Caller 19
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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And now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the Irish presidential race. And he's not. It's just it's an exceptionally difficult ballot to get on. You can't just stump up the money in America and become a third party candidate or a writing candidate or whatever. That doesn't work here. You need the support of a large number of democratically elected politicians to get there.
Behind the Bastards
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So I think McGregor's real aim is not to get into the presidency because really he can't. He's not even going to be on the ballot. But I think he wants to be Ireland's answer to Tommy Robinson. And I suppose if Tommy Robinson is the answer, what the hell was the question?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. I think with Connor, it's, it's all about his, his ego, which is probably what you'd expect from an MMA star. You know, there's going to be an element of, you know, ego and showboating and K fab and so on. I mean, it's interesting. And he's interviewed with Tucker Carlson. He was giving out that the minister of education was, you know, isn't a teacher, they're unqualified for the job.
Behind the Bastards
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And the Irish government's minister for health isn't a doctor. And it's like, well, what qualifies you to be president, Conor? You're a former plumber turned MMA fighter, you know? Yeah. Getting hit in the face. Yeah. And we've, we've had, um, ministers of education who were teachers and ministers of health who were doctors who happened to be totally awful. The reality is like we have a PR system.
Behind the Bastards
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We've, you know, a very democratic and fair process. And we have more than a two party system here. But I think like as emerged during the during that civil rape trial, which McGregor lost, you know, he had to admit to his cocaine use during it. He has been sending out kind of fevered. I would imagine cocaine fever trip tweet saying as president of Ireland, I have the power to.
Behind the Bastards
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And it's like, man, the election hasn't even happened yet. He's way ahead of himself. He's not going to get in the ballot. He knows that. He wants to present it. And I mean, the fact that he's even talking about getting in the ballot shows he doesn't understand the constitutional system here, which it's not like Britain. We have a written constitution.
Behind the Bastards
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It's not that complex, if you know the basics of the law. He's never going to get in the ballot, but he wants to present that he's been denied the opportunity to stand. And unfortunately, what we have around the country is
Behind the Bastards
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an increasingly violent anti-immigrant street movement that whenever these, what we call them here, IPAS, International Protection Applicant Services, these IPAS or refugee centres, basically, when these are picked as places of accommodation by the government, while these people's applications for refugee status, they have to stay somewhere while these are being examined.
Behind the Bastards
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You tend to get large protests in towns, villages, cities all over Ireland. Sometimes these turn quite violent. Sometimes there have been more than 30 arson attacks on these centers. And I think what Conor McGregor ultimately wants is he wants to be able to tour the country attending these protests and having everyone queuing up to take selfies with him and telling him what a great hero he is.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think that's his ultimate aim. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And he's obviously, he's going to grift off the back of it. The guy has money already, but it was so funny, this multi-multi-millionaire being interviewed by Tucker Carlson saying, we're going to start fundraising for my campaign.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like, man, you have more money than you could ever spend on political posters and flyers and adverts, you know?
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Yeah. And I mean, we've had some... You know, at the time of an outbreak of rioting in Dublin, anti-immigrant violence, which caused 20 million euros worth of damage and, you know, trashed the city center in November of 2023. Connor, and I'm not saying he directly caused it, but he was tweeting at the same time, Ireland is at war.
Behind the Bastards
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And around the same time he was tweeting like any property that's been taken over by foreigners evaporated. I think really his plan is to kind of if he can represent himself as a political martyr figure, he's hoping that it will overshadow the, you know, his loss in the rape case. And he is, of course, appealing that and claiming he has new evidence and everything.
Behind the Bastards
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No, what happens, these started around 2018. So maybe just before COVID, you had one or two of them. And my book went to print in December 2024. So I stopped counting in December. And by then I had over 30 arson attacks and there hasn't been a single conviction or any of them.
Behind the Bastards
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So it's when usually former hotels that have been closed down for years are that the government moves in or some local person moves in to renovate them and use them as one of these centres. They'll just go up and smoke in the middle of the night. And I mean, we have already a... very significant homeless problem here.
