’t Save Us
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Irish state will not protect us from the far right. In fact, it is enabling them. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party have created the conditions in which we now find ourselves. The Gardaí will not provide a solution either, nor should we seek it from them. It was Gardaí who evicted asylum seekers from a camp by the canal in Phibsborough, where they had community support and people nearby who could mobilise in the event of a threat. Some of these asylum seekers ended up camping on the quays and being attacked as a direct result. We should draw attention to all of this, but we should not expect anything different from the forces of the state. The escalation over the past few weeks, particularly, the arson attacks and riots in Coolock that saw a security guard hospitalised, along with asylum seekers being attacked by a gang armed with iron bars and knives by the quays should be a wake-up call. We need a serious, frank assessment of the strategy and tactics of the broad left, which have been found sorely wanting.
The various responses to the riots in Coolock demonstrate that the political mainstream cannot – and probably does not want to – provide a solution to the growth of the far right. The Government came out swinging. Taoiseach Simon Harris was quick to decry what has happened as “thuggery”. Fianna Fáil Senator Timmy Dooley as much as called for sending in the army to deal with the riots before later declaring on The Tonight Show that “many of them are high on cocaine”. Others like Sinn Féin’s Mícheál Mac Donncha decried the violence but said that concerns should be raised “peacefully and democratically”. By describing what is happening – the burning of a building, the attacks on workers and the xenophobia of the protests – as “concerns”, he downplayed the obvious racism being driven by the far right.
Outside the political mainstream, there is a general recognition that there are multiple factors that have resulted in the scenes that we saw in Coolock. Coolock is one of the most deprived areas in Dublin. The far right is taking advantage of this and redirecting anger away from the system that is producing this deprivation and inequality.
All of this is true, but it only gets at part of the problem. What the far right is driving is a racist agenda. What else do you call the graffiti on the walls of Crown Paints describing asylum seekers as rapists? What do you call it when a Croatian man, Josip Strok, is killed in Clondalkin for not speaking English? What do you call it when asylum seekers are attacked with iron bars and knives, and their possessions thrown in the river?
Sinn Féin’s Concessions
This dangerous reality is being ignored by some who claim to be on the broad left. In this context, Sinn Féin’s new immigration policy looks way off the mark. Instead of taking the racist arguments of the far right head on, they have tailed the Government in calling for faster processing – that is faster deportations – of asylum seekers. Similarly, they are now seeking to restrict access to international protection by declaring certain countries of origin as “partially safe”. And like the Government, they want to “end the two-tier system” that has given preferential treatment to Ukrainian refugees – not by giving all asylum seekers the basic human rights that have been granted to Ukrainians, but by revoking the rights of Ukrainian refugees.
But it’s where Sinn Féin breaks from the Government’s line that represents an enormous political failure and demonstrates a total unwillingness to recognise the political danger we face. Sinn Féin is proposing that new IPAS centres should only be put in “areas which have the capacity to deal with them”. Rather than committing to invest in housing, public services and resources, they are proposing an audit of resources in a given area before new accommodation for asylum seekers can be put there. The one thing they haven’t committed to is actually providing the resources needed by working class communities, whether asylum seekers are living in them or not.
Whether they admit it or not, this is a concession to the arguments of the far right. It accepts the narrative that refugees are a problem to be dealt with, instead of human beings who should be welcomed into our society and given the opportunity to contribute to it and be part of it.
Capitalism and Racism
Part of the backdrop to Sinn Féin’s concessions on immigration is their shift to the right as they prepared to take power – something that now looks increasingly unlikely. A “charm offensive” by Mary Lou McDonald in Silicon Valley, Pearse Doherty’s reassurances that big business has “nothing to fear” from Sinn Féin and Davy Stockbroker’s recent assessment that Sinn Féin’s economic policies are “more New Labour than Corbyn Labour” are all indications of this.
Ultimately, this is completely at odds with the kind of radical change that people are craving after decades of Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael rule. It constitutes an acceptance of the neoliberal mantra that “there is no alternative”. If we cannot challenge big business, if we accept the tax haven, neoliberal model as a fait accompli, how can we commit to providing the resources needed by impoverished communities? Perhaps Sinn Féin have made this calculation. Perhaps they don’t want to promise resources that they know they cannot deliver.
