The Influence of the US Far Right on Ireland Is Growing

The claims could have been taken word-for-word from any one of numerous US far-right websites in recent months.

“Reports are surfacing suggesting that [lawmakers] may have been involved in transporting large numbers of refugees and immigration applicants to polling stations to secure votes for individual candidates,” the author of the article claimed.

This wasn’t a conspiracist asserting that Honduran migrants are being imported into the US to replace swing-state Republican voters, though; the claim came from a website called The Irish Channel. A new report published on Tuesday by researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue outlines how the website has used generative AI to create articles that have been “heavily influenced by similar election denial efforts in the US.”

The anti-immigrant narrative, based on made-up quotes and fabricated academics, is just one of the conspiracies imported wholesale into Ireland from the US in recent months. Another is the lie that teachers and librarians are pedophiles and groomers for promoting books about sexual health and gender identity. This week, a new conspiracy theory emerged claiming that children in Irish schools will be forced to watch pornography as part of a new curriculum. The story, purportedly based on a whistleblower’s testimony, was completely false.

The importation of these narratives from American far-right sources is just the latest in a growing list of signs that the links between the far-right communities in the US and those in Ireland are growing stronger by the day.

“A feature of this emerging relationship between key actors in the US far right and smaller clusters of individuals in Ireland speaks directly to the lack of any real base or support for those individuals in Ireland,” Mark Malone, the lead researcher with the Hope and Courage Collective, an anti-extremism charity, tells WIRED. “Irish neo-Nazis are looking for friends and intellectual leadership. The danger in this is not any electoral success, or widely supported movements, but rather the inevitable violence that arises from neo-Nazis organizing.”

Ireland has long been seen by US far-right communities as one of the last bastions of white Christian values in the Western world. This view is outdated and inaccurate, given that Ireland is no longer dominated by the Catholic Church as it once was and has in recent decades introduced progressive legislation around same-sex marriage and abortion. The country also elected an openly-gay, mixed-race son of an immigrant as their leader in 2017.

But as a result of a housing crisis and an unprecedented influx of immigrants and asylum seekers into the country in recent years, a small but growing far-right movement has established itself, including several associated political parties.

This community is led by a small cohort of agitators who travel around the country, instigating protests at sites earmarked by the government to house asylum seekers. In many cases these protests turn violent. Dozens of properties have been set on fire.

In November 2023, riots broke out in Dublin following a stabbing outside a school that left three children and one adult hospitalized. The alleged attacker came to Ireland from Algeria in 2003 and had become a naturalized citizen, but for Ireland’s far right, this incident proved their false claims that all immigrant men were dangerous.

The resulting riots saw police cars, buses, and trams set on fire and widespread looting across the city. Among those fomenting the violence online was UFC superstar Conor McGregor, who, 24 hours before the violence began, posted on X: “Ireland, we are at war.” McGregor helped bring the riots to a global audience, and in the US, figures like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes all suggested that Ireland was on the brink of a second civil war.

Since then the links between Ireland’s burgeoning far-right movement and the much more established US community have only grown stronger.

And it’s not just storylines that Irish far-right communities are importing. They are also getting advice directly from some of America’s most racist, antisemitic, and conspiratorially-minded far-right figures.

In July, the Irish Times reported that Frank Silva, a prominent member of the Los Angeles branch of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s as well as the violent neo-Nazi group The Order, had joined at least five online calls with members of Ireland’s far-right community. During the calls, Silva reportedly offered advice to those taking part in anti-immigrant protests, including tips on how to make their content go viral and how to handle interactions with police.

“I’ve been there and I knew how to handle myself,” Silva told his Irish listeners, according to the Irish Times.

A review of Silva’s social media activity and his podcast topics in the months since show he continues to discuss immigration to Ireland. Silva did not respond to a request for comment.

At the same time, another US extremist, Jon Minadeo II, the leader of the virulently antisemitic Goyim Defense League, has joined calls with far-right online communities in recent months. Not only was Minadeo offering advice to those listening, he also shared posters his group had designed specifically for Irish far-right activists to print out and post in their areas.