Behind the Bastards
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I mean, there's more than 10,000 people homeless in Dublin, both Irish and refugee. And I mean, that probably sounds small to someone listening in a big American city. We thought we had a housing crisis when we had 2000 people homeless and we got more than 10, almost 15,000 people homeless now. And, um,
Behind the Bastards
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Some of these anti-immigrant protesters have actually burnt down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people in the mistaken belief that it was going to be used for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to the housing crisis. You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes. Sometimes it's just pickets. Sometimes it's graffiti.
Behind the Bastards
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In the case of Martin Kenny, who's an opposition TD, he'd be from Sinn Féin party. Most of your listeners would probably have heard of an Irish Republican kind of left-wing Irish Republican party. Oh, yes. There was a refugee center planned for where he lived in Leitrim. And in fairness to him, he spoke out against it.
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And, uh, he condemned what he called quote, the far right ideology that has been peddled in this country about asylum seekers. A week later, he was sleeping in his house with his wife and kids. And, uh, his, uh, his car in the driveway was petrol bond was fire bond. And they came back a few months later and did it again. And he was forced to move house.
Behind the Bastards
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So arson attacks on politicians homes is something we haven't seen here since the original fascists were around in the thirties as well. And, um, This violence, again, like, as I said, there hasn't been a single arrest. And I'll give you a perfect example. The title for the book, Burn Them Out, is from an event that happened in February 2023.
Behind the Bastards
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A guy stood up in front of a Garda police station here in Finglas, which would be a big suburb of Dublin. And there was a huge crowd of anti-immigrant protesters around. One of them was waving a swastika flag. And this guy stood up in front of them with a megaphone in front of their police station, said, there is no point standing here outside a Garda station.
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The only way to deal with refugees is to burn them out. Go where they are fucking staying and burn them fucking cunts out. That's a direct quote. And of course, had he been threatening that violence against the Gardaí, had he been threatening that violence against a private business or a politician, I have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away.
Behind the Bastards
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But this masked guy threatening violence and arson was just allowed to walk off. So there you go. They're certainly not on the ball. And we've even had during the COVID pandemic when there was a cop nearly killed that had a firework shot at him during one of these riots.
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The police commissioner in the south of Ireland, who's formerly a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a very controversial pro-British police force that used to be in the north. This guy's our new police commissioner down south, and he tried to blame Republicans and the IRA for the violence and left-wing extremists for the violence that was happening.
Behind the Bastards
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And it was so clear that, you know, Republicans, Irish Republicans have been on the streets opposing these people and their marches for years.
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I suppose, like, if you think back as far as 2015, Tommy Robinson, a friend of the pod, attempted to organize his anti-Islamic, his Islamophobic Pegidav movement, tried to launch a branch of it in Dublin.
Behind the Bastards
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They couldn't even get to their rallying point because there were 5,000 anti-fascists on the street there against them. Irish Republicans, Irish language activists, Muslim community from Dublin were there, LGBT activists, and they couldn't even get to have their event.
Behind the Bastards
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So up until COVID, certainly the anti-fascists and groups like Anti-Fascist Action Ireland were excellent at closing down small groups. You have a lot of people who are doing online research and exposing these people's sordid histories and their international connections. So that's one thing we're pretty good at.
Behind the Bastards
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And what it turns out is that a lot of these guys, like one of the main proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory here, was a guy called Rowan Croft, who just happened to be a former British Army soldier. So that doesn't fly too well in Ireland when somebody's standing up saying... I'm a great Irish patriot and I'm going to stop the foreigners. Like, well, hang on a minute.
Behind the Bastards
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When you chose to fight in the military, you chose to serve the Queen of England. Um, so you have big national groups like anti-fascist action. You have groups like anti-imperialist action, Ireland. Thankfully, as these protests have sprung up around the country, these far right anti-immigrant protests, they have always been countered. And, uh,
Behind the Bastards
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I'm thinking of in Cork City when the library was being attacked and it would actually had to be closed down for a period. And it was the first time that the Cork library had closed since the British burnt it down during our revolution in the 1920s.
