They came out, in the end, in their tens of thousands.
The Irish “anti-immigration movement”, to use the Irish Times’ framing, is a disparate and strange beast, a creature with many limbs and several heads, all of them competing for control over the direction of the body.
If you want to find extremism and folly in the as-yet-deformed limbs, then it is there and you can easily spot it – for example the enormous poster that unsurprisingly made every newspaper, which depicted Conor McGregor in beatific saintly pose with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as the two nationalist angels on his shoulders. If you’d tried to design something to fit the prejudices of Irish media photo editors, you couldn’t have done better than that.
But to focus on the light sprinkling of unserious carnival acts throughout the enormous crowd is to ignore the fundamental point that it was an enormous crowd, far exceeding the expectations of even the organisers, and that the vast bulk of people in it were there simply because they have had enough.
This is the thing about young political movements of this nature: There may be no agreement on what they are for, but much like the anti-water-charges movement of the early 2010s, there is universal agreement on what they are against. So, even the quixotic moments, such as when old Worker’s Party warhorse Malachy Steenson takes to the stage – as he did on Saturday – to announce that “we are building a worker’s revolutionary movement to represent the working class” are somewhat irrelevant.
It doesn’t matter much that many in the crowd would have entirely zero interest in a worker’s revolutionary movement of any colour or description. They didn’t come to “build a movement”. They came to oppose one.
To focus, as the media will, on the limbs and the heads of this protest – all pulling in different directions, all trying to capitalise on public discontent by making their own cause the centrepiece – is to ignore the body. And the body is large and growing.
It is growing because of something that the Irish public in their hundreds of thousands recognise to be a simple fact: That immigration into Ireland has been far too high, for far too long, and now is posing a series of enormous economic and cultural challenges. It is growing because the majority of Irish people want immigration to be sharply limited – if not entirely paused – and because outside of Aontu and Independent Ireland there are no mainstream political parties willing to heed this message.
It is growing not because of “a sense of unfairness”, but because the unfairness is real, not imagined, and it is everywhere.
The media, for example, likes to separate “housing” and “immigration” as two distinct issues when conducting opinion polls of the public. And they will therefore performatively come to the dishonest conclusion that “housing is a more important issue to the public than immigration is”. The simple problem is that anyone with a functioning brain, as well as functioning eyes and ears, can see that immigration and housing are not the different issues, but the same issue.
We are told for example that we need 50,000 new homes per year just to keep up with population growth, but in 2024, per the CSO, we had population growth of 98,700 people of which 79,300 was the result of net inward migration. More than four out of five of all the additional people in the state to the end of April 2024 were here as a result of migration. We need all the new homes because of immigration, not because of any other population driver.
Then there is the other point, which is the reason that Saturday’s protest was a sea of tricolours barely seen since the heady days of Italia ’90. That point is that for many of the people in attendance, immigration is an issue of identity as well as economics.
The nature of protest movements is that the loudest voices tend to dominate them, and thus questions of identity are often reduced to “Ireland for the Irish”, or other trite four-word slogans like “remigration for the nation”. But in reality, this too is a basic question of fairness, not simple race or ethnicity.
For whom and for what reason does an Irish person pay his or her taxes? The entire point of the state, and the entire legitimacy of its demands on the income of Irish people, is so that we can look after each other. My wife and I, with no children, pay our taxes to fund the child benefit of Irish families with children. In turn and in time, those children will grow up and pay their taxes to fund our retirement and care in our dotage. The entire system is based on the idea that you put in what you can, and you take out what you need.
Yet for a generation now, Irish people have increasingly been asked to fund the welfare (by which I do not only mean literal social welfare) of people who are not part of our national social compact, and who did not contribute. This was perhaps most memorably highlighted by the plain words of a heartbroken boyfriend, who lamented that his girlfriend’s murderer had come here and lived for a decade on the state’s generosity, never having contributed himself.
And then there are the existential questions: Why has this state laboured for years to protect the Irish language and Gaeltacht communities – at extensive cost – only to decide latterly that Gaeltacht communities should be home to hundreds if not thousands of people who neither speak the language nor understand the culture?
Almost the entire history of this island – as taught in Irish schools – is about that very national struggle to maintain our identity in the face of alleged foreign encroachment upon it. This is the very great irony of the moment: The Irish state represents itself as the heirs to an oft-exaggerated millennium-long struggle against our English neighbours for Irishness, while simultaneously now arguing that Irishness itself no longer matters and that you are an extremist for wishing to preserve it.
The public have had enough.
That does not mean, sadly for some of those who desire to present themselves as the heads or limbs of the body of people who marched on Saturday, that Irish people are ready to embrace a worker’s revolutionary movement, or that they are ready to leave the European Union or plaster Dublin with iconography of Vladimir Putin.
But it does mean that they want substantial and urgent change. And if nobody else offers it, then in time, a growing number of them will simply choose one of the disparate heads and limbs, and follow it where it takes them.
The Irish establishment have four years until the next General Election, when their power might reasonably be threatened once more. If the situation has not improved by then, they may well find that the strange beast that marched on Saturday has evolved into something much more sleek, agile, and threatening to them than it presently is.