How do you like your racism?

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

Gemma O'Doherty used YouTube to stoke fears about mass immigration

So . . . how do you like your racism?

Do you think it’s all a bit of a laugh when the grandson of a German immigrant and son of a Scottish immigrant tells political opponents who happen to be women of colour that they should “go back” to the countries they “originally came from”?

Even though the man who said this, the President of the United States, happens to be the most powerful person in the world? Or that three of the four women President Trump referred to were actually born in the USA?

Do you think it’s funny or strangely weird that the people of the United States voted for such a buffoon? Or that his language of division and hate has no consequences for people living on this side of the Atlantic Ocean?

Do you fool yourself into thinking that the kind of hate speech emboldened by Trump’s election victory and the Brexit vote in the UK could never take on here?

Or are we living in denial of the hate speech, the fear, the division and demonisation of minorities which has sprung up in Ireland in recent years?

Recently, for example, a lot of people enjoyed a bit of a chuckle when a former British soldier who describes himself as an Irish “patriot” had a milkshake chucked at him while filming a live stream in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim.

Rowan Croft, who goes by the name Grand Torino, is one of a number of far-right activists who regularly use YouTube to broadcast their thoughts on migrants and asylum-seekers and how “mass immigration” is allegedly destroying the social fabric of Ireland.

Many people laughed at the sight of the former British Army soldier, referred to by some as 'Tan Torino', getting doused in milkshake, but what they may not have picked up on was the kind of thing he was saying during his online broadcast.

“Many of the people down in Rosslare said they said they weren’t having it, they were going to burn the hotel down. Pretty much like what had happened back in the day and I’ve no problem saying that,” he said.

Given that three buildings designated as Direct Provision centres have been subjected to arson attacks in recent months, this could be seen as justification for hate crimes.  Direct Provision centres are mostly places, such as disused or run down-hotels, where asylum-seekers can be detained for up to eight years without any right to work or cook for themselves.

The moment a far-right YouTuber got "milkshaked" last week

If you wandered down to Google’s European HQ in Dublin today, you would see a small group of people protesting outside. These are supporters of a former national newspaper journalist who is outraged that her YouTube channel has been shut down permanently due to violations of the tech giant's policies relating to hate speech.

Gemma O’Doherty and her small band of followers have staged protests outside the European headquarters every day this week in a bid to restore her main channel, which has more than 26,000 followers.

Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed  on Tuesday night that her account has been removed for what were described as repeat breaches of its regulations.

Ms O’Doherty staged unsuccessful campaigns to run for the Irish Presidency in October of last year and the European Parliament in May of this year, when she managed to secure just 1.8 per cent of the first preference votes in Dublin.

But her increasing use of social media platforms to criticise ethnic minorities and migrants, as well as controversial views about vaccinations, has prompted growing concerns about the growth of the far-right here in Ireland. Let’s not ridicule those who vote for Trump while ignoring those who spread hatred and division at home.

Ms O’Doherty generated national headlines when she was fired by the Irish Independent, the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, in August 2013 after reporting on widespread wiping of penalty points by the Irish police force or Gardai.

As part of her investigative work, she had called to the home of the former Irish police commissioner, Martin Callinan, to challenge him about the deletion of penalty points from his own record.

She was forced to take redundancy by the newspaper after being referred to as a “rogue reporter” by then editor-in-chief, Stephen Rae. In December 2014, she won an apology and damages from the newspaper.

Many people felt sorry for her and admired her for speaking out against corruption at the time.

What you see if you try to access O'Doherty's YouTube channel today

Few of those who backed her bid to run for the Presidency of Ireland last year had any idea at the time that she harboured views which could be described as “far right” or extremist. She set up a new political party called Anti-Corruption Ireland (ACI) which, so far, has failed to attract any significant support from Irish voters.

But those who monitor far-right activity in Ireland have been alarmed by the kind of language used on her YouTube channel, in which she regularly interviews other activists, including Croft, with extreme anti-immigrant views and stokes up fears.

Indeed, the growth in the popularity of extreme right-wing social media in Ireland over the past year or so is almost an exact replica of the “culture wars” in the United States in the lead-up to the election of President Donald Trump in November 2016.

Right-wingers interview each other again and again, and constantly blame immigrants or minorities for society’s woes.

“We have to reclaim our Irishness,” O’Doherty told viewers earlier this year. “If that’s racist, great. Bring it on. But we are going to make Ireland Irish again and I’m sorry if I sound like Donald Trump.”

Earlier this week, one of Gemma O'Doherty's videos was removed by YouTube after she criticised ethnic minorities in Ireland and her account was suspended for seven days.

She tried to get around this ban by posting new videos under a second account bearing her name, which is a clear violation of YouTube’s rules for users of the video-sharing site.