Behind the Bastards
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And, you know, you had a crowd of maybe 100 far right and people on the opposite side, the anti-fascist scene kept building and building until by the end. And I was there for some of these protests. We had four or five hundred against them. And eventually we decided, right, we're going to stand and protect the library. And that happened in other places like Limerick and it happened in Dublin.
Behind the Bastards
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And eventually the far right said, well, we can't even get near the library to have our protest anymore. And they dissipated. One thing that's very interesting here is the optics. And sometimes on the left and on the anti-fascist side, we're not as good at the imagery and the using new technology and stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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And one thing you'll always see is, you know, when anti-fascists are mobilising in Ireland, you know, they'll have often red flags, they'll have the Palestinian flag, they'll have Irish left-wing Republican flags like the plough and the stars. But often we don't carry our national flag, the tricolour, as much.
Behind the Bastards
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And of course the far right love fetishising flags and they have the green, white and orange Irish tricolour everywhere. Often, of course, these people are so ignorant, they fly it the wrong way around and it's the orange, white and green. So it's like vive le Côte d'Ivoire. It's the ivory coast flag if you have it the wrong way.
Behind the Bastards
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But it's interesting in some of the clashes, you'll have anti-fascists with the Irish flag and fascists with the Irish flag. But I think just in terms of optics, it sometimes looks very bad when the far right are able to clip out a section of of the opposing crowd and say, look, they have Palestinian flags. They have all other LGBT pride flags, but they're not proud to be Irish.
Behind the Bastards
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They don't have Irish flags. And there could be some Irish flags clipped off at the side. So these people in the far right are very good at using the history of Irish politics and resistance to Britain and using the imagery of that struggle and co-opting it. And I think it's very important that we on the, uh, And the anti-fascist side don't surrender any of that to them.
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And I mean, the Irish flag, what it stands for, the green bit is for Catholics who wanted independence. The orange bit is for Protestants who wanted to be linked with Britain. And the white was for peace and unity. So it's a flag that at its very essence, you know, talks about respecting a religious minority and people from a colonial or immigrant background who arrived here as strangers.
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I think what's tending to happen now is genie is out of the bottle and far-right message is spreading. And you had this big far-right rally of, you know, 10,000, five to 10,000 people at its maximum that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main street in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards, but it is worrying. I think we're going to see that grow.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think on the left sometimes, and particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea that, oh, this is a flash in the pan and we'll organise a few big rallies and they'll go away. They won't. This is like the National Front in Britain. You know, these people are going to be around haunting Irish politics for at least a decade and then they're never going to fully go away.
Behind the Bastards
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They'll pop back up again. I think we're going to continue to see the regional protests. And I think as well, we have started seeing the Irish government, which is a coalition of two centre-right parties, kind of tighten up their own language on immigration. We're starting to see an increasing number of deportations as well. The police really still aren't fully on the ball.
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They are, of course, being given new policing powers by the government to deal with violent protests. They're being issued with things like, you know, new non-lethal technologies, you know, pepper spray and extra equipment and body cameras that they wouldn't have had before.
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But of course, the classic thing is that these will always be used as much, if not more so against the left and the anti-fascist side than they will be against the racists.
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Thankfully, these groups, you know, they're all in fighting with each other. They have tried to do like electoral pacts and to plan out political strategies. But thankfully, they're all so fixated on wanting to be the Führer that never really works. But what I was going to say a minute ago is that that 10,000 people, if there were that many on the street, not everyone in that is far right.
Behind the Bastards
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You know, some of the people are from working class communities that have been betrayed by the government and have been abandoned and they are starting, they've just fallen down the rabbit hole. And I can think of an incident. I was in the gym a couple of months back and I'm just sitting there and there were a few guys didn't know they were around chatting. Obviously we were in the gym.
