This time of year is always tense. Although Ireland is currently enjoying an exceedingly less rare heatwave, there is no relaxation possible in the city. Friends are in Donegal, scattered around the northwestern coast, jumping into waves and lazily sitting on grey sand. The beating and deafening sounds of parade drums are left long behind, even further behind than the invisible border. 27 years after the Good Friday Agreement, there is still a broadly accepted need for an alternative to the celebrations of the “Twelfth”, the Twelfth of July, preceded by Eleventh Night bonfires. Events labeled as “family-friendly” and “inclusive” pale in comparison to displays of sectarian hatred that have become the norm. Nothing generates more than an eyeroll. Everyone knows the date is rolling in; everyone makes alternative arrangements and plans for the bank holiday; no one really digs at why it is that we feel the need to leave instead of just ignoring the fracas and chaos outside.
Moygashel was unknown to most people before this week. A quiet small town located in the outskirts of Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, it boasts of a tight-knit community that, to the last census in 2021, was 93% Protestant. This is nothing extraordinary. A blog post from March this year quotes a young woman working in a local Spar: “It’s a great wee community and the locals absolutely support us very well.” Her coworker adds, “the people are nice and the community’s strong”. It becomes impossible to think that, just four months ago, the most known element about Moygashel is what a wonderful place it is to live in. Yet, the displays for the local bonfire suggests something else entirely. This is never said, because we all want to think the best of our neighbours. We want to acknowledge dissenting voices and validate them, which is also a crucial element of resisting the imagery that those same locals have erected a tall bonfire - made of stacked wood pellets - with a revolting, revulsing, and blood-curdling effigy on top: faceless, unnamed, people in a small inflatable orange raft, also known as a dinghy. Those figures, clearly meant to impersonate persons seeking asylum, were meant to be burnt on Eleventh Night.
The old Ireland is dying and the new Ireland is yet to be born. This is, truly, the time of monsters.
On hate
We are often told to be relatively quiet and to turn a blind eye because those displays are part of the culture. Culture is defined as a set of norms and beliefs that bind a particular community together; and those same norms and beliefs form the core of this community’s interaction with itself and with others. Consequently, if those bonfires - some of which routinely also burn election posters of political opponents, public figures, and symbols of other religions and countries - continue to express violence and hate to the point of burning effigies down, then it follows that this culture is one that expresses hate. Exclusionary culture is rampant, worldwide. We often understand our communities in isolation, and especially in Ireland, metaphorically and literally insular. We protect our customs as a form of self-protection against a manufactured threat. Ironically, William of Orange, the Dutch king celebrated during this particular holiday, arrived on the shores of Island on a boat.
The hatred of persons seeking to immigrate to Ireland isn’t the proprietary hold of loyalist communities in the North. For well over a year, incitement to violence, hate-filled riots and physical assaults on the basis of ethnicities have ramped up all over the country. Immigration solicitors became targets. Posters popped up in particular neighbourhoods threatening letting agencies and landlords over who they select as tenants. Factions close to the far-right and their collusion with loyalist paramilitaries have ensured that those threats have a realistic probability of being carried out, fostering a climate of division and fear that is necessary for population control. Because this is the symbol of those tall, threatening, and boisterous bonfires: to signal that violence is around the corner, that the targets have been identified, and that the rule of law and order was effectively replaced by mob rule.
Our culture, on the receiving end of such animalistic displays of brutality - that should never appear in any civilised society - is to ignore it. We feel the stomach churning nausea bubble up inside, cold sweat dripping down our backs, our hands are clammed up by the conclusion the Moygashel boat leads us to: that our empathy wells are dry, the social contract has been ripped apart, our humanity reduced to a shriveled peace agreement left behind on a wet pavement. We believed we had made strides to return human life to the sanctity it deserves, but we are now faced with the fact we have failed. We have seen and experienced abject violence, and we continue to do so. Victimhood has simply changed sides. Political struggles have been replaced by apocalyptic prophecies announced by bloated, ignorant yet loud far-right voices dominating our landscape. Our valid opposition to unregulated capitalism and ubiquitous slumlordism on this island has been co-opted in the name of a race war too many are now identifying as a way out.
All along, my generation - and the Peace Babies’ - were told that precisely because we have known war, torture, internment, bloodshed, retaliation, and disappearances, we were depositories of a collective history from which we had morphed from victims to witnesses. Never again, we told ourselves, on our shores or any other we could influence. There is no need to rehash the data, the cold statistics, the bare truth that the north of Ireland does not have immigration problem, asylum-related or otherwise. There is no getting through with the reality of our institutional stalemate, that affects every part of our society in the same negative way. A mental health crisis, a houselessness crisis, a femicide crisis: we are jumping from one horror to another with the flexibility and resignation of a lab rat. All statements of condemnation are preceded with a degree of acceptability: no one wishes to undermine the right to…. this is not to go after other displays of… there is no desire to override the event of… washing down the horror with tepid, flat water will never provide us with the rich and thick wine we were promised.
