An Ireland so inclusive the Irish aren’t welcome
By Kurt Mahlburg, Mercator.
Tensions have been running hot in Ireland after a 49-year-old Algerian-Irish man stabbed five people, three of them children, sending a woman and a young child to hospital in a serious condition.
On all sides, reactions to the attack have been immediate and intense.
Crowds of rioters angry at some of the highest levels of immigration in Europe took to the streets of Dublin, torching vehicles and looting stores. Hundreds of police officers were dispatched and the night ended with dozens of arrests.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar responded by announcing plans to fast-track draconian new “hate speech” laws that would go as far as criminalising the saving of memes on a smartphone.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk reacted to Varadkar by scoffing that the country’s leader “hates the Irish people”, while the prestige press on both sides of the Atlantic hyperventilated about a far-right apocalypse.
Even former UFC champion Conor McGregor found himself in the middle of the fight. The night before the stabbings, in response to a report that non-nationals could vote in local elections, McGregor tweeted, “Ireland, we are at war”—words the media later framed as incitement to violence that drove the riots.
However, one of the most bizarre stories to emerge out of the chaos was the news that a graffiti tag reading “Irish Lives Matter” is being treated as a “hate incident” by authorities in west Belfast.
According to the BBC, the message accompanied signage erected in the city stating that the community “will no longer accept the re-housing of illegal immigrants”. Police have asked anyone with information about the origins of either message to come forward.
Even as the words “Irish Lives Matter” are deemed hateful, Irish authorities have greeted with yawns a Limerick councillor’s call for rioters to be “shot in the head”. The councillor behind the remarks, Azad Talukder, is a naturalised Irish citizen originally from Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
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