Irish politics is showing symptoms of the US culture wars — we wanted to know why 

Just like other cultural influences have been exported from the US, so too could the often hateful, toxic rhetoric of this new era of Maga politics, nowhere more obvious than Irish anti-migrant protestors waving Trump flags and wearing ‘Make Ireland Great Again’ hats

In the aftermath of the Dublin riots in November 2023, a flood of US political figures posted about the incident. 

I’m what the kids call an "elder millennial". I was born in 1982 and grew up the youngest of three siblings in the 90s on the northside of Dublin. The area where I grew up was working class and it could be tough at the best of times, so when we got our first cinema in 1991, the UCI (United Cinemas International) in Coolock, I was pretty much there week in week out. It didn’t really matter what was showing, it was the escapism that appealed to me.

With the occasional exception, almost every movie at UCI came from the US. I distinctly remember getting lost in the world of My Girl when I was eight. In my teen years, it was Scream, Swingers, Grosse Point Blank, TV shows like Dawson’s Creek and The X-Files, music from Foo Fighters and the Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t an active obsession with American culture — American culture just seemed to be omnipresent in my life.