Elaine Crory: The far-right are miles ahead of us - we need to fight back now

I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. We’ve all been lured into a false sense of security, maybe even superiority.

For decades, there was no serious or organised far right in Ireland. Instead of counting our lucky stars, we rested on our laurels and took it as a sign that this was to our collective credit.

Time passes, circumstances change, and now they are everywhere.

They’re harassing and threatening politicians with violence, and sometimes appearing in the courts as a result. They’re standing for election, albeit unsuccessfully so far.

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They’re appearing outside hotels repurposed as direct provision centres in the south or for asylum seekers in the north. They’re adjacent to a lot of suspicious fires.

They’re in working-class communities in Dublin and elsewhere, radicalising children. Last week, they were on the property of a government minister, while the Garda seemed to look on from a distance.

A key part of this radicalising rhetoric is to stoke fear, and another key part is to manipulate a sense of being hard done by.

The former sounds like complaints about “unvetted, military-aged males”, very often spoken by someone who themselves fits that description. They suggest, usually without saying it outright, that there’s something uniquely threatening about these particular men – in other words, weaponising racism.

The manipulation of working-class children has been obvious in a number of videos made of recent protests in Dublin. Children are smart, and children have an inbuilt sense of fairness. They will, as anyone who has had to teach children to share knows well, speak up when they feel hard done by.

The far right has been successful in some communities at encouraging these children, who live in a well-off country but feel left behind, to point their fingers at those with even less than them. It’s so typical it’s become a meme – a man with a mountain of cookies sits at a table with two men; one, a worker, who has one cookie, the other, a migrant, who has none. “Careful mate,” says the wealthy man to the worker, “that foreigner wants your cookie”.

So far, the powers that be in both jurisdictions have taken a hands-off approach, taking the position that these people are too fringe to be a serious threat to anyone. That may have been true at one stage, but it’s very obviously not any more.

They have built links with each other across the border, and with the far right in Britain, and they’ve grown. In November, they stoked the genuine upset around a horrific stabbing to bring people onto the streets of Dublin and wreak havoc.

We need to step away from the blame game and de-radicalise those that we can, especially children

So far, gardaí and the state have done little to hold the ringleaders to account. Meanwhile, the mysterious fires and threatening gatherings continue.

While all this is going on, the rest of us have a duty too. It’s not enough to feebly point at the government’s mismanagement of migrant settlement programmes – on any part of these islands – or to their failure to handle the housing crisis. While there is truth to all of that, and both Ireland and the UK has fumbled this badly, it is the wrong argument for this particular problem.

It’s wrong because it suggests that changing government is a magic solution, when the truth is that this will not allay the growth of the far right. We need instead to make humanitarian arguments that defend the targets of the far right – which extends far beyond migrants, refugees, and racialised minorities, to LGBTQ people, to women, and to the left.

It’s also wrong because it is not emotionally satisfying, especially to someone who is radicalised. Blaming the government feels too much like blaming the weather. Blaming a person who you feel you can defeat, well, that feels empowering.

We need to step away from the blame game and de-radicalise those that we can, especially children. A big part of that is building community and connections with those who the far right try to target, helping people stand together against dehumanising rhetoric and see through the far right’s games.

First, however, we need to drop the idea that we are above these things. They’re miles ahead of us, and we are playing catch up.