Far-right call to arms over Southport has echoes of Dublin stabbings aftermath

Anyone in Ireland sitting in front of their television screen or checking their mobile phone about events unfolding in Southport this week could not help but be struck by the similarities to what happened in Dublin in November last year.

On both occasions young children were repeatedly stabbed.

In Southport,Axel Rudakubana, 17, has been charged with the murders of three girls – Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven – as they attended a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in the north-west of England. He also faces 10 counts of attempted murder.

Eight other children sustained knife wounds, with five of them in a critical condition while two adults were also seriously injured.

In Dublin on 23 November, parents had gathered outside an Irish language school to collect their children.

What happened next is also the subject of court proceedings, but it is alleged that a foreign-born Irish citizen in his 50s started stabbing two girls and a boy, aged five and six, as well as their care assistant, who was trying to protect them.

It wasn’t long before false narratives about what happened spread and the far right issued a call to arms.

Ciarán O’Connor, a senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue that specialises in online disinformation and extremism, said word of the Dublin stabbing spread before any news media outlet had reported it or Garda Síochána (Irish police force) statement had been made.

Muslims and foreigners were being blamed and one man was later falsely identified as the attacker.

O’Connor said less than half an hour after the incident a post on Telegram stated: “If a minor has been killed by one of those animals this would be the beginning of the end of this govt and their immigration. Now, if this is true, buildings will burn.”

As time passed the level of vitriol and misinformation intensified on a private Telegram group chat and was shared on X.

The group included a member whose username is “Kill All Immigrants”.

Misinformation and disinformation literally fuelled the flames of hatred as young men answered far-right calls to arms and gathered in the centre of Dublin. What followed was the worst rioting the Irish capital , normally a peaceful place, had seen in decades.

Masked rioters attacked gardaí protecting a crime scene, and torched police vehicles and public transport before smashing their way into shops, with some stealing as much as they could carry away.

Telegram says users only receive content to which they subscribe, and calls to violence are “explicitly forbidden” and removed once moderators are made aware of them.

The same far-right playbook appears to have been used in Southport and other parts of England.

As the Guardian has reported, an account called Europe Invasion, known to publish anti-immigrant and Islamophobic content, posted on X at 1.49pm, soon after news of the Southport attack emerged, that the suspect was “alleged to be a Muslim immigrant”. There was also a false claim that he was an asylum seeker.

Those posts have since been viewed nearly 7m times.

While far-right protesters on one side of the Irish Sea hold placards saying: “Ireland is full”; in England they say: “We want our country back”.

Fear of change, a housing crisis and nostalgia are powerful emotions for those who have taken to the streets and claim to feel threatened.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the violence in Dublin, the north-west of England and London.

Disinformation is a huge concern in Ireland as more people abandon traditional news outlets and get their information from the echo chambers of social media that frequently exist in a parallel world.

While making a documentary for the BBC radio File on 4 programme about the Dublin riots and the far right, my producers and I approached a group of men and women protesting outside a disused pub they said was going to be used to house asylum seekers.

When we told them the building was to be used for homeless families at a time of a housing crisis they refused to believe us or any official who told them otherwise. A short time later the pub was burnt down.

Susan Daly, from the Journal, said: “You cannot stop the disinformation. That horse has bolted. But you can build better communities and you can build better resilience to counteract those attempts in the future.”

Although many of the world’s biggest social media platforms have their European headquarters in Dublin, the Irish government has introduced legislation aimed at stopping the spread of false information.

The penalties include fines of up to €20m (£17m) or imprisonment.

The UK government’s Online Safety Act 2023 is a similar piece of legislation. It requires social media platforms to tackle illegal content, such as threats against people of a particular race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, and to protect users from an offence known as “false communications”.

As in Ireland, the success of the legislation largely depends on the social media platforms almost immediately taking down dangerous and misleading content and enforcing their own guidelines.

That is probably easier said than done and the recent events on both sides of the Irish Sea show that false information still spreads far more quickly than the truth, with too many people hearing what they want to hear.

While there are many striking similarities between what is happening in Ireland and England, there are also some differences shaped by history.

Until very recently Ireland was a country of emigration as some people fled relative poverty, others the stifling influence of a once dominant Catholic church. But in recent years there has been massive immigration, with one in five people now born abroad.

As the Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole has noted, the number of foreign-born residents is much higher in Ireland now than “in the great age of immigration in the US”.

And this all happened without – until now – immigration becoming a matter of political debate. But a housing crisis has helped to change that.

Nostalgia may play well in England but not in Ireland.

On his podcast, the economist and commentator David McWilliams once wondered what the Irish equivalent of Donald Trump’s slogan: “Make America great again” might be. Could it be, he joked: “make Ireland shite again”?

No doubt as more houses are built the attraction of the “Ireland is full” argument will diminish but the far-right genie is out of the bottle.

Some believe the government would be better advised to promote the benefits of immigration by highlighting the roles of foreign doctors and nurses, builders and hospitality workers.

Britain, as a former imperial power, has more experience as a society with multiculturalism than Ireland, but both have benefited economically, politically and socially from immigrants.

And as people in both countries sit down in front of their televisions and watch Olympic athletes from different backgrounds successfully representing both countries, surely it is worth highlighting and celebrating that message, rather than one of hatred.