PIECE 05SentimentLiving document
The question
Of 61 incidents of racist intimidation and violence documented in fourteen weeks of 2024, seventy per cent were filmed by the person committing them. Ninety per cent were posted online.
That is not a detail about how we know. It is the finding.
Of documented incidents were filmed by the perpetrator. Nine in ten were then posted.
Of them were attributable to one individual, who drew over six million views in five months.
Your voice — 150 words, at the top
A protest, a post or a conversation you actually witnessed. What the people there were saying, and what they were doing with their phones.
One · What is recordedthe tallies nobody official keeps
Every figure in this chapter comes from a charity, a think tank or a newsroom. The Irish State does not publish a tally of arson attacks on accommodation for people seeking asylum. That is the first finding.
Because no department publishes one, the only continuous tally that exists was assembled by a voluntary organisation. Here it is, year by year.
Nineteen of those attacks were in 2024 alone, and four were on a single site in Coolock in one week.
It is ordinary people with legitimate concerns. There is nothing organised about it.
It is Russian bots and outside agitators.
Both mistake the audience for the engine. One says there is no structure, the other says the structure is foreign. The documented structure is domestic, it is small, and it runs on attention.
The people standing at a protest and the people monetising it are not the same people. That distinction is the whole of this piece and it is the one both claims erase.
Filmed by the person committing it
70%
Of 61 documented incidents of racist intimidation, abuse or violence in fourteen weeks of 2024. Ninety per cent were posted online afterwards.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Clout, kicks and clicks, Gallagher & O’Brien, 26 September 2024, covering 6 May to 16 August 2024. 83% involved overt racist abuse; 31% involved physical violence or property damage.
Two · What drives itso what
A crime committed for an audience has a business model. Follow it and the shape of this thing changes completely.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue documented 61 incidents of racist intimidation, abuse or violence between May and August 2024. Nineteen were near accommodation centres. Seventeen were at or near homeless encampments — people with no connection to any accommodation contract at all.
The middle row is the one that breaks the accommodation-protest framing: those people were not near an IPAS centre and were not connected to one.
Seventy per cent were filmed by the person committing the abuse. Ninety per cent of the footage was posted. And more than forty per cent of the whole set was attributable to one individual, who accumulated over six million YouTube views in five months.
ISD's own framing is that participants post under their real names, apparently with little fear of prosecution. That is not the behaviour of a clandestine network. It is the behaviour of a content business.
The protests themselves were counted. An Garda Síochána logged every public gathering it had to police in Dublin that year, which makes anti-immigration protest one line in a much longer list.
Anti-immigration gatherings were about a fifth of the public gatherings Gardaí policed in Dublin in 2024, and there were fewer of them in the second half of the year than the first.
That is not a reason to relax. An Assistant Commissioner told reporters in May 2024: "We obviously see a huge rise in the level of aggression." Frequency fell; intensity did not. Nineteen buildings were set on fire in the same year.
But it does say something about the gap between how large this looks online and how large it is on a street — which is exactly what you would expect if the product were the footage rather than the protest.
There are, and they are documented. In April 2026 the ISD reported 202 Russian state-backed or state-affiliated accounts tracked on X targeting Ireland through 2025, with a dominant narrative characterising migration from non-Western countries as an "invasion".
Two things about that. First, the same study found that no Chinese state-controlled account in its dataset contributed to anti-migrant narratives, and Iranian activity was minimal with low engagement — which tells you the researchers were reporting what they found rather than what was expected. We print the negative finding because it is what makes the positive one credible.
Second, and more important: 202 state-linked accounts is a count of amplifiers, not of causes, and no published study establishes a bot network driving Irish anti-migrant sentiment. Amplification needs something to amplify. The thing being amplified was filmed in Ireland, by people using their own names, for an Irish audience.
Views, in five months
6m+
Accumulated on YouTube by the single individual to whom more than 40% of the documented incidents were attributable.
ISD, Clout, kicks and clicks, September 2024. We do not name him here. The finding is the concentration, not the person — and naming him is the transaction he is in this for.
Three · What would move itnow what
Every number in this piece came from a charity, a think tank or a newsroom. Thirty-eight arson attacks on accommodation for people seeking asylum, and the tally that exists is maintained by a voluntary organisation.
That is not a small point. A country that does not count something cannot say whether it is getting worse, cannot target a response, and hands the number to whoever wants to inflate or deny it. Both sides of this argument are currently working from an NGO spreadsheet.
And none of this makes anybody's rent cheaper. People are not being tricked into noticing that they cannot afford to live where they grew up. That grievance is real, it is measured elsewhere on this site, and the most useful thing anyone can do about it is to put a better explanation within reach of the person looking for one.
A real grievance with no accurate explanation attached to it is not a neutral object. It is an opening.
Every figure here is from a non-governmental source, except the Garda protest counts, which reached the public through a newspaper rather than a publication. Where two organisations count the same thing differently — Hope and Courage Collective's 38 arson attacks against RTÉ Prime Time's 31 fires — we give both and say what each is counting. Different definitions are not a contradiction. Of the 38 attacks, about 82% targeted empty or rumoured-intended buildings; roughly one in five were on buildings occupied at the time.
The Garda gathering counts. 605 public gatherings requiring policing in the Dublin Metropolitan Region, 1 January to 20 November 2024. Of the 126 anti-immigration gatherings, 75 were before 21 May 2024 and 51 after — a sharp decline within the year. 95 arrests were made for alleged breaches of legislation at protests over the period, the vast majority at anti-immigration events.
What the ISD incident study covers. 61 incidents documented between 6 May and 16 August 2024. It is a count of incidents ISD analysts identified, not a complete record, and the authors do not claim it is one. It should be read as a floor.
What the foreign-actor study does and does not say. It counts state-backed and state-affiliated accounts, which is a different claim from a bot network. No published study establishes a bot network driving Irish anti-migrant sentiment, and we do not publish a number for one.
We do not name the individual to whom more than 40% of the documented incidents were attributed, although the ISD report does. The finding is the concentration.
What we are not claiming. Nothing here says that people who attend a protest are racists, that concern about accommodation policy is illegitimate, or that the housing pressure people describe is imaginary. The rest of this site is largely an argument that the pressure is real and has been misdiagnosed.
Does any part of the Irish State publish a count of arson attacks on accommodation for people seeking asylum? We have looked at Garda crime statistics, at the Department of Justice publications and at IPAS reporting. The only tallies that exist are maintained by a voluntary organisation and by a television programme.
Read next · Piece 04
The claim underneath most of what gets shouted at these protests, tested against the State's own tables. 82% of everyone on a welfare payment is an Irish national.
Read it →
In the pipeline
This piece counts the incidents. The next one puts them on a map against population by nationality at Electoral Division level, and against where IPAS contracts actually are.
Data pulled, analysis under way