On Tuesday evening, a Google spokesperson told The Irish Times that it was the policy of the tech giant to terminate the accounts of those who violated policies against hate speech.

Since late last year, O’Doherty has regularly used her YouTube channel to warn viewers that Irish people are set to become a minority in their own country.

Earlier this month, she told her followers that “some African guys” had “some sort of a scheme” which involved getting Irish women pregnant, presumably so that they could stay in the country.

“What sort of fools are these women? What sort of fools? Are they sluts? Are they whores?” she asked her YouTube followers. “They don’t even bloody deserve Irish citizenship, getting involved in dangerous situations like this. It says everything you need to know about the degeneracy of this country at the moment.”

Previous YouTube streams have seen her claim that the country was being “inundated” with migrants who were putting pressure on the health care system and the provision of housing in Ireland.

She still has a Twitter account and a Facebook page, although she does not like to be challenged about her views and tends not to comment when contacted by other journalists.

She was widely condemned after using social media to describe the horrific massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, as a “false flag” or fake – even though 51 people lost their lives in the massacre.

A few weeks ago, she posted a photo of children from a school in the midlands town of Longford. The photo contained a number of black children and she claimed it demonstrated evidence that Irish people were set to become an “ethnic minority” in Ireland.

Hate speech against migrants and minorities has become a regular feature of online debate in Ireland, to such an extent that a man felt it was acceptable to go onto Facebook recently and call on people to  petrol bomb a house with migrants boarded up inside.

O’Doherty's is not the only Irish YouTube channel on which far-right activists rant about global conspiracies, how their land is being “swamped” by migrants and refugees, boast about Islamophobia, or blame minorities for all of the island’s social problems.

Instead of laughing at the idiocy of Trump and his supporters, it’s time for us all to wake up. Adolf Hitler used to be ridiculed as an ignorant buffoon in the 1930s.

O’Doherty may not be able to spread her disturbing views on YouTube anymore, but the far-right are now sharing views on social media platforms which would have been unthinkable in Ireland just five or ten years ago.

Related post: Is it time to legislate against hate crimes? (March 2019)



--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.


** Please note that Ciaran Tierney is available to write business blogs or opinion pieces about Irish politics and society. 

Is it time to legislate against hate crimes?

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

A protest against racism in Galway in 2017

"She needs to be taken under control and dealt with once and for all.”

Against my better judgement, but with a morbid curiosity, last night I sat down to watch a live YouTube video from a former newspaper journalist who now sees herself as one of the leading lights of an “anti-corruption” movement in Ireland.

And, just over 11 minutes in, I heard her make this sinister-sounding threat against a Cork woman called Fiona O’Leary, who I have never met, but who I have known to be a campaigner on behalf of people with autism.

Fiona is a mother of five, including two autistic children.

Earlier yesterday, supporters of Gemma O’Doherty began sharing photos of her family home in rural Co Cork on social media.

During the YouTube live video, they also posted threatening messages against Fiona, the majority of them hiding behind anonymous accounts.

“A Syrian family needs that big house Fiona,” wrote one follower, who did not have the courage to go by his or her real name. “You and the assburgers (sic) will have to live in tents like the Irish people you racist!”

A little girl in Syria, which has endured more than eight years of war

How could anyone not be alarmed by such language?

How could any parents sleep well at night, knowing that they and their children have been targeted in such a manner?

Gemma, in case you have never heard of her, once wanted to be President of Ireland. She went all around Ireland late last year, trying to persuade members of various local authorities to nominate her.

She didn’t succeed in getting nominated and it’s doubtful that the few who championed her cause knew the full range of her political views.

But they should know about them now.

Fiona was singled out for abuse because she dared to contact her local hotel in Bantry to express concern that O’Doherty’s new political party, Anti Corruption Ireland (ACI), was planning to hold a meeting there. She wondered were they comfortable with far-right, anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim views.

Fiona was definitely not the only one to do so, but she had the temerity to put up a short video on YouTube to announce that she had contacted the Maritime Hotel.

She recorded a short video to condemn racism and the “anti-vaccine” movement, before right-wing extremists posted photos of her home on social media.

She has long campaigned for the rights of children with autism, and against those who advocate for the use of a substance called MMS as a cure for autism.

And so she was seen as fair game for attacks on social media.

If you speak out against racism, you are now a target for the new “alt-right” in Ireland.

A version of this sign drew huge applause at the St Patrick's Day parade in Galway

Last weekend, the Sunday Business Post reported on an ACI meeting in Ashbourne, Co Meath, where about 180 people were given dire warnings about the growing Islamification of Ireland.

“There is a large Muslim community here now who the Government is bending over backwards to facilitate,” Ms O’Doherty told a meeting at the Pillo Hotel.

