It started with the soy milk. We were about five months into the pandemic, in the middle of that strange summer of 2020, and a plumber was in the house fixing a broken pipe. He wasn’t wearing a mask and was spitting as he spoke, a terrible worry in those early pandemic days. To avoid the trajectory of his saliva, I went back to the kitchen to make us both a cup of tea, but remembering there was no cow’s milk in the house, I offered him a drop of soy milk instead.

“For God’s sake,” he stammered, eyeing my thin wrists, “you don’t drink soy milk, do you?”

I explained that I do indeed drink soy milk and have been for some time. “But you know it’s full of estrogen?” he replied, spraying a wave of potentially COVID-19-laden particles into the air. “You can’t drink that – it will make you soft!”

Young men, he told me unprompted, had been turned into soy boys because veganism was filling their bodies with female hormones. Of course, he didn’t fall for it, and after several months of a meat-only diet, he had never felt better. He felt sorry for me – I was young and didn’t have the critical thinking skills needed to combat all the nonsense “the media” had fed me about woke ideology, migration, and this “COVID thing,” which was really all just a ploy hatched by a shady elite to crash the global economy for nefarious but remarkably obscure reasons.

I had come of age in the second half of the 2010s, in an Ireland that had awakened from the strange fever dream of Catholic conservatism and was undergoing a process of rapid social liberalisation. Popular, youth-led movements had fought successfully to Equality of same-sex marriage And Abortion rights in a series of referendums held in 2015 and 2018 respectively, which created a widespread feeling among a certain group of college-educated youth that we were on the inevitable march towards progress while our contemporaries in Britain, Europe and America began to confront the scourge of the populist far right. We were, in hindsight, entirely complacent, and that shady plumber who fed me paranoid, QAnon-like conspiracy theories proved that.

He was the first member of the post-Covid Irish far-right I ever met, but it wasn’t long before I met more people like him on the streets of Dublin protesting against masks and vaccinations. They were a strange bunch, generally quite old, and soon their concerns began to change. They took on broader issues of social degradation across Ireland, which was forced to endure a severe austerity program after the 2008 financial crash from which it has never really recovered.

Ireland today is full of social problems, but among the most serious is the deep housing crisis, which Home ownership among adults under 40 drastically decrease, Rent shoot to uncontrollable heights and homelessness out of control. At the same time Immigration into the country The number of refugees now exceeds the number of people leaving, which has led people like the plumber to blame all the country’s ills, even though only a minority of the new arrivals are actually asylum seekers.

Facts rarely get in the way of a simple, racist narrative.

I am one of those who emigrated from Ireland, flying across the pond to London in 2021. It was clear upon my arrival that, just as in Ireland, the UK’s social fabric had been torn apart by years of austerity – and asylum seekers were similarly being scapegoated for it. The then ruling Conservative Party, in power since 2010, had correctly calculated that stoking anti-immigrant rhetoric would distract from its own profound mismanagement of the country. Using the most inhumane language it could muster, it committed to ending the migrant “crime”.invasion” from “Stopping the boats”, referring to the small ships that illegally smuggle groups of people across the English Channel from France.

In both Ireland and the UK, asylum seekers who make it through are systematically treated appallingly. Despite pledging to abolish the system, the Irish government continues to maintain an inhumane system that is described as Direct provisionin which asylum seekers are housed in overcrowded, completely inadequate accommodation centres run by private companies.

Then there are those who cannot even make it into the misery of direct provision and are forced to seek refuge in makeshift tent citieswhich the government has repeatedly evicted by force. It is one of the greatest disgrace of the country. In Britain, the Tory government resorted to callous plans such as the Asylum plan for Rwandawhich wanted to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. In both cases, Ireland and Britain fostered a climate of simmering anger that finally began to boil over in recent months under remarkably similar circumstances.

In November 2023, the situation in Ireland came to a head when three small children and a woman attacked and injured by a man with a knife in Dublin. In the English town of Stockport at the end of July this year a 17-year-old man stabbed and murdered three young girls, several others were injured. Both crimes, separated by months, were heinous and naturally left the communities in which they took place in a state of shock; the far right was quick to exploit the grief they provoked. Disinformation about the respective identities of the attackers spread online, and claims that they were migrants quickly spread. In reality, the attacker in Dublin was a naturalised Irish citizen originally from Algeria, while the attacker in Stockport According to reports born in Wales.

In Dublin, however, a protest against immigrants took place in the wake of the attack, but it quickly turned into a real turmoil in which police officers were attacked, fires were set and shops were looted. The resulting photos of the burning city center were shocking, but in reality this violence was just a particularly dramatic example of old and persistent right-wing extremist agitation. Since 2018 there have been repeated arson attacks against accommodation facilities intended to house asylum seekers; the number of such attacks has increased since the unrest in November.

Protests often took place outside these places, such as in the Dublin suburb of Coolock, where there were renewed riots and arson attacks. broken out last month. What is particularly worrying is that a group of people armed with pipes and knives a number of tents attacked on the street that housed migrants from Somalia and Palestine, a group already abandoned by a callous and ineffective Irish state. People were forced to abandon even their tents.

These attacks were followed by a series of nationwide anti-Muslim riots. Mosques were sprayed with petrolMuslim graves were desecrated. Makeshift Roadblocks were set up where mobs checked the ethnicity of drivers to ensure they were white. Amid the Islamophobic chants and violence, one sentence was particularly recognizable: directly borrowed by former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak drowned out the noise: “Stop the boats!”

The Tories clearly bear responsibility for the intense Islamophobia that currently grips Britain, but Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is by no means innocent in this story. Starmer has consistently conceded ground to the right on the immigration issue, going so far as to call Sunak a “most liberal prime minister we have ever had on immigration.” The party has since scrapped the Rwanda programme, but on the grounds that it was a “expensive toy” and not as moral outrage. All this is nothing about Starmer’s horrific reaction on the Israeli war against Gaza, in which he repeatedly signaled that he doesn’t care about the lives of Muslims.

The outbreak of far-right violence in the two countries I call home was terrifying but hardly surprising. The ruling elites of both countries have failed their people and scapegoated vulnerable communities. Both have allowed their societies to decay and paranoid anger to fester and spread.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that the extreme right is a minority in both countries. While protests have taken place in both Great Britain and in Ireland have shown, people will resist this scourge of fascism and racism. This attitude must be constantly encouraged; as the riots have shown, there are a relatively small number of racists who are prepared to use violence to impose their insane ethno-nationalist ideals. People must resist this.