In a puff piece carried by the Irish Times last September, Niamh McDonald of the Brechtian-monikered Hope and Courage Collective was asked why they had reinvented themselves out of the much missed Far Right Observatory (FRO). Something to do with ‘community’, by all accounts.
It may have been to substitute the tired and cliched former title with something that might be more attractive to the soft centre and less associated with the group’s far-left origins. Ms McDonald stood as a candidate for a far left group in 2019, securing a paltry vote that hardly entitles her to be monitoring anyone.
As Gript previously reported, the FRO – despite being regularly quoted by the mainstream as a source for information on the latest bogeyman of the For Roysh – maintained a remarkably low profile. It listed no members, and no contact details, and published very little on its website prior to falling into disuse – despite the group having been given €112,500 from the Dormant Accounts Fund. So what were they doing?
Hope and Courage appears to wish to become more of a public player so we thought it right to assist them in reaching out by letting you know who their directors are. It was incorporated on January 5th this year and will not have to provide any accounts until July, at which date we will be letting you know where they get their money from.
The “collective” has been provided with a base at 13 Lower Dorset Street, which is run by the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI.) Their constitution, as required under the Company Act (2014) was signed by the five new directors, and witnessed by Luke O’Brien of Schull, County Cork, on December 12 last. The main objects of the company are said to be the advancement of “equality, democracy and freedoms” and so on.
All very laudable, I am sure, but as Gript pointed out in November, Hope and Courage used an Oireachtas briefing in October – organised by Dublin Green Party TD Patrick Costello and attended by representatives of most of the political groupings in Leinster House – as an opportunity to specifically name certain groups and one individual as extremists who were part of “the weaponizing of freedom of information and the weaponizing of GDPR.”
Significantly, Niamh McDonald who addressed the gathering complained that her group no longer has the ability to basically censor content on Twitter/X. This presumably was something that the Far Right Observatory had been at prior to the takeover by the dreaded Elon.
One of the individuals named in front of TDs and Senators was Jana Lunden of the Natural Women’s Council who McDonald pointedly said was known to have contact with self same TDs and Senators, but who, she claimed, was also working with “violent far right-wing thugs that we’ve seen burning down direct provision centres”.
Jana Lunden told Gript that she had passed this on to her solicitor.. Ms Lunden told Gript that she has been subjected to a concerted pattern of harassment over her public activities. Some of this harassment has taken place since the Oireachtas briefing and Ms Lunden claims that it can be traced to identified activists on the far-left.
The five directors of Hope and Courage are Rachael Doyle, Orla O’Connor, Siobhan O’Donoghue, Bulelani Mfaco, and Edel McGinley.
O’Donoghue is also the company secretary. Some or all of the names will be known to people familiar with the NGO migrancy and racism scene.
O’Donoghue founded Uplift in 2014 and it is also based at 13 Lower Dorset Street. In its financial report for 2021, Uplift stated that it provided “organisational, financial and strategic support and is the primary legal entity for FRO.” According to Hope and Courage, as reported by Gript in November, it is now “managed by Uplift.”
That Uplift link is also confirmed by the directorship of Edel McGinley, who was a director of Uplift from 2014 to 2021. She is currently on sabbatical leave from her position as a director with MRCI.
Orla O’Connor is the director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland. She was also a leading member of Together for Yes which campaigned for the legalisation of abortion on demand.
Rachel Doyle is the national coordinator for Community Work Ireland, another almost totally taxpayer- funded entity that appears to feel the need to maintain a sort of Woke Special Branch to monitor its potential critics. The fifth director is Bulelani Mfaco who is also on the board of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) and of the Movement for Asylum Seekers in Ireland (MASI.)
Mfaco told Gay Community News last year that he was involved in political protests in South Africa and that it had been his experience as a “’Black, gay, Mpondo man” living in Apartheid South Africa that led him to a life of activism.”
As the Michael Douglas character said to the Vietnam Vet panhandler in the movie Falling Down, “What were you, a drummer boy?”
I say this, partly tongue in cheek, because Apartheid ended in 1993, the year that President de Klerk and Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Prize for Peace – for bringing an end to apartheid. According to Mfaco’s registration as a company director he was born in December 1985. He was seven years old when Apartheid was still in place. He was hardly an anti-Apartheid activist, never mind being a gay man during that dreadful period.
Mfaco has also cited various reasons why he ought to have been granted asylum in Ireland but none of them were accepted and his application was rejected in July 2019. Nonetheless, he is still here lecturing the people of the state about their racism and what not. He was granted permission to stay here, for some reason, in February 2023.
To conclude, the question needs to be posed as to why a government TD thought it right that this group ought to be facilitated to slur a member of the public within the precincts of Leinster House. And the most important question of all – why should the taxpayer be expected to largely foot the bill for yet another left-wing NGO?