The far-right in Ireland tend to not talk about imperialism or colonialism, definitely not in the same kind of contexts as the Nationalist Left do. Nationalism as a concept tends to be more associated with the left here where it’s more about establishing a 32-county Republic and not at all about the ethnicity of the population. “Who lives here, belongs here” is a common rallying cry on that side of the political spectrum.
By comparison the right here tends to concentrate on migrants and blame them for all the problems in the country. Like all the homeless Irish people are apparently because the state houses refugees - and not because there are more than 150,000 vacant homes in the country, many of which are kept off the market by the owners because the land is more valuable as an investment without having to maintain the property and artificially driving up rents and mortgages.
Skinhead fashion was back in style a few years ago, I saw them around town a lot back when I was doing regular street stalls to canvass for the pro-choice movement. I was tempted to ask them if they just liked the style or if they liked the politics as well, but if it was the latter then I was risking getting the shit beat out of me. And well, the fashion faded away pretty fast anyway.
There are anti-racist skinheads, though. They’re not all violent racists (often just… dudes who like to fight). In fact a lot of the violence in the punk/post-punk scenes came from anti-racist skinheads fighting racist skinheads… an example from the US:
And of course, the original skinheads weren’t racist, since they were interracial groups who loved ska and many came from the Caribbean (the above documentary gets a bit into the history of skinheads in general). It was the British National Front that injected racism into the movement in the late 70s…
Some friends of mine found out that one of the people on their label was an active Nazi. They deleted their work but it became apparent that there were quite a few out there. The Quietus ran an article on it and it was around then I read of European police warning the Gardaí. They ignored it of course and here we are.
Seems to be a recurring theme with the far right, doesn’t it? “Oh, it’s fine! Not like the far right ever hurt anyone! These are just some young white men experiencing economic anxiety! They’ll grow out of it!”
The person he’s replying is the tech, actually really just the gadget correspondent, in the.l biggest selling newspaper. I know I said I don’t read the Irish Times due to their anti trans bullshit and solidarity, but I do miss their tech correspondent Karlin Lillington. We don’t deserve her, she’s great, and Mastodon isn’t enough.
There is a reason the original article refers to the canons as coming from Northern Ireland and not from the UK. Please change it back to Northern Ireland in your blog post. I don’t want to explain why, i am tired of explaining these nuances.
