Suzanne Harrington: The far-right are targeting the wrong people — like they always do
Far right protestors marching down O’Connell Street, Dublin, towards O’Connell Bridge, before being diverted along the north side quays. Photo shows gardai keeping anti immigrant far right led demonstration and a counter protesters apart on O'Connell Bridge, during the march. Photograph: Eamonn Farrell / © RollingNews.ie
“I like your pin,” says a Duty Free cashier at Gatwick.
She nods at the small enamel pair of flags on my lapel — Ireland and Palestine, intertwined.
She’s not Palestinian, she says, but she’s Muslim, and appreciates the gesture. I appreciate her saying that.
“I’m Irish,” I say, as I tap my card. “We get it.”
We don’t quite hug — that would be weird — but as micro-encounters go, it leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy. Connected.
Unlike the actions of two different sets of neighbours, who have recently hoisted great big Union Jacks up flag poles in their gardens, which leaves me feeling quite the opposite of connected.
(I should point out I live in the UK — these are white English people in their white English gardens hoisting the British flag).
Every morning these flapping big flags are the first thing I see when I leave my house, as though my neighbours think they are embassies, rather than bog standard houses in a bog standard neighbourhood.
This is where we are now, regarding flags. Thanks to campaigns funded by fascist billionaires keen to keep us divided and at odds with each other, so that we direct our grievances down instead of up, flags have become weaponised.
In London recently, a march saw tens of thousands of far-right flag wavers — many of them drunk, many of them violent — take over the streets, urinating as they went.
Even in my adopted home town of Brighton, where everyone is a vegan yoga teacher, flags have been appearing overnight on public lamp posts.
Two men burnt down a local mosque, when there were people inside, but it wasn’t called terrorism because the attackers were white.
The flags in my neighbours’ garden, flapping in the sea breeze, symbolise an emboldening, a sinister curdling in a country whose entire modern identity has to date been built on fighting Nazis.
This year, for the first time in my life, I too am a flag owner — a Palestinian one, for peaceful marches protesting the genocide in Gaza, and a funny Kneecap one, which simply reads ‘Fenian Cunts Anseo’.
Both flags live in my cupboard. Since the neighbours started flying their Union Jacks, I contemplate running Kneecap and Palestine up my own flagpole (I don’t have one, but I’m sure I could fashion one from broom handles and gaffer tape).
Ha ha, I think. And then I remember the local mosque, blackened to ashes by white people, and imagine my own house with its windows smashed in. Would they? These days, anything seems possible.
Arriving in Cork from Gatwick, the airport bus stop’s electronic display says that traffic may be disrupted due to a march in the city centre.
A far right march, protesting immigration. As the bus trundles into town, I see some Irish flags draped across the backs of people of whom you would cross the road to avoid.
Cans of alcohol in one hand, loudhailers in the other. Draped in the Irish tricolour, like Temu Conor McGregors. Irish flags being weaponised like Union Jacks.
My stomach sinks at the ease and speed with which the far right virus spreads, as I read the recent words of my Irish Examiner colleague Imasha Costa: “I am not the reason your system is failing.”
And I want to scream out the bus window, because they are targeting the wrong people, like they always do.
