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IN THE LAST six months, far right protests against asylum seekers have become more frequent, with greater numbers attending and have featured increasingly extreme rhetoric.
These activities have, particularly in the last year, started to present a significant challenge for the gardaí who are policing them, as the number of protests in Dublin alone has risen dramatically in the first month of this year compared to last.
The participants in these rallies have included members of already established far right groups, local residents, and what anti-racism demonstrators call “outside agitators” who recruit fellow protestors via social media.
These agitators are often involved in organising and promoting rallies outside of buildings housing asylum seekers through their social media and Telegram accounts, and several stand to make money from their involvement.
Ciarán O’Connor from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said that far right activists have long been at the forefront of using new technologies to reach their audience, and monetising their content.
“When it comes to crowdfunding platforms, content creator platforms, and streaming platforms with inbuilt monetisation tools – like YouTube’s super chat feature – all of these features have long been used and abused by a broad range of figures.
“Most recently, the various people who are now at the forefront of the current wave of anti-asylum seeker mobilisation in Ireland are finding new ways to monetise their involvement,” O’ Connor stated.
The researcher has previously studied how different online platforms have been used by extremists in the US, and he says Ireland is now seeing similar tactics being deployed, although not generating the same levels of profit at present.
The money at play is currently very small in Ireland – but O’Connor says the American experience shows how larger revenues can be garnered through livestreamed content.
On Wednesday night, during a protest that saw hundreds gathered to protest in Finglas and eventually surrounded the garda station, Philip Dwyer, a self-styled ‘citizen journalist’ who regularly live-streams these events, swapped his usual role behind the camera and took the mic to make a speech.
In his speech, he told the crowd that he was speaking out against “the complete destruction of our society as we know it”, and stated that he wants to see the State “stop the free accommodation, fly them back to wherever the hell they came from”, in reference to migrants.
However, he also touted his Telegram account and his YouTube channel, promising that he is “highlighting the madness in this country” on both platforms.
Dwyer stands to profit from both his YouTube account – which has over 12,000 followers – and his Telegram chat community, which has over 2,000 members. He also links a PayPal account under all of his livestreams.
The Dublin man also makes money from his YouTube livestreams through the platform’s ‘superchat’ feature – which allows viewers to have their comments pinned to the top of the live chat feed under the video for a fee.
The 91-minute livestream Dwyer posted from Tallaght this week – which has over 23,000 views – saw followers donate €197, £20 and five US dollars.
While monetised YouTube livestreams of protests make up one avenue for profit, another comes from Dwyer’s Subscribestar account, where he offers “exclusive digital content” in return for a monthly fee.
There are different subscription fees on Dwyer’s page, ranging from $1 to $50 – it is not clear how many subscribers he has on the platform, but he regularly reposts it to his Telegram account, where he also informs people of future anti-asylum seeker protests.
When Dwyer gave his speech in Finglas he urged the protestors to “remain peaceful”, warning “they want you to react badly, don’t fall into their trap”.
Another man with his face partially covered speaking at the event carried a different message.
“Burn them out of it. There is no point standing here outside of the garda station, you have to go to where these cunts are staying and burn them out if it,” he yelled into the microphone.
“Great to see the people of Finglas rising,” Dwyer tweeted after the protest.
The Tallaght man ran in the national election of 2020 for the National Party in Dublin South West. At the time he stated that he was a Property Manager in the area.
His political message centred around “promoting Irish heritage and culture”.
During his livestream at the Finglas protest, he seemed confident in the reach and influence of the social media platform he has built and profited from.
He encouraged a local man called Leon, who said he’d organised the event, to come on camera, assuring him that Leo Varadkar would be watching.
“We are the frightened people of Finglas,” Leon said. “They are getting shoved in everywhere and they are unvetted,” he added, stating that the protests he is involved in are always “peaceful”.
Dwyer told him that Irish people aren’t violent, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t defend ourselves”.
Like other right-wing influencers, Dwyer regularly shares reports of alleged incidents involving migrants, or the persecution of protestors, often without any evidence.
During his livestream on Wednesday, Dwyer said he’d been informed that Gardaí had “got violent” with protesters attempting to blockade the entrance of a construction site in Macroom where modular homes are being built.
On Thursday, he told his Telegram subscribers that construction workers at the site had “assaulted” a man and woman who were there to protest. One commenter said that they would have knocked one of the workers out, while another suggested going to protest at the homes of the people who owned the construction company.
A video attached to the post showed a man and a woman running up behind a lorry being backed up at the site, yelling “get your hands off me”, “get the law” and “get the photograph lads”, although no one appeared to attack anyone in the footage and no assault complaint has been made to gardaí.
The man filming the incident said “hit me” to one of the construction workers repeatedly, while the worker replied “why would I bother?”.
