Politics of cultural despair shaping anti-immigrant protests

The sight of the Tricolour being waved at anti-immigrant protests in Ireland – like the recent one in Ballybrack, South Dublin, where up to 100 people blocked the streets amid rumours that 60 asylum seekers were to be housed in a former GP surgery – is reminiscent of what we have seen in countries where populism and polarisation have surged.

It is a matter which Fiona Hill, the former Harvard academic who served on the National Security Council in the US, considered in her recent book, There is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century.

More than anything, Hill’s book – and her personal story – is a hymn to the transformational power of education and an observation on what happens when this opportunity is absent or falls into neglect. Hill was born into a mining family in the north of England and came of age as that vibrant culture decayed into poverty and misery. The sense of dislocation that she witnessed in England in the 1980s, and the downward trajectory of whole swathes of her home region, shaped what she describes as the politics of cultural despair.

What Hill experienced in northern England was something that she recognised again when she moved to live in Moscow and in the US. Economic and demographic shifts were triggers for an anxiety that played on the fault lines of both societies, paving the way for a rise in extremism. She wrote, for example, about how the people who first voted for Donald Trump and then stormed the United States Capital Building on January 6th, 2021 were ones who believed their social status and economic prospects were being adversely impacted: “Their anxiety about the loss of their perceived racial and socioeconomic position had propelled them into an emergent populist political movement – a collective, desperate attempt to counter their change in circumstance.”

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Hill considered two further points: the first was the way in which Covid acted as an accelerant, not least by fuelling a sense of precarity. Secondly, the manner in which “grievances, resentments, anxieties, conspiracies, and groupthink all travel faster through the internet than efforts to counter them can travel through parliaments and policies”.

Modern insurrectionists seek to manipulate people through an outrageous capacity to invent, distort, lie, conceal and generally dissemble. This rise of virtual communities on the internet presents a huge challenge in respect of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. But to just cede the ground here is not an option.

In this instance, in Ireland, whatever the motivations of those who protest, the scale of the rejection of history is breathtaking. Irish anti-immigrant protests are reminders of the manner in which people can disregard the past without a thought.

Is it that protesters and agitators are ignorant of history, or that they simply choose to ignore it and consider it irrelevant? Or have they been fed an alternative history online?

Do we call this out for what it is or do we pretend that it’s not happening, or somehow seek to downplay it? Do we foreground the broad welcome received in Ireland and not worry about the relatively small number of protesters? Most of all, do we wish to make believe that there is no hinterland to the protesters?

[ Pessimism about future driving anti-immigrant sentiment, ESRI report finds ]

The context for any Irish response to migration should not be separated from the fact that no European country has seen such a share of its people leave as Ireland has over the past two centuries. Some 10 million Irish people have emigrated from this island during that period and more. Initially, this led to the expansion of vast and seemingly permanent Irish communities in cities in England and America. Most striking of all was New York, which had more than 250,000 Irish-born residents by 1850.

[ Scary tales of New York: life in the Irish slums ]

Irish emigrants were usually single men and women; the number of women going was broadly similar to the number of men. Further, in the 19th century they were usually unskilled labourers, servants or similar. And, in something that caused great pain to those who left and those who remained, they almost never returned home. Even if they did make it home, it was not a permanent return. The toast “Bás In Éirinn” (“May you die in Ireland”) carried a heavy meaning.

During the 20th century, there was an almost relentless exodus of Irish people from this island, even as it modernised. This exodus was heightened during decades such as the 1950s when more than 400,000 people emigrated and again in the 1980s. Most recently, in the wake of the financial crash, there was a net migration of some 143,000 Irish citizens between April 2009 and April 2015.

Over the centuries the profile of Irish emigration has obviously changed. The educational attainment of Irish emigrants in this new millennium is entirely different from that of those from the 19th century. Now there are many diverse reasons for going, and a wide spectrum of emigrant experiences once gone. For some, emigration is a lifestyle choice; others have essentially little or no choice but to leave.

[ ‘Fear is like paraffin’: How Ballymun became embroiled in angry anti-migrant protests last winter ]

Online agitators and propagandists – who frequently feature the Tricolour in their social media profiles – have no interest in any notion of nuance. Their history thrives in a cartoon version of the past that creates a pretend world of ‘them’ and ‘us’. When it comes to migration, however, ‘they’ are ‘us’. Is it that protesters and agitators are ignorant of this history, or that they simply choose to ignore it and consider it irrelevant? Or have they been fed an alternative history online?

Either way, the ubiquity of internet-based media has radically redrawn the manner in which information is shared – and our education system is not able for it. Multi-platform information literacy and critical thinking must be made a much more central component in the national curriculum from primary school onwards. It will be difficult to do this, but the alternative is grisly.

Paul Rouse is a professor in the UCD School of History