Last week, Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee had her family home evacuated after authorities became aware of an anonymous bomb threat made against her residence, sparking a major Garda investigation.
While this issue is obviously incredibly serious and disturbing, police have not yet given any hint as to a possible suspect or what their motive may have been, saying: “An Garda Síochána does not comment on security details relating to individual State officials or Government ministers.”
Therefore, as of this moment, we simply have no idea who might be responsible for such a threat, or why they might have issued it.
However, this lack of publicly-available information has apparently not stopped some media figures and politicians, such as Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, from making baseless insinuations about an apparent “far-right” angle to the threat. As reported by Newstalk, Donnelly said that he found the bomb scare at McEntee’s home “unsettling”, adding:
Now, the implication here appears to be that the threat to McEntee’s home is a symptom of a broader trend of “far-right” extremism by right-wing agitators.
While it’s impossible to say with any certainty at this point what the motive for the bomb threat was or who was responsible, the last person who threatened to bomb McEntee did so via an anonymous call to the Samaritans charity – the exact same format as the most recent threats. As reported by the Irish Times:
This individual in question behind the previous threat had 40 previous convictions for rape, sexual assault, harassment, abduction of a child, false imprisonment, threats to kill, burglary and theft. In one incident, he was convicted of abducting a mother and her four-year-old son and raping the woman for hours, for which he received 19 years in prison.
So in other words, we’re talking about a violent career criminal, who was just convicted of making an anonymous call to the Samaritans charity threatening to bomb Helen McEntee’s house a month ago. And then, shortly after he’s convicted of engaging in that behaviour, another anonymous call to the Samaritans charity is made threatening to bomb Helen McEntee’s house again.
The individual in question has since “vehemently denied” any involvement in the latest bomb threat during an interview with the Irish Mirror this week.
So who is this individual who previously called in the hoax bomb threat on McEntee, then, and what is his political affiliation, if he has one? Is he a “far-right” extremist or right-wing agitator?
Well, in the anonymous bomb threat for which he was convicted, the message left with the Samaritans specifically referenced the Irish National Liberation Army, or INLA:
He further claimed to be formerly affiliated with the INLA during interviews with the Gardaí – as reported by the Irish Times:
He also claimed to have knowledge of what former INLA members outside of the prison were currently doing, as reported by the Sunday World.
Now, is he actually a former INLA member, or is he just saying that? It seems like a strange thing to lie to police about – falsely telling authorities that you’re an ex-member of an illegal organisation while they’re interrogating you about a suspected bomb threat doesn’t seem like something most people would do. The Sunday World describes him as “a man with paramilitary links” – but who knows?
Whether he was a member or not, the point is, the INLA are an explicitly Socialist dissident republican group, who could not conceivably be further from “far-right” – they’re literally on the opposite end of the political spectrum, hovering around Marxism.
In a 2010 statement, the group said their goal is to take “war to the heart” of the “capitalist apparatus in Ireland”, and that they see it as their “duty as revolutionaries” to persuade the working class to “embrace socialism”. So the fact that this individual claims to be aligned with them might give some clue as to his own perceived political affiliation.
Now, again: there is no way to know who is responsible for the latest bomb threat against McEntee – attempting to pin it on any individual or group at this stage would be nothing more than an unproven guess. But the idea that politicians and media figures would imply the totally unsubstantiated conclusion that this was carried out by rightwing lunatics is simply not supported by any of the publicly available information to date.
It’s at this point that it’s probably worth looking at the overall trends in alleged terror offences in Ireland over recent years, because we don’t look at these numbers often enough, and they are quite revealing.
Every year, Europol – the EU’s official law enforcement cooperation agency – releases an “EU Terrorism Situation & Trend Report”. This report does just what its name implies – it outlines terrorism arrests and trends by EU member states, broken down by category, so you can get a feel for what causes are driving the most terror offences across EU countries.
One of the terror categories frequently listed is “Ethno-Nationalist or Separatist” movements – although in the most recently available data, Europol explains that in an Irish context, this means Dissident Republican:
So what exactly is the ideology of said Dissident Republican groups? The report explains that these are “Socialists” who are affiliated with “Leftwing extremists” and “Marxists”:
As a slight aside, Europol also says there happens to be overlap with “environmental extremists”, which you never hear mentioned in the Irish media:
So how prevalent is the issue of these Socialist dissidents, exactly?
Well, when you go back over a decade or so of Europol terrorism reports, between 2012 and 2022, you find that around 81.1% of terrorism arrests in the Republic of Ireland involve “separatists” – i.e. far-left Dissident Republicans, as previously explained. Meanwhile 13.2% are jihadists, 3.8% are “not specified”, and a measly 1.9% are classified as “rightwing”.
Now, clearly, all extremism is appalling and unacceptable. But with Europol telling us that 81% of Irish terrorism arrests over the last decade or so were Leftwing Socialist dissidents, while just 1.9% were on the Right, it’s worth asking if our emphasis is in the wrong place.
It should go without saying that all violent radicalism needs to be cracked down on, regardless of ideology. But if people insist on making it a “Left vs. Right” thing, it just so happens that the data clearly demonstrates that Ireland has a much bigger Leftwing extremism problem than Rightwing one – that’s just a cold, hard, statistical fact. Yet we spend all of our time talking about one side, and almost no time talking about the other, for reasons which are best known to the powers-that-be.