Noticing and naming things has a certain power. They no longer can thrive in shadow, and must meet the word as everything else. Since the 2024 riots, grassroots organisation End Deportations Belfast has been advocating and fighting for a new Independent Paramilitary Assessment, the latest of which was conducted over ten years ago on the heels of a Paramilitary Strategy that has never fully been implemented. Ignoring that armed factions of proscribed organisations are patrolling our streets and rebranding them as community leaders brought us to that critical mass: we must name it, without which we can never fully reject it. Hate is taught, not bred. Hate is nurtured, not starved. Hate is normalised, not excommunicated. In our haste and hurry to be more inclusive than inclusion itself would have required, we opened the gates to the unspeakable. We have let the good people of Moygashel burn down the symbol of our collective, 1951-framed humanity. We have watched, mouths agape but with no sound - so as not to bother our neighbours - those mannequins be engulfed in flames, not the flames of war they were fleeing, but the flames of the pitchfork-wielding villagers with a blurred moral vision.
On hope
In moments like those, Marc Dones - a dear friend - describes the systems change element that the far-right has mastered. The Farage hordes have taken a population that kept to itself, felt strong kinship with the north of England in their class struggles, and are struggling in the face of a recession, strong inflation, governmental instability and fear for a future that feels all but certain - then twisted it into an ideology focused on the exclusion of the margins: women, trans people, and ethnic minorities, especially those already suffering the brunt of the world: asylum seekers. That a population so deprived of the most basic rights holds so much power over those who claim the legacy of what was once the world’s largest empire is baffling. Dones explains in unequivocal terms, speaking of US politics, that at the core of it reigns white supremacy:
So there's this moment where a lot of white folks have an opportunity. To make a decision about whether or not the country is going to really embrace this melting pot idea, this idea that, we can do better and be better by coming together or to stick with what they've got: which is racialized caste bigotry.
How the Republican Party did this was through the work of a number of people, but one of them was someone named Lee Atwater who understood that in order to get white Southern voters to vote against their own interest, they needed to be voting against something else that made them uncomfortable. And what made them uncomfortable was the idea of equality.
Atwater knew that if he mobilized white racism against the interest of poor whites in having a strong labor movement, that the racism and the racial animus. Would win out because ultimately what he was asking white people to do was to vote for staying comfortable. Vote for the world that you know. People are actually pretty likely to choose the thing that they know.
Dones is obviously correct in their assessment and historical perspective. Nothing rallies better, or more efficiently, than hate. The enemy has never arrived by small boat since Scottish settlers. Landlordism, an eugenics-adjacent view of disability rights, a deepening mental health crisis that led to an opioid crisis, and another wave of emigration forced by a rising and spiraling cost of living crisis has outpriced and outsold any young person on this island, as well as their aspirations. The only way to manipulate and twist this despair and disenfranchisement was to direct the anger and resentment to an unknown class of people: immigrants. Ireland has never been a country of immigration; we never came, we always left. The settlers had ensured a state of permanent siege, engineered a genocide, and enshrined Ireland’s debt to England and the United States. The concept of a race war became inevitable after the country was similarly exposed to the xenophobia and, particularly, islamophobia that swept over Europe in two waves: 9/11, and the 2015 attacks in Paris. Suddenly, there was a cause for which to mobilise. There was a demographic to demonise, after sectarianism was relegated to the backroom of pubs. Most importantly, there was a respectability in this hatred. It was demonstrable through counter-terrorism policy and it was understood by centrist parties who knew that as long as immigration was blamed for a tax deficit, no one would come for their billionaires setting up roots in Dublin in exchange for draconian tax relief.
It’s so simple it is infuriating.
In addition to this, the North needs to look at paramilitarism square in the eye. The presence of armed forces in the country helps solidify unacceptable alliances, coerce local communities into carrying out their bidding, and hold everyone hostage under the barrel of a gun. We have deluded ourselves into thinking this would eventually go away by itself for much too long. When the police denies what has been otherwise proven, in order to minimise the threat to social stability, we all fall into an alternative reality in which violence is too far away to merit any concern. We act as if sporadic reports of racist attacks, which hardly match the actual picture, were isolated incidents by lone wolves. We pretend that there isn’t rampant sexual abuse for the purposes of maintaining territorial control through terror, and we eyeroll at the idea that this could ever change. Elected officials are routinely harassed in the course of their mandate, but we elevate our democracy as clean and unimpended.
I am ashamed and disgusted by the displays of this year’s bonfires. It is a constant source of embarrassment to be contacted by people abroad asking what has happened, or whether we have returned to the times when such threats were commonplace. The shame, however, shouldn’t be ours. We can’t continue to pacify and low-ball the extreme racist threat that is snowballing all around us. More broadly, it’s time we break up with our love affair with violence. It’s time we genuinely step away from this generational impulse to find an enemy, wherever they may be and whenever they may appear. Ireland, as a nation-state, has made strides during its UN Security Council presidency. It is a well-regarded and constant contributor to UN peacekeeping forces. It is a political force often underrated within the European Union. Ireland - and its own North - isn’t a place apart, behind fortresses of clay, unable to move past itself, incapacitated by blindness to a future. Our reluctance to engage in the chaotic and messy affair that is reluctant change is holding us back and exposing already marginalised populations to discriminations and recriminations that, to be fair, at their root, may not even be directed at them specifically, so much as they needed to find a target, any target. There will always be one. There will always be someone or something in the crosshairs. It will always be those without the capacity to organise, mobilise, and advise. It will always be those who have been left even further behind by this status quo the far-right pretends it hates. But this status quo has tacitly endorsed the white supremacist threat. It has considered it part of its own, an unfortunate byproduct of Ireland’s growing pains, as opposed to the unwanted child of its political dispossession.
When this Ireland dies, it is up to us to decide what else she will become.