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This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.
Although they can't say it out loud of course, I'm sure that most anti-immigration Irish are probably not at all concerned about immigration from Brazil.
Insert Planet of the Apes meme, Catholics together stronk.
Up to a point. Slovaks are majority Catholic, but anti-immigration groups in Ireland aren't so keen on them in light of last year's murder of Aisling Murphy, a young teacher, by a Slovak.
Ah now, everyone knows he was a Gypsy, not a Slovak. Ironically it would mainly be over-the-hill, state TV watching, identity-is-citizenship types (ie not far right) that would fail to make that distinction.
And suddenly everyone makes sense.
It is extremely annoying when a someone complains about "Romanians" you don't know if they are just a xenophobe, or whether they are a normie trying to complain about Gypsies in a polite way.
Does anyone really have anything against actual Romanians? I don't think so. It's almost always the latter, and the difficulty is compounded by the High Wokish word for "Gypsy" (that is, "Romani") sounding so like "Romanian"
I agree with you, but when I hung out with Polish people in London there was a lot of grumbling about "Romanians" and I didn't know if this was bog-standard Gypsy hate or if there was some local derby kind of hatred I was missing the context of.
It is also a premise of the "Brexit was about immigration and so the referendum is a mandate to reduce it" crowd - which includes most of the populist right of the Conservative Party, as well as Nigel Farage - that normies were opposed to Eastern European immigration (including non-gypsy Romanians) and that this was why they voted for Brexit. I think these guys are wrong and that there is a reason both leave campaigns (Vote Leave was Cummings, Leave.EU was Farage) focussed their anti-immigration messages on Muslim immigrants.
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