Gardaí confirmed that they “have attended ongoing protests in the Macroom area” and that “local policing arrangements were put in place to ensure the safety of those present and minimal disruption to other members of the public”.
They are not investigating any assault against protesters at the site. Dwyer has not returned requests from The Journal for comment.
Derek Blighe is a Cork-based far right social media personality who also bills himself as a ‘citizen journalist’.
His following is even bigger than Dwyer’s, as he has over 4,300 Telegram subscribers, and thousands more followers on other social media platforms.
He leads a group called Ireland First, which describes itself as a nationalist party, but has not previously been registered as a formal political party. However, just on Friday, the registrar of political parties in Ireland proposed “to approve the application for registration in the Register of Political Parties of ‘Ireland First’, having its headquarters at Irishtown, Tullaghan, Mullingar, Westmeath, to contest Dáil and Local Elections”.
Blighe travels up and down the country to places where asylum seekers are living, claiming that Ireland is “under a sustained assault” from “unvettable fake refugees”.
He refers to direct provision centres as “plantations”, and “people trafficking centres”, and often alleges that the asylum seeker population in Ireland are disproportionately responsible for rape and sexual assault incidents.
He has led and attended protests in Fermoy, Dublin, Kerry and Wicklow, and he recently turned up at the protests in Lismore, county Waterford.
Blighe has also found a way to monetise these endeavours. On 21 January, he wrote to his Telegram group, “Things are getting hairy out there, we need to upgrade security as our houses and families are now being threatened.
We also need decent film and sound equipment as phones aren’t cutting it long term. Please consider making a small donation to help us to do this work for Ireland.
Blighe linked a PayPal account to the post, as well as his Givesendgo fundraising page, where he has already raised over €4,000.
Aside from telling followers that he needs security and is not safe, he also repeatedly tells them that they are not safe due to the threat he believes asylum seekers pose.
Encouraging people to protest outside of a school in Drimnagh earlier this month on the Mourne Road, which was temporarily used to house asylum seekers while it was closed over the Christmas holidays, Blighe said “Get down to the school tonight, you could have some very dangerous people inside the building”.
He further claimed that school children would be sharing the building with migrants and were therefore at risk of harm. The Department of Integration clarified that this was not the case.
Blighe is also adept at networking with influencers in other spaces. He has previously asked his followers to donate to other people, including Irish content creator Dave Cullen – a man who has 201,000 subscribers on his YouTube account. Cullen makes videos about TV and film on a new YouTube channel, after he was kicked off the platform previously for violating its rules – but he also runs a BitChute channel where he posts videos with titles like ‘Mass Immigration and the deliberate destruction of our nations’.
Cullen is not involved in organising protests, but he evidently shares an audience with Blighe and they advertise each other’s work. Blighe has posted links to Cullen’s PayPal, a site where people can buy mugs from him, and a site where they can donate to him through cryptocurrency, while Cullen has praised Blighe’s “journalism”.
Cullen speaks extensively about ‘the great replacement’, which is an ethno-nationalist theory which claims that an ‘indigenous’ European population is being replaced by non-European immigrants. In one of the videos in which Cullen discusses this theory, he commends the ‘investigative journalism’ of Blighe, Dwyer, and Stephen Kerr of The Irish Inquiry, and claims that they are showing “what is happening” in centres for asylum seekers in Ireland.
Cullen goes on to say that he believes that “our countries are being planted” and that wars are being used as an excuse to “flood” Ireland with refugees. He also states that the birth rate in Ireland is below the “replacement rate”, and that feminism has destroyed the family unit by encouraging women to go into the workplace in “their most fertile years”.
Blighe has been asked by The Journal for comment.
Speaking again about the difference in scale between activities in Ireland and the US, Ciarán O’Connor of the ISD said, “I have seen livestream videos in the US make up to $10,000, and the main way they do that is through the superchat feature.
2) There are more than a few comments, like these ones, advocating for the use of petrol/diesel, i.e. using fire & violence, to deal with asylum seekers. Rhetoric is becoming more hostile, here's evidence.
— Ciarán O'Connor (@ciaranoconnor) January 31, 2023
YT channel owners keep about 70% of these amounts, YT keeps about 30%. pic.twitter.com/0fZWSwT8gn
“In a recent livestream video from outside Citywest in Dublin, I saw people paying to pin comments that said “petrol’ and “diesel” – and what they are suggesting is that is how the protestors should ‘deal’ with the asylum seekers inside. That is highly worrying,” O’Connor said.
Creators keep 70% of the money made through the superchat feature, while YouTube retains a 30% cut.
O’Connor stated that many of the comments by followers of these videos actually violate the platform’s terms of use.