Behind the Bastards
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None of us are in the, in the sauna. None of us have many clothes on and none of these guys had like questionable far right tattoos or anything like that. But the conversation suddenly started about immigrants and how they were bringing crime and how they were bringing disease and all this kind of stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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And I listened to it for a minute or two and I just stood up and said, lads, everything you are saying about immigrants in Ireland now is what was said about Irish people in America in the 19th century and in England in like the 70s and the 80s. So I think it's important that even in our workplaces on public transport, when we hear it, this kind of talk, we call it out.
Behind the Bastards
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If it's a friend of ours who's fallen down the rabbit hole into these conspiracies, because that's how their message is spreading now. Often when you see people involved in some of this anti-immigrant rioting, they have no history of involvement in far-right groups, but it's that message has spread beyond those groups, thanks to our friends in the nerd Reich.
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No problem. Delighted to be here. Thanks very much, Robert.
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And I think if we have a work colleague or a brother or somebody who believes falls into that, that we don't abandon them. We don't immediately start calling them a Nazi and whatever that we try to talk them around with. But look, I suppose the thing is there is hope and everywhere these people have organised, there have been anti-fascists there to meet them.
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I think we need to get better at planning that on a national scale. Of course, on the left, you always get this factionalism and infighting. I'm not standing beside him. He's Trotskyist. Well, I don't like his views on the north, whatever. We need to kind of say, as long as we're fighting with each other, the fascists are winning.
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Thankfully, none of these people have ever gotten more than 2% in an election. They have nobody elected in our national parliament. They only have 4%. or five, maybe six, councillors elected in the entire of the southern part of the country, and that's out of 949 councillors. But we can't just laugh at them.
Behind the Bastards
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We can't worry this is a threat, because when the Nazis stood for election the first time, I think they only got 2% of the vote as well, and look how that turned out.
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you know cauterized right like that's and that's that's kind of the challenge in front of irish anti-fascists right now is ensuring that that cauterization happens absolutely and uh i mean look if you think of this you know elon musk has tipped mcgregor for president and we're all laughing at it now but uh you know it wouldn't be the first time that elon musk has tipped a reality tv star with a questionable sexual and criminal history for high office and they got there right
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, well, obviously, I'm not on ex-Twitter or anything like that. I don't have a sub stack or anything. So just the main thing I want to plug is my book, Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and the Far Right in Ireland. It is published by Bloomsbury, head of Zeus. So it should be available to order via any bookshop.
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Obviously, if you are going to support a bookshop, support a small independent one rather than Barnes & Noble. And if you are buying it online, obviously buy it direct from the publishers, Bloomsbury. Don't buy it off Amazon if you can, because God knows Jeff Bezos has enough money. Yeah, there's certainly plenty.
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Yeah. Sadly, as long as fascism has existed since Mussolini's March on Rome and his political rise, we have had fascist groups here of one sort or another. We've had fascist groups in Ireland that were pro-British in politics, fascist groups in Ireland that were pro-Irish or Irish independence. You know, obviously we were neutral during World War II.
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We weren't occupied by Nazi Germany or anything like that. We did have one very big fascist group here in the 1930s, the Blue Shirts, who were
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uh extremely violent and got 68 members of parliament elected they were the main political opposition they were kind of the largest non-governing fascist organization in the world per capita but as you said irish republicanism has kind of inoculated us against a lot of the far right stuff we'd have seen in britain and germany and france in the 90s um because you
Behind the Bastards
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You know, while the conflict was going on in the north of Ireland, basically, if you were an angry young man with very strong patriotic feelings who was given towards political violence, you would probably end up in the provisional IRA. And their politics were very left wing and internationalist. I mean, I remember going into their political wing, Sinn Féin's bookshop. in Dublin in the 1990s.
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And it was all pictures of, you know, Yessir Arafat. And it was pictures of Nelson Mandela and like the Zapatistas. And, you know, it was very much about Irish independence being an anti-colonial struggle. Yeah.
