It Could Happen Here - The Irish Far Right/Neo-Nazi Movement

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Robert sits down with Irish author Padraig O Ruairc to discuss the growth of Ireland's far right anti-immigrant movement since COVID, and what can be done to stop it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is normally focused on the United States because that's where we all live. However, we do like to cover the rest of the world and the ongoing struggle against the global far right movement. And today we're going to talk about a place that we don't cover often on this show, Ireland. And it's not because Ireland doesn't have a problem with the far-right,

because as our guest today is going to talk to us about, it most certainly does. And so I would like to welcome to the program a great guy, Padraig O'Rourke, author of Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and the Far Right in Ireland. Thank you so much for being on the show. No problem. Delighted to be here. Thanks very much, Robert.

Yeah. You know, there's this attitude and I think as you noted in some notes you said along, there's a degree to which it's true that Ireland has some resistance to the far right that has led to maybe it growing slower or taking a little longer to get off the ground to the far right that has led to maybe it growing slower or taking a little longer to get off the ground to the same extent that it has in the UK or the US as a result of kind of the history of Irish republicanism. But that's not comprehensively true across the island and that that's certainly has not stopped it from having some pretty significant problems, which we're going to talk about

today. 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. 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 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've seen in Britain and Germany and France in the nineties and because you know why the conflict was going on in the north of Ireland's 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 and it was all pictures of, you know, yes, there are a lot 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, you do, of course, get like on the opposite side of that and 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 UDA, the Ulster Defense Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF, 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 than in the north of Ireland. 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 they're taking to the streets. And to what do you you credit that? I mean, it seems like there's a mix of things. First off, you suddenly do have people immigrating into Ireland from elsewhere in the world in significant numbers for, you know, the first time in quite a

while, and then on the other hand, it sounds like there's also the kind of, as we see everywhere in the world, the conscious exporting of far right figures and ideas into the country. 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 have Irish people in Australia and Canada and England all over the continent. So in the early 2010s, we start like there had always been a trickle of migration and people coming back and forward like we had some Vietnamese refugees here. We had, you know, historically we had Russian Jews coming here and so on, escaping pilgrims in Tsarist Russia.

But really, the first time 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, 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 any time these groups tried to organize or take to the streets, they were challenged and they were run off.

But 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 kilometers from your home. That's one and a quarter miles for you Americans. And basically you could go to the store, but other than that, you couldn't, you know, you couldn't travel very far.

And of course, everyone was locked at home with their 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 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. On the Irish left and the anti-fascist side, we kind of dropped the ball

because we were following the health care advice and the cops were quite happy to ignore the far right mobilizing on the streets. But there were striking workers like Debenhams and Cleary's who had been striking before Covid struck and the cops were going up and moving these trade unions on saying, you know, you're breaking the pandemic. So it wasn't the least evenly. And, you know, suddenly for the first time during the pandemic, we were starting to see groups of three, four hundred far right in Dublin, which doesn't sound like much. 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.

Yeah and that's such a, I think, an important point. The degree to which, because this is a global issue, the degree to which everyone else attempting to abide by public safety measures during COVID-19 strengthened the far right because they were out in the streets. This kind of organizing equivalent of getting to steal a march on the enemy. It makes sense to me that it was, because in the US that was interrupted at least by the George Floyd uprisings. But in Ireland, you know, it seems like there was a much more significant period of time

where these folks were essentially acting and organizing unopposed and the police were when they chose to act at all, acting against folks on the opposite side of things who were organizing during COVID. Yeah. And it was like 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 nearly November, 2023, when they had this rally called. Um, I think it was called to the doll or maybe slightly earlier than that in September 2023. The doll is the Gaelic word for our parliament.

And basically 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 her 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. 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, you know, 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. 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 been 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, 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.

Cote Yeah. And, you know, so I'm kind of thinking here, this is part of why you've started to see, you know, guys like, we started this conversation before we began recording, talk about Tucker Carlson coming over to talk to Conor McGregor, who's becoming an increasingly large part of this. And I wonder if it's maybe these different kind of international folks in the international movement sort of sniffing that, you know, they're hoping the cancer has metastasized, so to speak. I mean, is that kind of what you how you see it? 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 stuff about the Calergy plan stuff about the great replacement and and so on I mean a hundred years ago 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 we had a party called the Irish People's Party and some of our campaigners were really fundamentalist, Latin mass, set of accountants, 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 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 and perfectly happy to give my own 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 and it was really crazy stuff and at that stage again you did get anti anti fascist organizing what you kind of get is figures like connor mcgregor amplified by, you know, Tucker Carlson coming over interviewing him or Donald Trump, of course, inviting him to the to the White House. I mean, the prime minister of Ireland, as we'd say in Gaelic, the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, he was 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 populous

figures, and McGregor has kind of started, he's become God-pilled and he started rambling on about, 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 and he, you know, and and and Elon Musk and others, he says he's going to run for president. We have a presidential election coming up here in six months. Did you watch the interview, Robert? No, no, I haven't yet.