“Ireland’s hot right now,” Minadeo said in one recent online broadcast, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. “I’ve been in some of these Ireland spaces chatting with these youngsters. Unfortunately, some of the older Irish folks think they’re going to vote their way out of this.”

One of the main tactics of the Goyim Defense League, which has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is to plaster a particular neighborhood with flyers and posters featuring extremely antisemitic language and imagery. In the poster created for Ireland, a QR code links directly to the social media account of Stephen Butler, a prominent Irish far-right figure who was convicted of killing his father in 2020.

Minadeo did not respond to a request for comment.

Most recently, Irish far-right communities have been hearing from Jeffrey Pedersen, a QAnon promoter known as “In the Matrixxx” who has been pictured with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

Pedersen last week joined one of the most prominent Irish extremist channels, called Off Grid Ireland, spewing conspiracies and antisemitic tropes.

“The people who are running us act like they are Jewish and act like they are Christian. They are not Christian, nor are not Jewish, they are Satanists. And they belong to secret societies, and that’s where their loyalty lies, not with God, not with Jesus, not with anything else, but the deceiver.”

Pedersen told WIRED that he was invited by an Irish-based X account to “explain to them what Q is, not what the mainstream media says it is but what it really is,” adding that he wanted to spread the message that “if the US falls, by not electing Donald Trump, the whole world falls.”

Far-right Canadians have also become increasingly focused on Ireland.

Ezra Levant, the founder of Rebel News, a far-right website that promotes Islamophobic content, traveled to Ireland to report on anti-immigrant protests in Dublin, interviewing several prominent members of Ireland’s far-right community. Shane Sweeney, an influencer from Newfoundland who regularly posts white nationalist content on social media, is also very closely linked to Butler, regularly joining him in online discussions.

Levant did not respond to requests for comment. Sweeney declined to comment.

During a number of chats in recent months, some members of these far-right groups have suggested they have connections to people in the US who may be willing to provide funding for Irish extremist groups.

While there was no evidence provided to back up these claims, one recent fundraiser for an Irish far-right group does indicate that there is at least some willingness for Americans to donate money to these causes.

Justin Barrett, a well-known figure in Irish far-right politics who has called Hitler the greatest leader of all time, recently launched a fundraiser on Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. The money was earmarked for the National Shield, the “protection unit” of his newly created political party, called Clann Eireann, which means “Family of Ireland.”

While the effort has so far raised just €3,000 of its €10,000 goal, many of those donating money claim to be based in the US. “Much love from America,” one donor wrote, while another added: “Integration has failed in America. We can move out of the citys [sic]. You live on an island. You don’t have anywhere to go. Fight the invasion.”

Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, is also seeking to benefit financially from links to the US. O’Brien has spent years building up relationships with figures in the US far-right movement, including Fuentes, who has hosted the Irishman numerous times on his podcast. Woods also appeared last summer at a notorious white supremacist conference in Tennessee.

“He has a significant US audience very much focused in the same space as Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement,” Malone said. “There isn’t a large paying Irish audience for his material, so O’Brien is really US-focused.”

O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.

In the US, armed militias are once again organizing at a local level ahead of November’s election, and while Irish people do not have easy access to guns, there are efforts underway to create localized groups.

In recent weeks, the far-right Irish Freedom Party has launched a new “watchdog” initiative which aims to create localized groups of men who will be activated to respond to claims that illegal immigrants are being brought into their neighborhoods.

The group has been called Sinne na Daoine, which is Irish for “we the people,” a phrase that has become indelibly linked with far-right causes in America over the past decade.

The Irish Freedom Party is also linked to the Irish Channel, a website that features allegedly AI-generated content pushing the anti-immigrant voting conspiracy, according to Ciarán O’Connor, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. (The Irish Channel did not respond to a request for comment.) He believes this is once again a sign that Ireland’s far-right is following the lead of the US far right, where once-fringe media outlets have replaced mainstream media for large swathes of the population.

“What you have [with The Irish Channel] is a highly active hub of misinformation across domains, social media accounts, and messaging apps,” O’Connor tells WIRED. “I would see a lot of similarities with the US. And I really think how [US far-right media] was once fringe and has now become the mainstream probably does speak to some of the ambitions or aims of these kinds of partnerships here in this country.”