"Get Them Out" - How the far right walked into the fuel protests through the front door

Gergely Somerville

— 6 min read

By Sunday, six hundred petrol stations had run dry and the army had been sent to break the blockade at Whitegate, the country's only oil refinery. I watched a smaller protest pass through Cork City Centre from beside the road.

I felt a sinking feeling in my chest watching it. Whilst I would usually be the first to celebrate any victory of the people over our government, the far-right co-opting of the movement is impossible to ignore. Even in the short while I stood by watching, flag-waving, red-faced men spontaneously broke into chants of "Get them out!" and "Sinn Fein are traitors!" A Three employee beside me assured her colleague that "Get them out" referred to the Irish government, not immigrants, not that the men chanting it seemed particularly concerned with the distinction.

The anger is real. I want to be clear about that before anything else.

The war in Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and global fuel prices surged overnight. In Ireland, where tax accounts for nearly sixty percent of the price of a litre of petrol, that surge hit harder than almost anywhere else in Europe. Hauliers, agricultural contractors, taxi drivers, the people whose livelihoods run on diesel, watched their operating costs spike while the government offered a package that cut green diesel by three cent a litre.

Nobody here is claiming farmers are starving. Irish agriculture is heavily subsidised and plenty of those driving tractors onto O'Connell Street own more land than most of us could dream of. But you don't need to be destitute to be right about a fuel tax that takes sixty percent off the top while the government closes their ears and calls the crisis global. The point isn't poverty. The point is contempt. A government that told people the problem was bigger than Ireland and therefore not its responsibility, while sitting on the levers that control over half the price at the pump.

But here is where the sinking feeling starts.

Before the first tractor rolled onto the M50 on Tuesday morning, the protest was already being promoted on Facebook pages that typically post anti-immigrant content. A page called Ireland: Rising from the Ashes, a meme page that regularly shares far-right material, was one of the first to circulate a map of assembly points for a "national fuel protest" at 7am Tuesday. The main organising page, The People of Ireland Against Fuel Prices, ran a paid ad from the 6th of April directing people to local WhatsApp groups. Facebook's ad library shows it was paid for by a company owned by a man who regularly posts anti-immigrant content, including the false claim that Ireland is the only country in Europe to offer immigrants free housing.

The protests themselves are fragmented. There is no single leader, no central set of demands, no formal organisation behind them. So in stepped three men, James Geoghegan, Christopher Duffy, and John Dallon, who became the de facto spokespeople for the Dublin protests. Two of them appeared on livestreams run by Niall McConnell's "Síol na hÉireann", one of the most prominent far-right operations in the country. And this is far from guilt by association. Duffy's own Facebook history includes sharing conspiracy content claiming Ursula von der Leyen called free speech a "virus," and a comment about Greta Thunberg I won't repeat here. Geoghegan shared the homophobic smear image of Roderic O'Gorman that circulated around 2020. These are the people who ended up on RTÉ representing a movement of farmers and hauliers. Elected and vetted by nobody but seen by the whole nation.

On the first day of protests, Kildare county councillor Tom McDonnell, a man who told the press before the local elections that Irish women need to "breed" more, stood on the back of a truck on O'Connell Street and called for international protection centres to be emptied and their funding given to farmers. Dublin city councillor Gavin Pepper joined him later in the week with a coffin marked "RIP Ireland." Neither of them were there to talk about diesel.

Then came the international layer. When the government called in the Defence Forces on Thursday, it gave the far right exactly the image it needed. Tommy Robinson began posting from England, sharing footage of army vehicles on Dublin streets, vehicles the Defence Forces clarified were on the streets for an entirely unrelated reason, and declaring the government was "at war with the Irish people." Katie Hopkins weighed in with old anti-immigration protest footage presented as current events. A Canadian conspiracy theorist posted a video of O'Connell Street claiming Ireland had erupted into "full civil war." Within days, AI-generated images of Gardaí using water cannons were circulating on X. A fake document claiming police were recording protesters' registration plates spread through Telegram. None of it was real, but that didn't seem to matter.

This is the pattern. It happened with the Brussels farmers' protests. It happened with the Dublin riots. A genuine grievance draws a crowd. The crowd draws public attention. The attention draws people whose interests have nothing to do with what started it. Within seventy-two hours, a protest about fuel tax becomes content for audiences in England and America who probably couldn't even find Cork on a map.

It keeps happening because the far right understands something that the rest of us have been slow to learn: you don't need a programme. You don't need a policy. You just need to be in the room when people are angry. "Get them out" does more political work than any white paper because it gives people an enemy they can point at. It turns a systemic problem, a tax structure, a war in Iran, a government that won't listen, into something that fits on a placard and can be chanted in unison. The far right doesn't solve anything. It doesn't have to. It just has to show up with a target.

Justice Minister O'Callaghan said on Thursday that the protesters were being "manipulated by outside actors." He named Tommy Robinson specifically. It was the same day the government refused to sit down with anyone from the blockades. That is not a coincidence. The "manipulation" line did exactly what it was designed to do: it let the government talk about Tommy Robinson instead of talking about fuel tax. It reframed a protest about material conditions as a security threat, and in doing so gave the state permission to send in the army. The Tánaiste called the blockades "a despicable attack on society." The Taoiseach called them "an act of national sabotage." Language like that is not a response to far-right co-option. It is a response to a government that does not want to be challenged by the people it is supposed to serve.

That doesn't make O'Callaghan entirely wrong about the co-option, and the evidence for it doesn't come from the government. It comes from inside the protests themselves.

Reporting by The Journal found that in multiple WhatsApp groups used to organise the protests, people who tried to steer the conversation toward immigration were removed by admins. On O'Connell Street on Tuesday, a farmer told anti-immigration agitator Philip Dwyer directly that the protests were "about fuel." The Irish Road Haulage Association chose not to officially support the protests partly because of concerns about some of the individuals involved. These are people who can see exactly what's happening and are fighting to stop it.

But the fight is not settled. On the same streets where farmers are pushing back, the chants still slide. "Get them out" still carries two meanings, the spokespeople still appear on far-right livestreams, the meme pages continue to post racist tirades, and every day the protests continue without clear leadership or a resolution, the window for co-option gets a little wider.

I stood on a street in Cork and listened. A Three employee assured her colleague that "Get them out" referred to the Irish government, not immigrants. The men chanting it didn't seem particularly concerned with the distinction.

That distinction is where everything is decided. Not just for this protest, but for every crisis that comes after it. Because fuel prices will come down eventually. The government will announce a package and call the crisis resolved. The people in their tractors on O'Connell Street will go home with a few cent off a litre and the knowledge that it took shutting down the country to get a phone call. The anger will not go anywhere.

And this is the danger of a protest with no structure, no leadership, no agreed demands. It doesn't stay about one thing for long. A movement that belongs to nobody becomes available to everybody, and every grievance against the established order, no matter how legitimate or how vile, finds its way in. Fuel tax and the government and the "woke left" and foreigners all collapse into a single all-encompassing rage against "them." The people chanting don't need to agree on what they want. They only need to agree on who they're against.

The next time people take to the streets with a legitimate grievance and no one to articulate it for them, the far right will be ready again. The question is whether anyone else will be.

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