“Anyone is free to use social media platforms, and anyone is free to monetise their content. But they aren’t free to incite violence and hatred, and in doing so violate a platform’s terms of use.”
O’Connor said that another worrying aspect of how these platforms are being utilised is how extremists from one country can fund the work of extremists in others. “These systems are enabling that kind of activity.”
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“Whopping”? Have they missed a few zeros off the end?
Next year there will be no jobs announced at the event. Lisbon will be smiling though
320 in one day is not bad.
By 2018?…………that’s stretching it a bit for the FG election manifesto.
A good dollop for electioneering too I’m sure?
The IDA must think that Ireland as a country that it in dublin, cork and galway city. Nowhere else gets a look in. Only IDA estate that a falling into disrepair. They might as well just rename the Dublin Development Agency.
Kev, it’s hard to attract tech staff outside Dublin. They just don’t have an interest. If there lucky the may get low wage manufacturers to move outside Dublin.
And its going to get worse. All development money for infrastructure going to Dublin. Rest of Country left to rot.
Great news, since the government came to power 125,000 new jobs have been created at a rate of 1300 per week. Today adds to that. The government is doing a splendid job securing the recovery.
You could stay in your mountain top cottage, moan and wait for Silicon Valley to come to you. However opportunity is already 5000 miles closer thanks to the work of the IDA, perhaps you might consider some flexibility on your part?
Kev, my thoughts exactly. This government has abandoned manufacturing entirely. A real mistake. The most successful economies (like germany) have strong manufacturing and de-centralization. This is where FG fails the litmus test for economic growth. Ie. It cant all be IT and Dublin etc.
Unions killed manufacturing, not government
KevJ, the IDA and Govt don’t decide where tech jobs go. The tech companies do. The alternative to Dublin is another EU capital or large hub. That’s the way of the world and has been for a long time. Scale and concentration is what it’s about as well as providing the right environment for their staff who are easily poached if you think that the IDA can coerce tech companies to set up where they don’t want and there there are no other tech companies God bless your innocence. Cork has scale in pharmaceuticals. Dublin in tech. That’s the way these industries work. You move to these companies not the other way around.
Finally in relation to comments elsewhere, the Govt can’t conjure up manufacturing industries. They have tried. That’s why we have foreign investment but that investment has been a boon for the development of Irish companies and management skills. Criticising Govts for not having a magic wand is simply lazy thinking. Move to where the jobs are. This is what is happening all over the industrial world. Or did you think Ireland was unique?
The government don’t dictate these things, the market does. They create the economic conditions to help businesses but you can’t force global companies to setup a manufacturing base in Longford.
@Dane Tyghe – How many jobs have been lost in that same period?
Boon indeed. Nice wordage John; I doff my cap sir..
@Dane Tyghe:- You are such a fraud Dane, a bit like the party you defend with such fervour here day in day out. You try to be pleasant when posting under your own name but with your alternative profiles in the same thread you post snide remarks. A touch schizoid to be honest, it is almost as if you resent everyone else for not loving Enda the way you do. Plus you still have a few signatories to go before you get through the full list.
@ Conor
Don’t know why I bother answering your question, but none.
The net increase in employment in the lifetime of this government is 125,000.
70,000 more people are in employment now than 18 months ago.
http://www.cso.ie/multiquicktables/quickTables.aspx?id=qnq37
Meanwhile greed, traffic and wifi gridlock halts the web summit.
The Minister for gobs will promise the sun moon and the stars. Yes we believe him because he says so.
What will happen to the Irish tech sector if/when the EU come for our corporate tax rate? They certainly won’t hang around for our weather. We need to invest in infrastructure now while the going is good…..
The Tech sector will, ironically, stay for our weather. Our cool, cloudy climate, in fact is ideal for data centres, where most of the power costs are not on keeping the servers and storage running, but on the cooling systems keeping them from overheating.
There have been many high profile articles in major IT publications pointing this out, playing on the pun “Cloudy Computing”
Yeah right Alan, the weather only economically makes a difference for data centres. None of the jobs announced today are “Irish” weather dependent. However they are dependent on transport and internet infrastructure.
There are about twenty jobs per hundred acres of data centres.
Horse manure Spammer.
Pure drivel from you.
1) Traffic in Ballsbridge for the last three days has been flowing perfectly. I should know, I live here.
2) The EU has absolutely no say on out Corporate Tax rate. If they had any, and I mean any, influence on this, we would have been forced to raise this a long time ago.
3) Websummit, by their own admission, organised the Wifi this year. It is their fault alone that it is patchy.
The only point you are remotely correct on is greed – but it is Websummit’s greed that is taking them to Lisbon and nothing else.
Good evening Barry,
I’ll answer in bullet points:
1) The founder of the web summit specifically mentioned traffic and lack traffic calming measures as a problem this week;
2) The EU are currently looking at ways of harmonising corporate tax. One option is for multinationals to pay tax where the sales are made. (I’m quite an expert in this because I brought this up during the first Lisbon Treaty debate ;-);
3) the wifi did not work last year – at a WEB summit!
Anything else you’d like to discuss?
Happy to discuss this Spammer!
Firstly, did you see what €20 bought you for lunch at the #WebScammit?
But to reply to your points
1) The founder of Websummit, Paddy Cosgrave, highlighted potential traffic issues in a morning Ireland interview BEFORE the summit. He’s since been proven to be talking nonsense.. As I said earlier, I live here. The traffic plan the Gardai have in place is excellent and working perfectly.
2) I work in tax. It is an absolute fallacy to day that the EU are working at harmonising tax rates. That is a fiction. Neither BEPS nor CCCTB would give any power to the EU over our CT rate. The OECD are looking at trying to establish a framework for agreed reporting mechanisms but they will not include enforcing rates in this.
So your comment above that “the EU coming for our corporate tax rate” is completely inaccurate. It is a flat out mistruth that they could ever do so.
3) The Wifi last year was provided by the RDS, not the Gov, and was the cheapest on offer to Websummit – who gleefully accepted the cheap option. It failed.
This year, as they themselves have advertised,the wifi is being run by Websummit. If it fails , or is patchy as it has been all week, it is the fault of Websumit and Websummit alone.
The other points i’d like to discuss are –
A) Paddy Cosgrave described the €700,000 he received in Gov grants as “hush money”.
Since he clearly can’t keep his mouth shut – can the Irish people have this back please?
B) €1,245 for a standard ticket, but the hotels are the ones gouging?
C) How has he managed without a Garda Escort this week, which he had demanded? Was he ok? Was the Garda Escort he demanded REALLY needed or was it just the ego of a jumped up new millionaire?
1) It’s. nice that you didn’t notice much traffic the other day but that did not effect the web summit’s founder decision. He (the decision maker) claimed traffic was an issue. Furthermore Dublin has some of the highest traffic congestion is Western Europe.
2) The EU are currently holding a public consultation on CCCTB. This could have a huge adverse affect on the corporation tax collected in Ireland. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/commission-asks-public-for-views-on-ccctb-proposals-1.2384378 . If that doesn’t solve the EU’s Irish tax problem they’ll keep coming until they solve the problem.
3) The wifi did not work last year. That was a joke, full stop!
@Dane
Hopefully FG will send a positive message to investors,by not putting a known dissident republican into our senate….what you think ?
Great news the begrudgers can go a shite.
I shouldnt need to move to Dublin to get a tech job.Shall we all move to and annexe the rest of the country as not needed. What’s the point of the government paying for some of the cost of laying fibre all over the country if the tech companies only want to go to Dublin. The IDA has abandoned the west in terms of jobs. You can’t force tech companies to come to the west but you can make it easier for them not to go by making the west doesn’t have the buildings , office space or technology to give it a chance of securing some jobs.
When they hear the RNU are in Dublin now,they probably will go elsewhere.
Web Summit rocks
Ireland is the jobs machine of Europe at the moment.
Ireland, population 4 million, created net 60,000 jobs last year.
Germany, population 80 million, created net 300,000 jobs last year.
If you do the math, you can see that Ireland is created jobs at 4 times the rate of Germany when adjusting for population, and Germany are supposed to be a “success”.
Perhaps we should leave the eurozone and join the dollarzone?
We’re doing grand in the eurozone as it is so. Who would bail us out next time if we pegged our new currency to the dollar?
How many layoffs have there been in the last five years .. Loads !
We are led to believe it’s only new jobs but it’s not …
The same companies announcing IT jobs are making layoffs / retrenchments at the same time
” free publicity ”
Bluffers !
Why Dublin? Why not somewhere else in the country to create jobs and revitalize the dying towns elsewhere
Ruth – why don’t you set up a company and create jobs in your local town then? Stop looking for “daddy” government to give you goodies.
These companies are not here to save your town. Better Dublin than London or Amsterdam.
Ah they’ll be best mates again now
Biggest fear is the PESTLE model and the Euro?
https://www.rt.com/shows/sophieco/320457-eu-currency-economy-crises/
2 things I’d love to know, how many Irish people will be employed and how much corporate tax will they get away with
Even if they employ all foreigners, those foreigners will move here and buy goods from irish stores, want services from Irish companies, pay income taxes here and make investments here.
Great!
Ohh wait …..
It’s jam tomorrow!
Sigh….!
*tightens belt.
These jobs were announced at the Web summit at press conference. That doesn’t mean that the Web summit had anything to do with the jobs being created …
GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY KIDS!!!
have your say