In early June 2025, anti-migrant violence exploded in Northern Ireland following the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by two Romanian teenagers in Ballymena, County Antrim. In the unrest that followed, local Facebook accounts spread information on how to identify migrant occupied housing and helped organise unrest at the community level—a pattern seen in other recent instances of anti-migrant violence.
As violence spread, so too did the sharing of videos on social media clearly documenting targeted arson attacks against the houses and businesses of perceived foreigners. These videos and narratives were amplified by members of the national and international radical and extreme-right. And when migrants internally displaced from the violence in Ballymena were moved to temporary accommodation, rioters attacked that building as well after its location and purpose were made public on social media platforms, including Facebook.
South of the Irish border, the Republic of Ireland has been subject to its own wave of anti-migrant and racist violence. Between November 2018 and July 2024, reporting from RTÉ mapped 31 instances of confirmed or suspected arson throughout the country against accommodation housing, planned to house, or rumoured to house, migrants. Again, the internet and social media have been central to outbreaks of violence in the Republic, their perpetration and the dissemination of videos and images of these attacks as a form of intimidation and further mobilisation.
This Insight explores how social media platforms have contributed to the rise of violent extreme-right activity in Ireland, with a focus on the use of arson as a key offline tactic.
Ireland’s Growing Violent Extreme-Right
Violent far-right extremism in Ireland has historically been seen as a uniquely Northern Irish, and indeed Loyalist, phenomenon—confined to working-class PUL areas where Loyalist paramilitaries maintain a presence. This division, academics argue, lies in the religious-ethnic divide, with those identifying as Irish rather than British, centring their nationalism around opposition to British rule and advocacy for Irish unification. As the conflict of “the Troubles” developed and progressed, this image became starker. Left-wing republican groups (including paramilitaries and their political wings) formed relations with other global left-wing violent and non-violent groups and movements. At the same time, some Loyalist paramilitaries developed close ties to British extreme-right groups—including the violent Neo-Nazi group Combat 18.
Certainly, in Northern Ireland, this divide remains somewhat observable. Migrants and people of colour in a number of PUL areas were, and continue to be, subject to threats and attacks since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Loyalist groups are also alleged by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to be behind racist violence and organised unrest, such as the attacks on immigrant-owned and operated businesses in 2024. In Catholic/Nationalist/Republican communities, several factors have prevented the development of comparable anti-migrant violence. These include the historic connection to socialist politics, identification with other groups such as the Palestinians, Northern Ireland’s continued position within the United Kingdom, and the continued presence of “dissident” republican paramilitary groups and political organisations holding left-wing and anti-racist political positions.
Figure 1: Screenshots from Irish republican political organisations referencing violence against the extreme-right.
Yet this is changing. In the Republic of Ireland, increasing rates of immigration and real anger at successive governments on issues of housing and infrastructure have produced fertile ground for the extreme-right. Grassroots protests against accommodation for asylum seekers in communities from Roscrea in County Tipperary to Coolock in Dublin’s Northside have frequently turned violent. And major events, such as the stabbing of young children in Dublin by an Algerian immigrant, have quickly spiralled into instances of mass anti-immigration violence. At a day-to-day level, increases have been noted in opportunistic harassment and interpersonal violence against people of colour.
There is also growing evidence to suggest that the wider radical-right and the violent extreme-right in both countries are becoming interconnected, though collaboration remains divisive. Despite sectarian violence in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and violence perpetrated in the Republic of Ireland by both British neo-Nazi groups and Loyalist paramilitaries, recent violence on both sides of the Irish border has seen members of the Irish extreme-right and Loyalist paramilitary groups working and socialising together.
Hands Across the Water: Social Media, Ireland, and the Global Extreme-Right
When exploring this growth in extreme-right violence, it is important to understand the role that social media platforms have had in turning the Island of Ireland into a node of what is an increasingly decentralised and international movement.
Indeed, the growing ties between the British, Northern Irish, and Irish extreme-right have been facilitated through online connections. Reporting from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue notes that British neo-Nazi and extreme-right organisations such as the British National Socialist Movement (BNSM) and Patriotic Alternative have advertised protests in Ireland and facilitated links through posts and podcasts with central figures in the Irish extreme-right. More broadly, key figures in the wider British extreme and radical right have increased their sharing of Irish-based content deliberately targeted at both domestic Irish and international audiences.
Figure 2: Two screenshots talking about Ireland from the X account of an English anti-migrant activist.
Further afield, social media has also facilitated connections with figures within the US white-supremacist and neo-Nazi movement—and there is mounting concern about this growth. Online meetings between US Neo-Nazis and the Irish extreme-right have involved discussions of harassment and assault against immigrants and Muslims in particular. This includes discussing strategies and tactics such as burying pigs near migrant accommodation, and spraying Muslims with pigs’ blood in water guns. The online-based US Neo-Nazi group Goyim Defence League has additionally used social media connections to produce and disseminate kits of printable antisemitic materials for use in Ireland.
