The parallels between riots in the UK and Ireland are alarming (2024)

Last year, on the evening of 23 November, Dublin city was flooded with around 500 rioters. Buses and trams were torched, Gardaí assaulted, and shops looted. Only hours before, a man had attacked primary-school children with a knife on Parnell Square in Dublin’s Northside. Three children and two adults were severely injured.

Far-right agitators wasted little time in taking a call to arms on the encrypted messaging service Telegram. “Everyone bally [balaclava] up, tool up,” a man can be heard in a voice note. “Let’s show the f***ing media that we’re not a pushover. That no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country.”

The surface-level similarities with the recent Southport attack and subsequent riots in England are hard to ignore: an assault on young children followed by civil unrest, which quickly proved be an expression of antagonism to immigration writ large, rather than a response to the particular incident. After Southport, for example, much of the agitation has been directed at the Muslim community; that the suspect was born in Wales to Rwandan parents and has no known links to Islam did not prevent rioters from attacking the town’s mosque. In Ireland, the clashes were accompanied by signs declaring “Ireland is full”, no matter that the man charged was a naturalised citizen.

There is perfectly good reason to believe that the parallels run deeper than the mere chronology of events, too. The social contours are the same: an angry, nihilistic, white working class that feels alienated from the liberal elites and betrayed by globalisation, and are channelling their despair into hostility towards mass migration.

On both sides of the Irish Sea, a distressing incident led these underlying emotions to boil over. Ireland may consider itself immune to continent-wide trends (owing to its geography and self-image as a cosy liberaliser), but here, both England and Ireland are reflecting wider problems in western Europe.

Even more than England, Ireland has undergone precipitous demographic change in recent history: in the 12 months to April 2023, immigration reached a 16-year high; per capita, Ireland receives the most applications for asylum in Europe; in October 2023, it was reported that Ireland had taken in more Ukrainian refugees per capita than the UK. For a country whose national story has long been shaped by emigration, the shift to being a nation defined by immigration was bound to provoke disquiet. Combine that with a severe housing crisis and Ireland was a tinder box. In the year prior to the November riot, Dublin’s East Wall – a working-class area in the inner city – saw frequent but peaceful protests.

Dublin, thanks to its self-professed liberal sensibilities, has not historically been a site of rioting. But the November violence wasn’t an isolated event, a simple case of exorcising sudden, overwhelming feelings (that it happened on a dark and cold November night and not in the languid heat of the summer disproves that). Instead, it entirely changed the temperature of the country. Antagonism has settled in: asylum centres have been targeted with increased frequency, clashes with police have grown violent. In recent weeks, citizens from the Republic travelled to Belfast to join in with the unrest there. If Ireland really can help us divine the trajectory of England in the wake of Southport, this lingering disorder is most concerning.

Perhaps the major point of divergence with Britain lies in the UK’s political representation of the immigration scepticism. Despite the fluctuations in the profile of the Irish population, the establishment never facilitated a national conversation about immigration until this summer. The government’s apparent head-in-the-sand approach to mass migration led the country to trouble – allowing tension to foment on the streets as those in government buildings blithely insisted that Ireland remains the land of céad míle fáilte (a hundred thousand welcomes).

The national omertà on questioning mass immigration saw any critic of the relatively open-door policy branded a bigot. This was not the only contributing factor that drove the island to the precipice – but it certainly did not help.

Meanwhile in Britain rioters might not find their stance represented in parliament – partly because of first-past-the-post, partly because anti-immigration sentiments are mainly the preoccupation of a noisy minority. But in British politics, immigration has been part of the conversation for a long time: in Nigel Farage’s domination of the news cycle; in the fringes of the Brexit debate; in Conservative messaging. This didn’t prevent the eruption of violence after Southport, but it suggests that ensuing antagonism might not persist in the same way it has in Dublin.

For Ireland, the November riots have forced a realisation. The national mythology of the 2010s – which imagined the country as a place shielded by the worst impulses of European ethnic tension, a country defined by its friendly and liberal disposition – may not be maintained into the 2020s. The former taoiseach Enda Kenny reminded the world in 2017 that St Patrick himself was an immigrant, as though that was proof alone of Ireland’s infallibly tolerant disposition. Now the country looks to riots in England – and sees itself.

[See also: Labour cannot save Northern Ireland]

This article appears in the 14 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, England Undone