Three years ago Aisling Golden was attending a conference in Sweden on the grooming of young people into violence and criminality.
As the youth justice director of the Solas Project, which works with teenagers from inner city Dublin who have broken the law, she was particularly interested in the first half of the conference which dealt with youths being trafficked into drug dealing.
However, she paid little attention in the second half, which addressed teenagers being groomed into far-right and anti-immigrant violence.
“I left and I said to our CEO: ‘The first half was great, but the second half just isn’t a problem for us.’”
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The young people who were involved with the Solas Project had a lot of problems, but anti-immigrant violence wasn’t one of them, she decided.
“Four weeks later, the first wave of it hit us,” said Golden.
A group of refugees were briefly housed in a school in Drimnagh, south of Dublin city centre, while it was closed over the Christmas break, triggering protests by members of the local community.
On the second day of the protests, by which point the refugees had already been relocated, well-known anti-immigration campaigners turned up and started spreading false information about who was in the school.
“By day three, the kids were there and the teenagers were there and the guards were there. And it was ‘aggro’ – that was the beginning of it for us.”
Golden was one of the first to detect a growing trend in Dublin of vulnerable young people being drawn into anti-immigrant and far-right violence.
Since then, racist attitudes among some of these teens have solidified, driven by social media and prominent anti-immigrant campaigners in the local community, according to a group of youth workers who spoke to The Irish Times this week.
Some young people become involved out of boredom, some out of a misguided sense of patriotism, and some because it gives them a sense of purpose, they said.
“It’s very like how they are groomed into criminality, but it’s more complicated because so much of it is online,” said one youth worker.
Garda sources said in some cases young people were being actively groomed by criminals to carry out anti-immigrant violence such as that seen recently in Citywest in Saggart, west Dublin, where there were riots in October.
Investigators suspect drug gangs paid teens to carry out attacks on International Protection accommodation centres in Saggart and in other areas of Dublin – Dolphin’s Barn and Clondalkin – to curry favour with the local community.
In at least one case, they believe a gang leader paid teenagers to attack asylum seeker accommodation to “create a distraction” and draw Garda resources away from their own criminal activities.
In another case, they believe youths were coerced into driving out a Roma family from their Dublin home so it could be used as a base for drug dealing.
This grooming works in the same way young people are sucked into drug dealing, sources said – they are offered praise and companionship, along with gifts such as trainers or e-bikes in return for carrying out attacks and intimidation.
Youth workers said teenagers from disadvantaged communities were ripe for exploitation by anti-immigration groups.
“The far-right are, of course, drawing in young people. It’s from the sense of feeling disenfranchised,” said Noirin Ní Eoghagain, co-ordinator of the Clondalkin Community Safety Forum.
“Young people here in the inner city instinctively know that the system is not designed for them to make their way through it.”
Far-right rhetoric also gives youths “a face to be angry at”, said Golden. “These are young people who have had absolutely unfair lives in terms of housing, employment, education.”
It is much easier to blame non-white immigrants than the Government or the system responsible for this, she said.
Becoming involved in the anti-immigrant movement gives young people “position, power and status which they do not usually have in their lives”, she said.
They see people in their communities post anti-immigrant or racist comments and receive thousands of views and likes, “and they want a part of that”, she said.
Some vulnerable young people look up to these figures in the same way they look up to drug dealers in the community, she said.
When teenagers post their own anti-immigrant content, they are called “heroes” and “patriots”, giving them a status they never had before, said Golden. “And every ‘fair play fellah, yup bro’ – they get, it feeds that.”
[ ‘Hateful rhetoric’ towards migrants leads to ‘more vicious violence’Opens in new window ]
The involvement of inner city teens in violence has ebbed and flowed since 2023 depending on local events, Golden said, but racist language and sentiments have become embedded.
“Its very much ‘us and them’,” she said, as some young people consider that “every immigrant is a sponger and they’re here to bleed the country dry”.
“It’s become normalised to use the ‘N’ word or call them ‘fake-ugees’,” she said, referring to the slang portmanteau of “fake” and “refugee”. “It’s language straight off Twitter.”
The Solas Project has had some success in challenging these attitudes, primarily through one-to-one conversations.
Golden describes challenging views that it is immigrants’ fault that people can’t get a house, rather than the Government’s failure to build new homes.
Youth workers push back against the idea that immigrants are criminals who pose a particular threat to women and children, a common trope pushed by far-right activists.
“We might say to them, ‘You have a criminal record – are you a danger to women?’”
Sometimes they get through to the teens, sometimes they don’t, Golden said. “They can be dismissive and say: ‘Oh, you always defend them.’ That kind of push back – that’s new.”
