It was Mark Twain who famously said that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”, and that was before a time when gross distortions can not only circumvent the globe ten times in the blink of an eye, but can then become embedded in the public narrative as absolute fact with minimal chance of the truth emerging at all.
The establishment and their lackeys in the media like to point the blame for fake news at social media sites, in particular at X ever since Elon Musk decided that the dance with hobnail boots on free speech should desist. As so often is the case, they’d do well to examine the failure to remove the plank from one’s own eye.
Nowhere is this more evident than in regard to immigration, and to the endless gas lighting of communities who are still being forced to bear the brunt of this government’s dreadful, reckless policies which, as a Red C poll showed yet again yesterday, are strongly opposed by a huge majority of the Irish people and have been for years.
For more than a decade in the UK, anyone who pointed to the rape of thousands young girls – children in some cases – by grooming gangs of mostly Pakistani heritage, they were castigated as being “far-right”. The media weren’t interested. Deflection was the answer for more than a decade, and continued right up to this year, when Keir Starmer was, almost unbelievably, more focused on accusing MPs of “jumping on a bandwagon” and “amplifying what the far-right is saying” in relation to these sick, evil rapists.
Exactly the same strategy was used here by the political establishment with the full-throated support of the media – without whom none of this gas lighting would be possible. And this has always been most obvious in the tactic of deflection, and in the use of the bogeyman of the moment: the nebulous and ever-dangerous ‘far-right’,. to distract from the pressing issues at hand.
The term ‘far-right’ used to have a meaning – those who supported evil ideologies – but it was essentially expanded in recent times to apply to anyone who had opinions that might be inconvenient for the state. So the media painstakingly painted opposition to the ridiculously long Covid lockdowns as being ‘far-right’, while NGOs insisted that any questioning of the idea that there are two sexes was indicative of extremism. In 2023, then Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, couldn’t define ‘far-right’, but said traits included being “anti-government” and “anti-immigration”, though from the polls that’s about three-quarters of the country it seems.
This stick was used to beat communities around the country from East Wall to Inch, from Dundrum to Newtownmountkennedy. Sometimes the beating was literal: policy forced through at the point of a Garda baton, backed up by the liberal use of pepper-spray. There wasn’t a word from the lavishly-funded supposed protectors of civil liberties. The ‘fash’ deserved the beating they got, was the unspoken message, even though it was patently obvious that the supposed ‘far-right’ were mostly just upset local people who wanted to be listened to.
But it was as a tool of deflection that scaremongering about the ‘far-right’ really came into its own. When three small children and two of their carers were slashed in an unprecedented, horrifying attack on a school in Parnell Square, the next morning the headlines focused almost exclusively on the riots that followed and what to do about the supposed ‘far-right’ organisation of the disturbance.
As I wrote at the time, “the papers were full of angry headlines and vivid, stark, blown-up photos, but their focus had shifted, away from the stabbed children and onto the riots that followed”. The reporting, it seemed, had moved on from another photo, the haunting image of a pretty, pink Paw Patrol schoolbag lying on the ground next to paramedics who are working to save a child allegedly stabbed by a migrant.
Eventually, a year later, An Garda Síochana released 99 photos of some of those who were caught on camera during the Dublin riots. Many of those sought by the Gardaí seemed very unlikely to be part of any anti-immigration movement or protest. There was a fair amount of diversity. The evidence corresponded with what Gript reporters had seen on the ground the night of the riots.
In fairness to John Mooney of the Sunday Times, he pointed out that the photos showed “white, black and Asian rioters ‘answered a call for mayhem’” – and said that the CCTV revealed that “diverse ethnicities were involved in last year’s Dublin disorder, complicating the case against the far-right.”
Mooney also spoke to a retired garda, Tony Gallagher who said he had never believed the riot was “purely far-right”, but rather that it was, for some, “an excuse for blood sport and late-night entertainment, with no connection to left-wing or right-wing ideology”.
Did these revelations receive anything like the continuous media coverage around the threat of the ‘far-right’ after the riots? No, of course not. Lies can be a sin of omission too.
And so, when a ten-year old girl was allegedly seriously sexually assaulted by a migrant seeking asylum in Citywest in October, most of the media attention was on the anger and violence of a minority of protesters. Their analysis was taken up with by-now-customary review of social media posts, while the usual NGOs fretted about ‘far-right’ playbooks.
The locals of Saggart who did everything right – peacefully protested, held public meetings, wrote to TDs – in opposing a massive migrant centre in their small village, were horrified and scared that their worst nightmare had come true: a child had been sexually assaulted. But the media weren’t much interested in their concerns. The real issue here, they said again, wasn’t an alleged sickening sexual assault on a 10-year old child by an asylum seeker, but the ‘far-right’ orchestrating riots. Deflect, deflect, deflect.
This time, however, it didn’t take as long for the truth to out. From Ken Foy at the weekend in the Independent:
The violent disorder that broke out last month at Citywest and the Dublin riots two years ago were not primarily driven by far-right elements, according to a senior garda. Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Woods of the Special Detective Unit (SDU) has told the Irish Independent that simply attributing blame to the “far right” misses a much bigger picture.
“It was open to infiltration by the far right and there were individuals from the far right who were present and they raise tensions around these incidents, especially in the spreading of disinformation online which happened around both these incidents,” he continued.
However, he believes that the events in Citywest – just like the Dublin riots two years ago – “were reactive to a particular situation and not an organised protest”.
The particular situation, is of course, an alleged serious sexual assault on a child, just as two years ago it was the stabbing of children – and just as the dreadful murder of Ashling Murphy was a crime carried out by a migrant, and just as the beheading of two men in Sligo was not about homophobia as the media said, but Islamic extremism.
The deflection will, no doubt, continue. But the media and the establishment have succeeded in destroying the public’s trust in the institutions which are charged with informing and protecting the people. And they have no-one to blame for that but themselves.