There is a beast slouching towards central Dublin, and the authorities aren’t quite sure how to deal with it. In recent weeks, hundreds of Irish tricolours have been affixed to lampposts across the Irish capital, mirroring the vigilante patriotism of England’s “Operation Raise the Colours”.
What began in the tattered suburbs of Ballyfermot, Coolock and Finglas is now pressing into the more bohemian quarters of the inner city. “We object to the unauthorised erection of these decorations,” read one letter from residents. “They dishonour the Flag by flouting official protocol [and] are in breach of Dublin City Council’s rules on the decoration of lighting poles.”
The Irish state, like its British counterpart, is allergic to such tub-thumping displays, yet is struggling to find a way to counter them that doesn’t invite more of the same. The optics of taking the flags down or leaving them hanging are both, for nationalists, a “win-win”, noted one Dublin councillor.
To complicate matters further, there is no law in Ireland against flying the national flag, and council workers have so far been reluctant to remove them. According to Dublin City Council, the issue requires “a considered response from all stakeholders… informed by a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation”. That will include meetings in the coming weeks with senior Gardaí to plan their next steps.
The parallel campaigns in England and Ireland suggest their respective nationalist movements may be observing each other closely. At any rate, that was the verdict of Darragh Moriarty, a councillor for Dublin South. “I think it’s rich to hear of Irish patriots borrowing from their English cousins on this issue,” he said. “We absolutely have to stamp this out.” That barb drew a laugh from Malachy Steenson, a veteran republican and councillor for Dublin City. “The English are copying us!” he told me.
Both may be right. There has in recent years been extensive — often unwitting — cross-pollination between English and Irish nationalist movements. While Ireland’s flag-raising operation began last year, predating England’s, its arrival in Dublin’s inner city just as St George’s flags proliferated across the Irish Sea is surely no coincidence.
The rank-and-file of both movements distrust conventional news outlets, sensing they downplay harsh truths about immigration, and rely instead on social media for unfiltered information. It is on these online channels that citizen journalists catalogue — and sometimes embellish — the twin evils of government incompetence and migrant misbehaviour, and this communal space creates a shared consciousness between like-minded protesters in England and Ireland.
Michael McCarthy, an Irish nationalist-leaning vlogger who’s gained nearly a million followers across different platforms in the past year, says he sees no mystery in this convergence, “because there’s that shared anger at the establishment”. His monologues about the negative consequences of mass immigration in Europe now reach an audience of 35 million accounts each month, most of them in Britain, Ireland and the US. “Even your Raise Colours movement has a knock-on effect and comes over to Ireland,” he said. “We like the look of it in the UK and we’re like, ‘let’s do that too.’”
In contrast to the football-lad aesthetic of groups such as the English Defence League, protests against immigration in Ireland were early adopters of the “mammies at the front” technique, making them harder for the establishment to dismiss as far-Right louts. That has since travelled back across the water, where England’s “Pink Ladies” now frame porous borders as less of a nativist concern than a women’s safety issue.
Other tactics may have been piloted in Ireland, too. In contrast to the rudderless marches that paraded through central London, Irish demonstrations were locally coordinated and frequently targeted migrant housing facilities directly. This pressured the government into backing off plans to house migrants in places like Coolock and Leitrim, where they met with concerted resistance. The results are hard to dispute: over the past seven months, 12 international protection accommodation (IPAS) centres have been closed down — triple the number during the same period last year.
English protestors have attempted something similar, with less luck. Epping saw rolling protests which forced the council to apply for an injunction against housing migrants there, though it was overturned last week.
Clearly, though, the Overton window is shifting. The loosening of online content moderation that followed Donald Trump’s election victory last year has expanded the scope of what is acceptable to say publicly faster than at any time in living memory. As a result, a series of official fictions about the unalloyed benefits of mass immigration have, one after another, been punctured.
The problems this has caused in both England and Ireland are often so similar that each new controversy in one country can compound the outrage — and resolve — of activists in the other. That feedback loop is beginning to show itself in the flags now flying overhead.