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You do, of course, get like on the opposite side of that, on kind of the loyalist pro-British side in the North, you did get as kind of reaction to that pro-British paramilitaries, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF.
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They would have linked up with neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 in England to get guns, to get finances, to get their hands on explosives and things which were easier to get in England today. than in the north of Ireland.
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But really, we never had a party here, either in the north or in the south, that was as successful as groups like the Front National in France or the British National Party in England. But sadly, in recent years, certainly in the last 10 years, the far right are kind of back. They're alive and kicking and they're taking to the streets.
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Yeah, well, Ireland's greatest export was always people. And, you know, we huge Irish American communities in, you know, Chicago, New York, you know, all over. You've Irish people in Australia and Canada and England all over the continent. So in the early, you know, 2010s, we started like there had always been a trickle of migration and people coming back and forward.
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Like we had some, you know, Vietnamese refugees here. We had migrants. You know, historically, we had Russian Jews coming here and so on, escaping pogroms in Tsarist Russia. But really, the first time that we had very large numbers of people coming was in the 20 teens. And it was things like the Mediterranean migrant crisis. It was people fleeing climate change in Africa.
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the Syrian civil war, Taliban in Afghanistan, and more recently, of course, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. And the far right had always been these tiny little fringe parties and figures. There's a very active anti-fascist group here called Anti-Fascist Action Ireland. And anytime these groups tried to organize or take to the streets, they were challenged and they were run off. But
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Really, what brought them all together, Ireland's kind of attempt to unite the right, was the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we had one of the strictest COVID lockdowns in Europe. You're talking about, originally, you weren't allowed to travel more than two kilometres from your home. That's one and a quarter miles for you Americans.
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Basically, you could go to the store, but other than that, you couldn't travel very far. And of course, everyone was locked at home with their internet and started going down the rabbit hole. And what we saw was the anti-vaxxer COVID conspiracy movement took to the streets in Ireland very quickly. And that brought together all of the disparate, tiny groups.
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far right and neo-fascist factions, the closet neo-Nazis, the anti-vaxxers, the fundamentalist Catholics, like the Society of St. Pius X, the sovereign citizen types, you know, the people who were on about 5G conspiracies and chemtrails all got onto the streets, all got active.
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On the Irish left and the anti-fascist side, we kind of dropped the ball because we were following the healthcare advice and the cops were quite happy to ignore the far right mobilising on the street. But there were striking workers like Debenhams and Cleary's who'd been striking before COVID struck.
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And the cops were going up and moving these trade unionists on saying, you know, you're breaking the pandemic. So it wasn't policed evenly. And, you know, suddenly for the first time during the pandemic, we were starting to see groups of three, 400 far right in Dublin, which doesn't sound like much.
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But I mean, last weekend there was a march in Dublin city and they had probably around 5,000, maybe up to 10,000 people marching. And that's something we haven't seen here since the 1930s.
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Yeah, it was let kind of rumble on to the police. The cops didn't really start taking action on any of this stuff until I would say it was in early November 2023 when they had this rally called, I think it was called to the Dáil or maybe slightly earlier than that in September 2023. The Dáil is the Gaelic word for our parliament. And basically...
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the dregs of the COVID movement kind of came together again. You had all these tiny far right and fascist parties popping up. And the best thing about them is they all get into fewer fights. They all start arguing with each other about who's going to be the leader and they haven't united. But they took to the streets in the autumn, in the fall of 2023.
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And there was one really violent and disgusting riot outside the parliament where the far right were throwing bottles of urine at politicians trying to get in, were shouting racial abuse at anybody who wasn't white, who was working in the building as a cleaner or a parliamentary assistant or anything. Any opposition politicians, they could see they were screaming at them in imitation of you guys.
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And January the 6th, they had built a mock noose and they were using it to hang effigies of politicians. And you also had police cops being attacked for the first time by the far right. Really, there'd be one or two other incidents, but it's only when cops started getting attacked by them and politicians were being directly, their safety was being threatened.
