A real movement – but not a mass one
Over the past few years Ireland has developed something that barely existed a decade ago: a recognisable far-right movement with activist networks, livestreamers, local campaign groups, elected councillors and the ability to mobilise around flashpoints. Racist ideas that were once confined to the fringes now circulate far more widely.
That is serious. But we should begin by getting the scale right. The far right has not built a mass party nor has it broken through nationally at the ballot box. It has no unified leadership and its organisations are repeatedly divided by rivalry and splits. More than 60 candidates who could be described as far-right or hard anti-immigration stood in the 2024 general election, yet not one won a Dáil seat.
This is a contradiction at the heart of the Irish far right today: it is stronger as a movement and as an ideological pressure than it is as an electoral force. Anti-fascists who ignore that growth make a mistake. But so too do those who talk as if fascism is already on the verge of power.
Exploiting grievances
The first breakthrough for the far right came in late 2022, when there was a deep housing crisis. Rents were soaring, homelessness was entrenched, public services were stretched and many working-class communities had been neglected for decades.
Their central argument was brutally simple: you cannot get a house, a hospital bed or decent services because migrants are getting them first. “Ireland is full” was their message.. From there came talk of a “plantation”, “replacement” and conspiracies in which refugees, NGOs and politicians were supposedly working together against the Irish people.
The housing crisis is real. Poverty is real. Regional neglect is real. But migrants did not create any of them. Decades of pro-landlord housing policy, privatisation, weak public investment and government deference to wealth did.
A network built around crisis
The far right has also developed a form of organising suited to the social media age. A rumour appears that a hotel, convent or vacant building may house asylum seekers. A local Facebook or WhatsApp group forms. National activists and livestreamers arrive. The story is amplified online. A protest or blockade begins. Within days a local dispute is presented as part of a national rebellion.
This allows a relatively small core to look much larger. The same activists move from town to town. An online audience of tens of thousands can give the impression of a huge organised movement where the committed activist core may still number only in the hundreds.
Online reach is not the same thing as organised power. But online networks can rapidly turn a local grievance into a national flashpoint, and that gives the far right a capacity for sudden mobilisation that should not be underestimated.
From protest to intimidation
During 2023 and 2024 sections of the movement became more aggressive. There were blockades of accommodation centres, intimidation of refugees and workers, attacks on buildings and repeated arson incidents involving properties believed to be intended for asylum accommodation.
The Dublin riot of November 2023 was the clearest warning. A horrific stabbing was immediately seized upon by far-right networks. Racist agitation then connected with a much wider layer of anger, alienation and opportunism, and produced the most serious public disorder Dublin had seen in decades.
Coolock in 2024 showed the same dynamic. A local dispute became a national rallying point, with encampments, blockades and confrontations drawing activists from across the country.
Not that every person at an anti-immigration protest is a fascist, but a small organised fascist core can pull a much wider layer around it when anger has no convincing progressive outlet. The 2024 local elections gave anti-immigration candidates some limited successes and created a sense that a national breakthrough might follow. It did not. In the general election later that year, the far right failed to win a single Dáil seat.
While many people will share an angry post, repeat a racist myth or even attend a local protest without committing themselves to a coherent far-right political project. This should give anti-fascists confidence. The far right is not an unstoppable wave. It can be isolated and defeated. This is why countering their racist message – both through mobilisations against them and calling them out – is vitally important.
Their biggest victory is elsewhere
Ideas that were once marginal are now treated as legitimate questions. Are there “too many” migrants? Are refugees getting preferential treatment? Should access to housing be framed as a contest between Irish and migrant families? Mainstream politicians have added to this by trying to prove how “tough” they can be on migration. If Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin or sections of the media accept its framing, the far right has already moved the ground beneath everybody else.
For anti-racists this is crucial. Our job is not simply to denounce a handful of fascist activists. We have to challenge through mobilisation the political story that gives their ideas oxygen.
Ireland does not lack wealth. What it lacks is democratic control over that wealth. Landlords extract enormous rents. Developers sit on land. Private interests profit from shortages. Governments chronically underprovide public and affordable housing. Then the victims of that system are encouraged to fight one another over what remains.
Instead of tenants against landlords, we get Irish tenants against migrant tenants. Instead of workers against exploitation, we get Irish workers against migrant workers. Anger that should travel upwards towards wealth and power is redirected sideways or downwards towards people with less power.
Fascism and social crisis
Marxists such as Clara Zetkin and Leon Trotsky treated fascism not simply as extreme prejudice but as a particular kind of mass reactionary movement that grows in conditions of deep social crisis and severe working-class defeat. Fascism needs more than racist ideas. It needs a mass social base capable of smashing working-class organisation and democratic rights.
