Record number of racist incidents reported in 2020

A Black Lives Matter protest outside the Embassy of the United States of America in Dublin following the death of George Floyd in the US last year. Picture: Stephen Collins/ Photos

Incidents of racism have increased during the pandemic, a new report has found.

The Irish Network Against Racism (INAR) has launched the 2020 findings from iReport.ie - the racist incident reporting system.

It found that the total number of incidents has increased and there has been a record number of hate speech incidents.

The iReport system found that there were 700 racist incidents reported in 2020, compared to 530 in 2019.

It also recorded 159 criminal incidents, a record 51 racist assaults and a record 594 hate speech incidents.

There were 334 cases of racist hate speech reported last year.

INAR describe a racist incident as any incident “which has the effect of undermining anyone’s enjoyment of their human rights, based on their background”.

Incidents of racist assault included a Chinese woman being racially abused and then pushed into a canal by teenagers while out walking and a black-African man who was headbutted while standing on the street in an area he was visiting professionally, after being accused of damaging a resident’s car.

“Contrary to what we might expect, the pandemic and associated lockdowns did not result in a quieter time for minorities in Ireland,” said Oein De Bhairduin, an INAR board member.

“In fact, the situation worsened for minorities, both in terms of the absolute number of online and on-the-street hate incidents, and in terms of the disproportional impacts of Covid on almost all minority groups.

“It’s been a bad year for everyone and racism and hate crime have made it an even worse one for all minorities.” 

A Black Lives Matter flag in the US. Picture: AP Photo/Jim Mone

The report also claims that racial profiling “continues to be a feature of current practice, and there is no legislation to govern this practice”.

The report states: “When non-Irish people are subjected to police stops, and are required to produce identity cards, the practice has the potential to perpetuate racist incidents and the profiling of individuals on the basis of their race and colour.” 

The report’s author, Dr Lucy Michael, said: “The report findings are also disappointing in what they tell us about our institutions and how they respond to minorities. Minorities making complaints about repeat harassment have told us about more instances of inappropriate responses from gardaí than before.” 

 The report found that the group most commonly reporting experiences of both crime and illegal discrimination was the group of black-African, black-Irish and black-other.

They experienced 33% of all crime cases and 33% of all discrimination cases.

The report also found that perpetrators of racist crimes or racist incidents were four times more likely to be adults than young people.

Men were more than three times more likely to be perpetrators of racist crimes (45%) than women (13%) and almost twice as likely to be perpetrators of abuse (32%) than women (14%).

Hate speech

Of the 334 cases of racist hate speech reported last year, 282 were online.

The report claims that 119 were published on Facebook, 42 on Twitter, four on YouTube, 21 on Instagram, seven on Snapchat and two on TikTok.

Online forums hosted 16 of the reports containing explicit hate content. 22 were published on other websites.

Most of the hate speech reported was targeted at black poeple.

The groups most targeted were black-African, black-Irish and black-Other (74 in total), Muslim (69), Traveller (35), South Asian (54), Chinese (29), Jewish (23).

The findings state that 70 reports concerned racism against white-other Europeans, of which 56 concerned racism against Romanians and Roma on Facebook.

The report states that racism “has a demonstrable impact on the lives of those targeted.

“An analysis of the data on impact shows that there is psychological impact on those targeted, impact on their social connectedness, and financial impacts through for example increased costs or lost income.” 

It found that 57% of reports “described as having a psychological impact on the victim” - more than twice the rate reported in 2019.