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Then the cops started to act maybe in the last 18 months or so. But it was really closing the stable door about five years after the violent far right horse had already bolted.
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Well, they definitely have an influence here. I mean, the politics, the talking points, the buzzwords that the far right use in Ireland have all been learned from the likes of Alec Jones, have all been learned from watching, you know, crazy stuff on Twitter. And it's all American and British far-right talking points that are being replayed here.
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Stuff about the clergy plan, stuff about the Great Replacement and so on. I mean, 100 years ago, it was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and now they're just spinning the same conspiracies, same talking points again. Like, for example, one of the things we had here was
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We had a party called the Irish People's Party, and some of their campaigners were really fundamentalist, Latin mass, set of a contest Catholics. And they were going down and protesting about drag queen story time at Irish libraries. We don't even have drag queen story time. Yeah. These guys have been so inspired by what was happening in America. They just went in and.
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Started taking books off the shelves, you know, and anything to do with any LGBT plus theme. Even basic sex education guides for kids. Stuff that's pretty mild. I'm perfectly happy to give my own kids. And I'm not the most woke guy, but they'd start ripping them up. They'd start taking them out of the library, filming themselves burning books at home. Um, it was really crazy stuff.
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And at that stage, again, you did get anti anti-fascist organizing, but what you kind of get is figures like Conor McGregor being amplified by the likes of Elon Musk being amplified by, you know, Tucker Carlson coming over interviewing him or, or Donald Trump, of course, inviting him to the, uh, to the, the white house. I mean,
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the prime minister of Ireland, as we'd say in Gaelic, the Taoiseach, Michail Martin, he was, uh, invited to the white house on the 12th of March, but the guy that Trump chose to actually have there on Patrick's day itself was of course, Conor McGregor. And McGregor has links to, I wouldn't say far right figures, but certainly very populist figures.
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And McGregor has kind of started, he's become God-pilled and he started rambling on about, um, you know, rosary beads and the power of Christ and all this kind of stuff. And he doesn't strike me as a particularly religious man. And now with the help of Tucker Carlson, you know, and Elon Musk and others, he says he's going to run for president.
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We have a presidential election coming up here in six months. Did you watch the interview, Robert?
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It's wild. There's absolutely no resemblance. Like what Connor puts across, there's no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland. Like he starts ranting about how the police are so corrupt. Element of that's true. But he starts talking about how the traffic core, the road cops who give you like speeding tickets and stuff, they're the most violent and repressive and all this kind of stuff.
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And it just so happens that Conor McGregor has a string of speeding violations in his sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson chips in and says, oh, my God, you've got these armed cops and they're they're repressing the Irish people, but they're letting these immigrants do whatever. My dad was a cop here for 30 years.
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My dad was on the border in the 1970s with the IRA shooting at him and he didn't even get a gun. Our cops aren't armed. But Carlson is just throwing this stuff out, being uneducated about it. And he says at the very end of the interview, McGregor says, oh, there's been a government kind of hit job on me. They're planning to bring me down. And what he's referring to is
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A civil trial, now not a criminal trial, a civil trial that Conor McGregor lost when he was brought to court for alleged rape and sexual assault. And the jury believed he's his accuser, a woman called a hairdresser called Nikita Hand. And Conor McGregor was forced to pay damages of a quarter of a million euro to her, plus compensation.
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costs in the Irish High Court, which are about one and a half million euro. Now, to you or me, that would be a huge sum of money. To Conor McGregor, that's nothing. And I have to say, for legal reasons, he is appealing it. But the reality is that's standing in the way of any political ambitions Conor McGregor has.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 182
And we just had here in the last year, we had a local election for local councils, a general election, a European parliamentary election. Any one of those, all he needed to do was put up 150 quid and he could have stood. He would be on the ballot. In fact, under Irish electoral law, he could have stood in every single constituency in the country and he didn't stand for election.