Ireland is not at that point. There is no mass fascist party, no unified fascist leadership and no movement capable of destroying the organised working class. But those conditions are not fixed forever. Economic crisis, war, political instability and a weak or demoralised labour movement can create openings. The task is to close those openings before the far right can exploit them.
One reason the far right has found space is the weakness of organised labour. Trade union organisation is far below its historic strength, and too many unions have retreated from the kind of political organising that once made workplaces a school of solidarity across nationality, religion and race.
That has to change. Anti-racist work cannot remain the concern of small activist circles. Trade unions should be organising migrant workers, challenging racist myths in workplaces, supporting communities under attack and mobilising visibly against the far right.
Where the movement is now
At present, the movement lives from flashpoint to flashpoint. It can still bring substantial numbers onto the streets around immigration, but it has struggled to turn episodic anger into durable organisation. It also increasingly attempts to attach itself to wider grievances – the cost of living, fuel prices, crime, opposition to government and distrust of institutions – and reinterpret them through nationalist and anti-migrant politics. The far right does not need everyone to become a fascist. It needs its explanations to become common sense. If every housing shortage, crime story or pressure on a public service is automatically discussed through the question of immigration – something that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have an interest in doing – the ground shifts in its direction.
Thus the immediate threat is the normalisation of racism, the growth of a harder activist core, and that deeper economic or political crisis allows the far right to connect with a much larger audience. That is why the time to organise is now – while the movement is still limited and beatable.
What anti-fascists should do
The far right wants to look bigger than it is. Most people in Ireland are not fascists, and many people who have absorbed anti-migrant ideas can still be won away from them.
But we cannot ignore them. Racist intimidation has to be confronted. Communities targeted by the far right need solidarity. When fascists attempt to dominate public space, broad, disciplined and larger anti-racist mobilisations can isolate the hard core from the wider layer they hope to influence.
There are important examples showing that the far right can be pushed back when anti-racists organise on a broad, confident and united basis. In February 2023, after weeks in which anti-migrant protests had dominated the headlines and created the impression of a racist tide sweeping the country, the Ireland For All demonstration brought around 50,000 people onto the streets of Dublin in one of the largest anti-racist mobilisations seen in Ireland in recent years. Trade unions, migrant organisations, community groups, anti-racist campaigns and the organised left came together to demonstrate that the far right did not speak for the majority.
More recently, following the racist pogroms on migrant communities in Belfast, up to 20,000 people rallied in Belfast at United Against Racism’s Together Against Hate demonstration, providing another powerful example of how quickly a mass anti-racist response can change the political atmosphere.
These mobilisations matter because they puncture the far right’s central myth that it speaks for “the people”. When anti-racists bring together workers, trade unions, migrants, community organisations and the organised left in numbers far greater than the racist minority, we can isolate the hardened far-right core from the much wider layer of people they are attempting to influence.
The lesson is not to retreat from the streets or concede communities to them, but to build broad united-front mobilisations capable of demonstrating in practice that racism is not the majority — solidarity is.
Alongside us mobilising against them, we need also to fight on the terrain that produces the anger they exploit: housing, rents, wages, healthcare, poverty, public services and inequality.
That means building united campaigns that bring socialists, trade unionists, community activists, migrants and everyone opposed to racism into common action – while arguing openly for a class politics that points the finger upwards.
Palestine Solidarity IS Anti-Fascist Organising!
The movement for Palestine is also one of the most important anti-racist and anti-fascist movements in Ireland today. It has brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets, built solidarity across nationality and religion, challenged Islamophobia and racism, and drawn a clear line against dehumanisation, collective punishment and the politics of ethnic supremacy. Every Palestine march, workplace action, student occupation and community campaign strengthens the habits of solidarity that the far right depends on breaking down. It brings Irish and migrant workers, Muslims, trade unionists, students and activists into common struggle and demonstrates in practice that our interests are not divided by race or religion. Building the Palestine movement is therefore not separate from building the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement — it is one of the most important ways of building it.
Rosa Luxemburg warned that the choice facing humanity was “socialism or barbarism.” Barbarism is not an abstraction: pogroms against migrant families driven from their homes, mosques attacked, accommodation centres burned, minorities hunted through the streets, living in fear when they see the tricolours that the far right put up in communities, dividing workers while landlords, corporations and the wealthy continue to prosper – all these cause deep divisions in the working class. But none of this is inevitable. The far right remains a minority, and we have already shown that mass anti-racist mobilisation can be isolated and pushed back. Our strength lies in numbers, organisation and solidarity — uniting Irish and migrant workers around housing, wages, public services and a society run for human need rather than profit. Our future depends on it.
