A strange duality characterised Thursday’s riots in Dublin: the level of violence caught most people by surprise, and yet there was also a feeling of inevitability about it. Ireland’s Booker prize-winning novelist Paul Lynch captured the mood in his acceptance speech on Sunday, when he said he was “astonished” by the disturbances but that the possibility for such disquiet to break out is “always under the surface”.
Few expected to see the capital descend into a violent hellscape during evening rush hour. But factcheckers like myself who monitor Ireland’s far right – as part of our work verifying online content and debunking misinformation – have witnessed how the movement instigated city-wide destruction after building on anti-immigrant sentiment over the past year.