In her world view, immigration poses an existential threat to the Irish nation, so much so that she told the meeting that the Irish would become an ethnic minority in our own country by 2040.

Those of us who were shocked by the election of President Donald Trump in the USA in 2016 used to console ourselves that such things would never occur here.

People voted for him even after he claimed that Mexico was deliberately sending murderers and rapists to the United States.

They voted for him even after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, even though there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and the extremists of ISIS and Al-Quaeda only represent the views of a tiny minority.

Fascists on the streets of Charlottesville in the USA

My 20-year love of scuba-diving has brought me to places like Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, and Jordan. I have met so many Muslims who have shown me wonderful hospitality – the reality of their lives in places like Dahab and Hurghada, Egypt, and Koh Lanta, Thailand, seems so far removed from the terrible images portrayed on social media.

In Dahab, kind Bedouins used to invite me and my friends into their homes. In Koh Lanta, a Muslim island, I was one of the guests of honour at a Muslim wedding. Hatred tends to evaporate when you travel the world and actually get to know people.

We should no longer fool ourselves that fascism, hate speech and xenophobia have no place in Ireland; a country which should have a greater understanding than any place on earth of the desire of people to move overseas, escape oppression, and improve their lives.

Where would the Irish have been without the ‘coffin ships’ to North America when hundreds of thousands were dying of starvation under the British Empire in the 1840s?

How quick we can be to forget our own history, how keen some of us can be to dehumanise or demonise.

On Saturday, just hours after the terrible terrorist attack in New Zealand, O’Doherty made it clear that she was not grieving too much for 50 lost Muslim lives.

“New Zealand has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation to incite fresh IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists to take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11,” tweeted O’Doherty last weekend.

“A professional job. The public are no longer fooled.”

No time to pause or to think of the terrible waste of human life, carried out by a so-called white supremacist – a terrorist – motivated by nothing more than blind hatred of people he knew nothing about, many of whom had escaped war zones or poverty to build better lives.

By all means, let’s have a meaningful debate about immigration or Ireland’s place in a European Union in which the bureaucrats in Brussels seem to be very detached from ordinary Irish people.

Let’s debate PESCO and whether our ‘neutral’ nation is about to be led into a European Army.

Let’s have a debate about the Direct Provision system and whether old, converted hotels in rural Irish towns are appropriate places to detain asylum-seekers, with no right to cook or privacy, for months or years on end.

But how can anyone engage with people who call for refugees, who may have escaped from a terrible conflict in Syria, to be burned alive inside their homes as one “brave” online troll posted just two weeks ago?

That’s not a debate, that’s hate speech.

Can't imagine why people have begun to hate Muslims ... ?

Once you start to demonise minorities, or target the homes of vulnerable people who happen not to agree with you, you are descending into a terrible world of anonymous online cowards, intolerance, and hate crimes.

We now live in a country in which the same few people interview each other online every night about the Islamification of Ireland and how immigrants are posing a threat to some idealised “ethnically pure” land which probably never existed in the first place.

The comments some of them attract to their live streams belong in a sewer.

By all means, question those in authority and debate the homelessness and health care crises which have fuelled so much anger across the land.

But some of these people cannot raise any issue without punching down, attacking the easiest, most visible, and most vulnerable targets and blaming them for all our woes.

It's far easier to blame the black family down the road for the housing crisis than the landlord who owns 50 properties and keeps putting up the rent while forcing ordinary Irish people out of their homes.

BlindBoy from the Rubberbandits once described the comments section of a prominent Irish news website as a "sewer". Many of those who follow these ‘alt right’ groups are guilty of appalling online abuse which should never be given a platform.

And nobody should have to tolerate that kind of abuse from anonymous, cowardly trolls.

If the tech companies won’t regulate themselves, isn’t it time the Irish Government legislated against hate crimes?



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--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world. 

People in Galway mourning the death of an American woman
who was murdered by a white supremacist two years ago.

No laughing matter for the Italians of Galway

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

An anti-racism event in Galway city centre

A few weeks ago I was invited to a meeting in a Galway pub in which members of the region’s Italian community met up with representatives of the city’s anti-racism network.

Up to a dozen immigrants from Italy attended the meeting and it was interesting to note how united they became as they discussed an issue close to their hearts for two hours.

Unlike, say, the Irish in London when I was a young lad, the Italians in Ireland don’t tend to stick together or live in the same area. Most of them had never met each other before and all four corners of their native land were represented in the pub.

What drew them together was a common concern that an anti-immigrant meeting being held in Co Galway this week was not representative of their little community.

I took some of their phone numbers and, as a result, wrote an article for Irish Central which proclaimed that an immigrant to Galway was holding an anti-immigrant meeting in a Headford pub.