These connections have also manifested in Irish-specific chapters of international groups, which spread first through social media platforms and internet forums before morphing into real-world networks. The Proud Boys (which has been involved in both street violence and the attack on the US Capitol) has developed chapters in Ireland. A branch of the international white-nationalist Active Club movement—which focuses on militarised training and combat sports—Comhaltas na nGaedheal (Brotherhood/Association of the Gaels) is another demonstration of this transnationalism, with the group’s social-media accounts frequently showing collaboration and meetings with international Active Clubs.
Figure 3: X screenshots showing members of Comhaltas na nGaedheal sparing outside and with members of other international active groups.
Echoes from the Past: The Online Messaging of the Extreme Right in Ireland
Alongside developing international links, social media platforms are also being used as a tool to attempt to legitimise groups and the use of violence within the language of Irish and Northern Irish history.
Symbols of Ireland’s mythological and historical past are frequently deployed to legitimise positions and actions. Comhaltas na nGaedheal invokes and repurposes Celtic and Nationalist/Republican messaging and images online (such as its logo and the Gal Gréine) alongside the broader aesthetics and messaging of the international extreme-right (and the neo-Nazi/White Supremacist movement in particular). It also often uses the images and language of previous acts of nationalist violence and major historical figures within the Irish independence movement—drawing parallels with their arguments and actions with contemporary white supremacism in a specifically Irish context.
Figure 4: Two images from the X account of Comhaltas na nGaedheal referencing the 1916 Easter Rising, where Irish republicans attempted to overthrow the British government in Dublin by force.
Extreme-right groups and decentralised activists also frequently use “the great plantation” as a slogan and hashtag—combining the racist antisemitic conspiracy theory of “the great replacement” with British efforts to change the demographic, religious, and political composition of what would become Northern Ireland through Scottish and English settlement.
This cultural and historical signalling can also be seen in the use of arson by the violent extreme-right in Ireland.
Arson has long been a tool within the wider repertoire of the violent extreme-right. It is a low-cost, low-skill act of political violence, which can cause significant destruction. For this reason, it has been heavily used by activists and groups internationally against migrant accommodation and centres, with attacks noted in Germany, Sweden, and France.
But in Ireland, arson as a political tactic also has a longer history. Arson as a tool of resistance against colonialism can be seen in the attacks on the households of Anglo-Irish landlords during late 19th-century rural agitation, and then later by the early Irish Republican Army against these same targets. In Northern Ireland, both Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups employed arson as a method of removing members of the “other” community from areas of their control during the Troubles.
In this way, arson attacks on migrant housing and non-white businesses afford a spectacle which, when filmed, can be shared domestically and internationally—while straddling meanings and contexts.
Figure 5: Two X Screenshots reposting TikTok and Snapchat videos of anti-migrant arson in Northern Ireland.
Outlook: Online Organising, Offline Violence
In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, social media platforms are a core part of the violent extreme-right toolkit. It allows activists to foster international and intra-Island links, communicate with a range of audiences using context-specific and wider framing devices, and foment real-world violence through capitalising on events which can be exploited to fit existing narratives. Further, it can identify targets and turn them into content for further dissemination and mobilisation. Indeed, the spate of arson attacks in the Republic of Ireland seems to be the result of copycat violence following arson against migrant housing in Dublin during the January 2023 riots, which were also widely shared online.
As reported by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the recent violence in Ballymena demonstrates regulatory gaps and failures across social media platforms, which allowed for inciting messages and violence to spread quickly. Left unchecked, this remains a dangerous tinderbox.
Platforms need to increase the speed at which they moderate content that could incite violence. As the events in Ballymena demonstrate, the extreme right’s ability to amplify existing tensions and escalate them into unrest – particularly by sharing suspects’ identities online – depends heavily on weak moderation policies or a lack of understanding of local contexts. Likewise, during periods of unrest, content moderators must enforce existing powers to reduce the chance for violence to be perpetrated—removing posts encouraging or documenting violence and those which can be seen to be identifying the locations of targets, even if inadvertently. More widely, the wider milieu of extreme-right content and rhetoric online, which allows violence to metastasise, must be tackled.
And yet, there appears to be little movement here. Despite the political fallout from its “anger-boosting” algorithms, Meta has recently forged ahead with a raft of changes which could bolster the extreme-right on Facebook and Instagram. Removing its independent misinformation checking programme and allowing fewer restrictions on “topics that are part of mainstream discourse” could stop effective pushback on dangerous misinformation, while introducing personalised approaches to political content risks reinforcing echo-chambers and encouraging “algorithm radicalisation.” X has rolled back policies on misinformation and the banning of figures within the extreme-right, which has allowed groups, individuals, and narratives to flourish on its platform. Telegram has been effectively used by the extreme-right to spread misinformation and promote and organise real-world violence. And there is growing concern over the use of Artificial Intelligence to disseminate content and misinformation while avoiding moderation.
In the light of these platform-wide trends and policies, the UK, Northern Irish, and Irish governments face strong challenges in preventing online manipulation by the violent extreme-right. This was demonstrated by the Irish media commission’s ordering of social media platforms to take “necessary measures” to prevent the platforming of terrorist content following repeated removal orders on posts on X, TikTok, and Instagram. But a failure to challenge the Irish extreme-right online risks a growth of the extreme-right offline—and with it, violence.
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The author of this Insight is an independent researcher focused on radical politics in Ireland and mobilisation into, and disengagement from, radical movements and organisations.
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