I caught some clips of it on social media. Yeah. But I haven't gotten to sit through the whole thing. It's it's wild. There's absolutely no resemblance. Like what Connor puts across bears no resemblance to what's actually happening in Ireland. Like he starts ranting about how the police are so corrupt. Elm into that's true, but he starts talking about how the traffic corps, the road cops who give you like speeding tickets and stuff.

They're the most violent and repressive and all this kind of stuff. And it just so happens that Connor McGregor has a string of speeding violations in his sports cars. And then Tucker Carlson ships 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. 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. Yeah.

But Carlson is just throwing this stuff out, being uneducated about it. 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 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 accused her, 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 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 he is appealing it. But the reality is that standing in the way of any political ambitions, Conor McGregor has. And we just had here in the last six or last year, we had a local election for like local councils, Last year we had a local election for like 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. And now he's complaining that he's being debarred from the presidential race. Please he's not it's just it's an exceptionally difficult. I like to get on you can't just dump up the money in america and become your third party candidate or writing candidate whatever that doesn't work here you need the support of a large number of democratically elected politicians to get there. 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? Yeah, we'll get into that more in a second. I do want to throw the ads here really quickly,

and then we'll continue to talk about Connor for a moment. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

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will be hosting a podcast called IMO. What have been your personal journeys with therapy? We need to be coached throughout our lives. My mom wanted us to be independent children and she would always tell me, stop worrying about your sister. Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear?

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A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So you say he wants to be the Irish answer to Tommy Robinson, which is such a, like aim higher, man. Like that, it's odd to me. Like I had kind of been worried

because we've had so many cases of guys in the United States who start out as these absolute jokes on the far right. And then you just see them pick up more and more attention over time. And, and that was kind of my worry with Connor, but you're saying you're kind of concerned more that he's going to continue to be like an organizing presence on the far right, rather than someone who has much of a chance of picking up actual like political office.

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 ego and showboating and KFAB and so on. I mean, it's interesting. In his interview with Tucker Carlson, he was giving out that the minister of education, you know, isn't a teacher, they're unqualified for the job. And the Irish government's minister for health isn't a doctor.

And it's like, well, what qualifies you to be President Connor? You're a former plumber turned MMA fighter, you know? Yeah, getting hit in the face. Yeah. And we've we've had 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, 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 beavered, I would imagine, cocaine fever trip tweets saying as president of Ireland, I have the power to. 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. It's not that complex. If you know the basics of the law, he's never going to get into ballot, but he wants to present that he's being denied the opportunity to stand. And unfortunately, what we have around the country is an increasingly violent anti-immigrant street movement that whenever these, what we call

the mere I-PASS, International Protection Applicants Services, these I-PASS or refugee centers, centers basically when these are picked as places of accommodation by the government while these people's applications for refugee status are they have to stay somewhere while these are being examined. You tend to get large protests in towns villages cities all over Ireland sometimes he's turned quite violent sometimes there's 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. And I think 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. It's like, and you have more money than you could ever spend on political posters and flyers and adverts, you know? So it almost sounds like this is like a retirement plan for him, right? Like he's he's he's clearly passed his prime in terms of the getting hit in the face thing for money.

And now he's sort of moving on to like grifting off of these far right events and probably traveling just ahead of a series of riots. You know, like that's that seems like what's in his future. 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 were to damage and, you know, trash 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. Yeah. 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. But I think really, that's what it's about. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the way far-right violence has looked in Ireland, like when these protests have really kicked off, because it seems like there's been this kind of fairly significant acceleration in the last three or four years in terms of particularly arson attacks. And one thing that I was kind of struck by in your notes was the degree to which like no one's been arrested for any of these yet. 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 for any of them. So it's when usually former hotels that have been closed down with years are that the government moves in or some local person moves in to renovate them and use them as one of these centers. 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.

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 some of these anti-immigrant protesters have actually burnt down homeless accommodation designed for Irish homeless people in the mistake and belief that it was going to be used for refugees. Yeah, so that's their contribution to the housing prices. You've also seen stuff like attacks on politicians' homes.

Sometimes it's just pickets. Sometimes it's graffiti. In the case of Martin Kenny, who's an opposition TD, he'd be from Shin Fane. Part of 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 in Leitrim. And in fairness to him, he spoke out against it and 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 his his car in the driveway was petrol bombed, was fire bombed. And they came back a few months later and did it again. And he was forced to move house. So arson attacks and politicians homes is something we haven't seen here since the original fascists were around in the thirties as well. And this violence again, like I said, there hasn't been a single arrest. And I give you a perfect example.

The title for the book Burned Them Out is from an event that happened in February. Twenty twenty three, a guy stood up in front of a guard, a police station here in Finglas, which would be a big suburb of Dublin. happened in February 2023, 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 the police station said, there is no point standing here outside a Garda station.

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 Gardi, had he been threatening that violence against a private business or a politician, I have no doubt he would have been arrested straight away. But this masked guy threatening violence in Arsene 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. 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. And it was so clear that, you know, Republicans, Irish Republicans have been on the streets opposing these people and their marches for years. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. Like the, the actual organizing of the anti-fascist movement in Ireland, how is

it kind of responded to the, the explosion and in some cases, a literal explosion in far right violence on the street. Like, are you seeing it kind of reach like new heights or does it kind of seem like it's unprepared for the moment that we're hitting? Because like, I mean, in the United States, it's kind of hard to tell because things have changed so much since 2020, right? Like a lot of the fascist violence that we're seeing is now explicitly from the state. And so there's just not a lot of on the ground. There's not the same kind of on the ground response to it that you were

saying when it was groups like the proud boys and I'm wondering kind of how things have changed since 2018 in that regard in Ireland. Um, I suppose like if you think back as far as 2015, uh, Tommy Robinson, a friend of the pod attempted to organize he's anti-Islamic, he's Islamophobic, uh, Pagida movement tried to launch a branch of it in Dublin. And 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 their LGBT activists. And they couldn't even get to have their event.

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. 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. When you chose to fight in the military, you chose to serve

the Queen of England. 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 I'm thinking of in Cork City, when the library was being attacked, 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 and you know you had a crowd of maybe a hundred far right and people on the opposite sides 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. And eventually the far right said, well, we can't even get near the library to have our protest anymore. And they 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. And one thing you'll always see is, you know, when anti-fascists are mobilizing 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 plow and the stars. But often we don't carry our national flag, the tricolour as much. And of course, the far right love fetishizing flags and they have the green, white and orange Irish tricolour everywhere. Often, of course, these people are so ignorant, they fly the wrong

way around and it's the orange, white and green. So it's like Vive le Cote d'Ivoire, it's the Ivory Coast flag if you have it the wrong way. 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 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. 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 on the anti-fascist side don't surrender any of that to them. 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. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to continue this discussion and then close things out.

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Yeah, no, 52. 52. 52. I adopted my son as a single mom because I kept thinking, oh, I'm going to meet the guy, I'm going to meet the guy, I'm going to meet the guy. I finally was like, what am I waiting for? And I did it. And I'm just so glad that I did.

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A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So yeah, I kind of wanted to end this by looking into a little like, what are you kind of looking for in the future? Like in the, in the kind of the, the next year or two in, in Ireland, like what are you, what are you expecting? What are you, what are you worried to see?

Like, yeah. What do you kind of see cut moving forward here? I think what's tending to happen now is genius out of the bottle and far right messages spreading. And you had this big far right rally of, you know, ten thousand five to ten thousand people at its maximum that came down O'Connell Street in Dublin, the main streets in the capital city. It's not huge by political standards, but it is worrying. I think we're going to see that grow. And I think on the left, sometimes, and particularly in the trade union movement, we have this idea that all this is a flash in the pan and we'll organize 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. 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 center 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. They are, of course, being given new policing powers by the government to deal with violent protests that are being issued with things like, you know, new nonlethal technologies, you know, pepper spray and extra equipment

and body cameras that they wouldn't have had before. 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. 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 Fuhrer. That never really works. But what I was going to say a minute ago is that that 10,000 people, if there were that

money on the street, not everyone in that is is far right. 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 just sitting there and there were a few guys didn't know they were around chatting. Obviously we were in the gym.

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. 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. 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 in the nerd, right. And I think if we have a work colleague or a brother or somebody who 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. Talk them round to it.

But look, I suppose the thing is, there is hope. And everywhere these people have organized, there have been anti-fascists there to meet them. I think we need to get better at planning that in a national scale. Of course, on the left, you always get this factionalism and infighting and 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.

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 four 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. We can't worry this is a threat because when the Nazis stood for election the first time, I think they only got 2% to the vote as well. And look how that turned out. Well, yeah.

And as we've seen in the U S like what starts as this tiny, tiny number of freaks and weirdos can wind up being a mass movement if it's not cauterized. Right. Like that's, and that's, that's kind of the challenge in front of Irish anti-fascists right now is, is ensuring that that cauterization happens. Absolutely. And 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, 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Do you want to have anything you want to plug here at the end of the episode? I mean, your book, obviously. Yeah. Well, obviously I'm not I'm not on ex Twitter, anything like that. I don't have a sub stack or anything. So just the main thing I want to plug is, is my book, Burned 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 in any to order via any bookshop. Obviously, if you are going to support a bookshop, support a small independent one, Roderick Barnes and Noble.

And if you are buying it online, obviously buy it from direct from the publishers. Bloomsbury. Don't buy it off Amazon if you can, because God knows Jeff Bezos has enough money. Yeah, it's certainly bloody. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, that's that's our episode everybody. Come back tomorrow when we'll have another one. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommates' toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, Connie Britton is here. I think you should encourage your friend to go ahead and not be holding out for any man to have her babies.

She could be waiting another 10 years before she finds the right guy. Connie didn't meet her right guy until you were what 50 Connie 52 52 I kept thinking. Oh, I'm gonna meet the guy. I'm gonna meet the guy. I'm gonna meet the guy I finally was like, what am I waiting for? And I did it and I'm just so glad that I did Listen to dear Chelsea on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I had a panic attack on a conference call. Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your wellbeing. Listen to the psychology of your twenties on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. for me to handle. I am Khloe Kardashian. Khloe Kardashian everybody. Khloe Kardashian. No one understands how it's, I'm not just a TV show. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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