People laughed at the heading. They felt it was ridiculous. Here was a man who had moved to another country to build a new life organising a meeting to oppose or demonise refugees and asylum-seekers who had left war-torn Syria or Libya to build new lives.

Ironically, the person who has organised the far-right meeting has also been using his business page on Facebook to support 'Ire-exit', the campaign for Ireland to leave the European Union.

He seems to be blissfully unaware that it is membership of the EU which allows him the right to live and work in Ireland without any need for a visa.

Yes, you couldn’t make it up.

But it was clear from the Italians I talked to that night that this was a deadly serious issue for them.

They wanted to make it clear to me and the Galway Anti Racism Network (GARN) representatives at the meeting that they saw the proposed event in Headford as an embarrassment and a sinister development for a small town in the West of Ireland.

Protesting against racism in the City of the Tribes

They told us a lot about Matteo Salvini and his Lega Nord party that night.

They thought they had left the kind of politics in which some people are not deemed “racially pure” behind when they left Italy for the West of Ireland.

The kind of rhetoric which demonises minorities seems even more appalling than ever this week, as the proposed meeting in Headford comes in the same week as Holocaust Memorial Day. Just in case anyone needed reminding of the dangers of demonising minorities or valuing one group of people over another.

They told us of how Salvini blames immigrants for bringing drugs, theft, and violence to their land or how he described Italy as a giant refugee camp before the election which saw him become Deputy Prime Minister last year.

For these Italians, who have seen their migration to Ireland as a good thing, Salviini’s words about immigrants are nothing more than hate speech.

“We, European citizens, came here with all the comfort of a Ryanair flight and knowing that we could always go back. I am at home and I plan to stay for good, but I am an immigrant, an economic immigrant, I have been working in Ireland for the past 13 years,” one of them, Marcello, told me.

“I am ashamed of being associated with a person who is happy that people drown in the sea trying to make a better life, with a person who is an immigrant in Ireland supporting a party that against the law kept women and children confined in a ship, a person who supports throwing women and children on the street with no support, while the crazy Italian bureaucracy decides if they are refugees."

He asked me how many Irish people had crossed the sea to find a better life, just as the Italian man who is hosting this week’s “xenophobic meeting” in Headford moved to Ireland for a better life.

While some people laughed at my article – the idea that an immigrant would host an anti-immigrant meeting in a Co Galway pub – it was clear from the mood of the Italians that night that they were anything but amused by the prospect of Salvini’s party taking a foothold in Ireland.

A protest against racism in the heart of Galway 

And, over the past few weeks, as I recovered from surgery, I have noticed an alarming increase in the number of far-right videos circulating here in Ireland.

A video I watched last weekend described Salvini and his party as “patriots”, expressing admiration for Lega Nord and the hope that a party like his could emerge here in Ireland.

Some of these online videos might seem pathetic, as the same people interview each other week after week; but it is clear that there is a market for this kind of far-right material now in Ireland, given the anger and alienation people feel in the midst of health and homelessness crises.

It's so easy to focus anger onto the weakest (and wrong) targets, as President Donald Trump has done with his language of hate in the United States.

A lot of people are deeply unhappy with life in Ireland right now, with so many homeless on our streets, patients lying on trolleys in our public hospitals, and people being evicted from their homes.
Like Salvini, there are people in Ireland who are only too willing to spread hatred and division, and to blame the most marginalised in society for all of our ills.

As a result of the meeting in Galway in December, the region’s Italians are set to meet with the people of Headford tomorrow (Tuesday, 7.30 pm), to outline their opposition to the idea of a far-right meeting taking place in our midst.

They don’t want to see Irish political parties encourage hatred against foreigners, demonise them, or create the kind of environment in which violence against immigrants is deemed to be inevitable.
So they want to reach out to Irish people, to show that a fascist party does not in any way represent their views.

The meeting in Headford is being run in conjunction with GARN and concerned local people in the town. 
          

Some anti-EU material on the Facebook page of the Headford pub

“We can't ignore recent events, especially damage done to proposed direct provision centres or support for Peter Casey's comments. These are signs of communities who are only being fed an elitist government line on topics like immigration or are being exposed to far-right propaganda - the sole purpose of which is to sow division,” said Joe Loughnane of GARN yesterday.

“Our message of resilient communities campaigning together for better services and equal treatment is already resonating well with the concerned folk who've been in touch."


• The meeting takes place in St Fursas Parish Hall, Headford, tomorrow evening (7.30 pm). The far-right meeting is still planned for a pub in the town on Thursday night, even though all traces of it have been removed from social media following the storm which erupted last month.

UPDATE: Since I published this blog post last night, I have since learned that the organiser of the Headford meeting has announced that he will no longer serve Travellers in his pub. See the screengrab below:

* Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com.