The Irish establishment is fuelling the rage on the streets

Last night, the BBC told one of the grossest lies of omission I have ever seen in the mainstream media. It published a report about the disturbances outside a migrant hotel in County Dublin and nowhere did it mention what triggered the riotous behaviour. Three hundred and eighty-seven words pumped into the gadgets of the masses, every one of them devoted to damning the ‘thuggery’ of those who assembled at the hotel. Not one of the words – not one – addressed the thing that angered them.

What was that thing? It was the alleged sexual assault of a 10-year-old Irish girl by a failed ‘asylum seeker’ on the grounds of the hotel. An alleged assault so serious that the girl was hospitalised. What’s more, this is a highly vulnerable girl in the care of the state. Maybe none of that matters to the BBC. Perhaps the alleged violation of a defenceless innocent by a man who was meant to have been deported from Ireland is immaterial to the aloof scribes of Britain’s public broadcaster. How else do we explain that they essentially redacted this information, one of the most salient parts of the story, from their initial dispatch on the fury gripping a community across the Irish Sea?

The irony of the BBC’s seeming indifference to the alleged horror that provoked last night’s disturbances is that it will compound the unrest on the streets. Indeed, it will confirm the sense that the media classes, in Dublin and beyond, give not one toss for the safety of people’s children or the validity of their own views on immigration. In so heartlessly erasing that girl from its early reportage, the BBC will have intensified the fiery anger of the very ‘thugs’ it hates.

The disturbances made for unpleasant viewing. They took place outside Citywest Hotel in Saggart, a town in County Dublin about 12 miles from Dublin city. This is a hotel that just last month was sold to the state for €148million for the purposes of housing migrants. Then this week, an assault of the most appalling kind allegedly took place either on its grounds or in its vicinity. A girl was hospitalised, and a man in his thirties was arrested.

The details are distressing. The 10-year-old girl was in the care of the Irish Child and Family Agency. She reportedly absconded from staff during a recreational trip to Dublin city. She was reported missing to An Garda Siochana (the Irish police). She was later found close to Citywest Hotel and reported that she had been assaulted. As part of their investigations, the Gardaí have arrested a man who arrived in Ireland six years ago, who failed in his application for asylum, and who has been the subject of a deportation order since March.

Everyone must let the investigation take its course and the truth be ascertained. The anger of the people of Saggart is wholly understandable but riotous violence is never the answer. Cops outside Citywest were pelted with a volley of bottles. Brick walls were dismantled to turn into projectiles to hurl at the guards. At one point, Irish lads even charged the police lines with horse-drawn sulkies (carts). These were grim scenes, echoing the riot that rocked Dublin city in November 2023 following the stabbing of three children by a man from Algeria.

Yet even as we lament the events in Saggart, we have a moral responsibility to ask what is fuelling this fury. Saggart is a microcosm of Ireland’s broader migrant crisis, and of the Irish elites’ ruthless, bigoted refusal to listen to the concerns of the working classes. To understand why mass immigration has become such a burning topic among the people of this republic, look no further than this small town south of Dublin.

Saggart has been changed utterly by the imperious decision-making of Dublin’s elites. Its population has surged as a result of immigration. It rose by a staggering 46 per cent between 2016 and 2022. By anyone’s reckoning that is an extraordinary change, and all in a town with one pub, two restaurants and a couple of small shops. What’s more, 8,000 locals from Saggart and nearby towns signed a petition against the transformation of Citywest into a migrant facility, and they were unceremoniously ignored. These little people, silly xenophobes in the eyes of Dublin’s influencers, were cavalierly overridden by an elite that would never dream of setting foot in a ‘backwoods’ town like Saggart.

This is Ireland’s migrant crisis distilled. It is happening in towns across the country. Overnight, in haughty defiance of working-class opposition, the elite brings in scores of often undocumented men. It commandeers hotels to house them, robbing locals of income from tourism and a place to hold weddings and parties. It metaphorically rips up their petitions, it is deaf to their democratic cries. And then it calls them ‘racist’ if they dare to continue complaining about the restructuring of their beloved communities by a faraway establishment that loathes them.

What happened in Saggart last night was deeply regrettable. It also spoke to a deeper rage of the dispossessed. A fury of a people demeaned, defamed and brutishly sidelined from the democratic fate of their own nation. A people enraged by the transformation of their communities into chessboards for a distant faux-virtous elite – and of themselves into moral unpersons whose needs and beliefs are treated as impediments by a ruling class determined to demonstrate its fealty to the post-borders hysteria of globalism’s gold-collared superclass.

Immigration is the issue through which the people of Ireland – and the UK – most keenly feel their disenfranchisement from the life of the nation. It’s the issue that divides a post-truth establishment obsessed with accruing virtue from a populace more interested in the restoration of sovereign integrity and community life.

The politicians condemning the scenes in Saggart surely have questions to answer of their own. If it turns out this man who should have been deported did indeed rape a girl, then Ireland’s useless, preening state will be all but complicit in that atrocity.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy