Why are people protesting against asylum seekers in Ireland?

A large number of protests against asylum seekers and migrants have been held in the Republic of Ireland since 2022. Drawing on new research, Barry Cannon and Shane Murphy write the protests reflect a combination of state neglect, far-right mobilisation on social media and structural racism.

Asylum seeker and migrant related protests in the Republic of Ireland have become, on average, almost daily occurrences since the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Some of these protests have been violent, including arson attacks on sites believed, often incorrectly, to be earmarked for asylum seeker accommodation.

In November 2023, riots took place in central Dublin, ostensibly due to the stabbings of three young children outside a city centre kindergarten, falsely attributed on social media to an asylum seeker. In July this year, there were violent disturbances in the Dublin suburb of Coolock, outside a disused factory earmarked for conversion into an asylum seeker accommodation centre. All of this suggests that this issue is not going away, especially as Ireland is due to have a general election before March 2025.

Many of these protests, however, have also been peaceful. With the support of Maynooth University Social Science Institute (MUSSI), we sought to find out in a recent study what these protesters were actually demanding. Over an inclusive research period from November 2022 to June 2023, we identified 144 media articles on asylum related protests, covering fourteen such events in urban and rural locations throughout the country. We extracted, analysed and categorised thousands of direct quotes from protesters on their reasons for attending such protests.

Explaining the protests

The main reasons people cited for protesting against asylum seeker accommodation were, in descending order, security concerns, resource and service scarcity, lack of government consultation with local communities, and concern about the suitability of identified accommodation sites.

Additionally, we found that while many of these protesters sought to distance themselves from the far right, some simultaneously engaged with xenophobic and racist far-right tropes, such as the so-called “great replacement” theory (which holds that the native population is deliberately being replaced by an elite-led immigration policy), and a fear of male “unvetted”, “military age” asylum seekers coming into their community.

From this research, we suggest that four key contexts have coincided to contribute to the current crisis in Ireland, which may have relevance for other states: state failures in social investment; inadequate asylum reception policy; a tech fuelled crisis in public communication strategies; and a long simmering context of unattended structural racism.

State investment failures

First, despite Ireland being the poster child for economic recovery after the 2008 financial crash, social investment has never recovered from the severe austerity imposed in its wake, at the behest of the “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

One of the first areas to be cut was the Irish state’s “key institutional mechanisms for addressing racism”, leaving communities to fend for themselves in that regard. More broadly, as the NGO Social Justice Ireland points out, despite bumper economic and tax income growth, “Ireland’s infrastructure and social services have been inadequate in areas such as housing, public transport and healthcare for years” and poverty levels, income inequality, homelessness and prices remain stubbornly high.

This points to an important distributional issue at the heart of migration and asylum policy, whereby immigration tends to benefit elites far more than the less well off. Yet it is overwhelmingly urban working class and rural communities in Ireland that host asylum seeker accommodation, the very areas where such underfunding has been felt most sharply. Ireland’s housing crisis, in particular, has been weaponised by the far right to whip up hysteria on the issue.

An inadequate asylum reception policy

Second, the Republic of Ireland’s asylum reception policy has been recognised as inadequate and underfunded for years, relying on an ad hoc Direct Provision (DP) system whereby the state pays private providers to house asylum seekers in hotels and guest houses.

A state report from 2020 condemned this system as not fit for purpose, a conclusion borne out by its inability to cater for the huge increase of asylum seekers and refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere. The result has been thousands of mostly male asylum seekers sleeping on the streets and exposed to racist attacks, despite courts finding this in breach of the state’s international obligations.

Social media

Third, the role of tech and social media companies in enabling far-right agitators to propagate misinformation on asylum seekers in a virulent manner has been pointed to repeatedly by many commentators, and Ireland is no different in this respect. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has catalogued an explosion of far-right misinformation across all digital platforms in Ireland on asylum seekers and immigration, as well as targeting LGBTQI+ and other vulnerable groups.

It has also facilitated cross-national learning and support for Irish far-right agitators, especially from the United States and the United Kingdom. While Ireland has comparatively high levels of trust in media, trust is lowest among those who primarily receive their news via social media, namely younger people with lower levels of education and income, a cohort who also show pronounced distrust of government .

It is interesting to note, however, that literature we reviewed on anti-asylum seeker protest from the pre-social media age, in Ireland and Britain shows evidence of some far-right involvement, including repetition of similar far-right tropes. This suggests that although social media can supercharge the circulation of far-right myths, any meaningful intervention will need to go beyond increased surveillance and censorship of online spaces.

Complex debates

Finally, as pointed out above, we found that protesters could counter-intuitively repeat far-right tropes while simultaneously expressing concern for asylum seekers’ welfare. We suggest that this is demonstrative not of ideological inconsistency, but rather the complex nature of these debates.

Many protesters are seeking positive material change for their communities while also remaining vulnerable to deeply embedded racist imaginings of the “other”, even in a supposedly post-colonial, anti-imperialist and increasingly diverse country such as Ireland. This is easily exploited by a small number of far-right agitators who are eager to set the parameters of this debate in racist terms, but it is also increasingly leaned into by Irish mainstream political actors within the context of an ever more securitised approach to asylum by the EU.

The way forward

Our research suggests that the key to combatting far right expansion is tackling state investment failures in community service and asylum reception infrastructure, to ensure that the benefits and costs of immigration are distributed in a more equitable and sustainable manner, particularly to better off areas.

Additionally, more needs to be done to ensure already woefully neglected communities receive sufficient state resources to facilitate greater community integration of asylum seekers and migrants, allowing these communities to view immigration as beneficial, hence helping to tackle embedded racism. It is this issue of distribution which needs to be at the centre of public debate on immigration, rather than the toxic, polarising and racist frames favoured by the far right and, increasingly, some “mainstream” politicians.

For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in the Irish Journal of Sociology

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Derick P. Hudson / Shutterstock.com