A bigger factor, however, is the acceptance of racist ideology, driven by the far right, as being part of the “genuine concerns” of local people. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of where racism comes from. It does not emerge naturally in an “uneducated” working class, but is driven from the top down. The modern system of racism as we know it stems from the history of European capitalism and imperialism, which sought to dehumanise Europe’s Black and Brown colonial subjects in order to justify their subjugation. At home it served to divide workers by creating a hierarchy in the working class and ideologically tying white workers to their own ruling classes in order to keep the whole working class down.
The same dynamic has been at play in Ireland. It was Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats who introduced the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, where the Government stirred up fears of heavily pregnant African women getting on planes in order to go straight to the hospital to have their babies in Ireland. It was the Irish State that used the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963 to demonise Irish Travellers criminalising their way of life and driving them off the road. And as the Irish State has become more and more integrated into the European Union, it has committed to the Fortress Europe policies that have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the Mediterranean Sea. These policies go hand in hand with the ideology of a European identity that is based on a “civilised” Europe, in opposition to the Black and Brown “barbarians at the gates”.
The far right draws on all of this reactionary ideology and drives it harder. Over the past decade or so, the same dynamic has been apparent across Europe: the neoliberal policies of the mainstream right, coupled with racist Fortress Europe policies which pay millions of Euros to border control agencies like Frontex and to other authoritarian states to stop asylum seekers coming to Europe, create the space for the far right to gain a hearing and to grow. In response, the mainstream right attempts two things – to win back ground from the far right by taking up some of its demands and to use the opportunity to distract from its failures and promote racism in order to undermine the Left. Sadly, the response of the Centre Left, broadly speaking, has been to concede ground to the mainstream right and the far right, and allow the entire Overton window to shift to the right. This only opens up further ground for the far right, who claim victory, as the mainstream is beginning to play to their tune.
A Way Out
None of this is inevitable. But to stop the slide to the right, we need a radical shift away from the politics of concession. We need to build a principled Left that does not accept that racism is a naturally occurring phenomenon in deprived working class areas, but that recognises that racist ideas are driven by the establishment and the far right. This means that we must confront racist arguments in the working class and try to win people to a politics of solidarity.
Of course, simply making anti-racist arguments will not be sufficient. We need to build a left that actively organises in working class communities and builds people powered campaigns for housing, for public services and for community resources. Sections of the left sometimes counterpose this kind of work with anti-racist work, arguing for one or the other – in fact, both must go hand in hand. Often, we will have to campaign on economic issues while being ready and willing to tackle anti-immigrant arguments within campaigns, as these will undermine the solidarity we are trying to build.
In this, People Before Profit has had some recent success in places like Ballymun-Finglas, where Conor Reddy was elected to local council despite a combined far right vote of 20%. The branch in Dublin North-West campaigned for months on housing, particularly on dereliction and conditions in council houses. It is the campaigning on housing issues that meant they could get a hearing from people who held anti-immigrant views and have a chance of winning people to the view that it is the Government and not immigrants who are to blame for the issues in our society. In the local elections, Reddy, a staunch anti-racist, drew substantial transfers from far right candidates – more than Sinn Féin did. The vast majority of people who voted for far right candidates are not themselves far right and were willing to give a preference to someone they saw as a fighter and a campaigner in their area. This demonstrates that there is an ideological battle happening now in working class areas and highlights the urgency of getting organised to win people to a politics of hope.
Finally, a key pillar in our anti-fascist strategy must be direct opposition to the far right on the streets. For the fascists, street mobilistions, protests and riots serve a number of purposes. Firstly, they serve to bring wider layers of people into their orbit, spew more racist lies and radicalise them. Secondly, the mobilisations are used to harden the fascist core at the centre of their movement, emboldening them to physically attack immigrants and commit arson attacks. Finally, they contribute to a wider racist atmosphere in society, pulling mainstream parties to the right and making the society more dangerous for immigrants and other minorities. All of this is geared towards the ultimate goal of smashing the left and the limited forms of democracy that we have under capitalism.
Counter mobilisations against the far right are of massive importance. We need to build united fronts composed of workers and trade unionists, immigrants, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, womens’ groups, students and communities that can take the streets from the far right, demoralise the fascists at the core of their movement and split away the people who have been drawn into their orbit.
This is why what has happened in Dundalk over the past two weeks is of huge importance. On two occasions, Hermann Kelly and the Irish Freedom Party attempted to mobilise a hate march against asylum seekers in the town. On both occasions, they were opposed by an energetic, vibrant counter demonstration, the second of which significantly outnumbered them, sending a clear message that they were not welcome and running them out of the town. The battle isn’t won yet, but these are the kinds of green shoots we need to draw on as we try to build in the future.
