Month: May 2024

(I have written a short(er) update to this story.)

The short version: a small group of agitators calling themselves the Clonmel Concerned Residents Group includes at least two deranged, racist conspiracy theorists who have both spoken for the group on local radio station Tipp FM, called Dee Dempsey and David Moloney. Dempsey is, to the best of my knowledge, an actual resident of Clonmel, and believes, among other things, that the Irish government is being directly controlled by Israel, and that housing for refugees is part of a Zionist plan to replace white Irish people with foreign settlers. Moloney is the operator of the Facebook page “Clonmel Concerned Residents Group”, official voice of the group and their campaign, even though he’s from Tipp Town, and has no connection to Clonmel whatsoever, by his own admission. He believes there’s a secret plan to construct a detention centre for asylum seekers in Clonmel, and claims he was personally told of this plan by Mattie McGrath, TD. At time of writing, Mattie McGrath has not responded to an email asking if he told Moloney this, and refused to give a straight answer to other questions about his communication with Moloney and the CCRG’s request for a list of buildings and sites in and around Clonmel that may be used as housing for refugees.

These people claim to speak for the residents of Clonmel, and particularly of the housing estates and halting site adjacent to a parcel of HSE-owned land on Heywood Road where the Department of Integration plans to build 82 modular homes to house currently homeless refugees from the war in Ukraine. They don’t speak for those people, and they know they don’t speak for those people. They’re being dishonest about the reasons for their opposition to the development, which is actually rooted in ludicrous conspiracy theories they are too cowardly to be upfront about. They’re deceiving people about this in part to recruit others with more sincere concerns into their campaign and use their well-meaning involvement as a shield against accurate criticism of the racist, conspiracist core of the group. They’ve begun going door-to-door with a petition in Clonmel, though they haven’t said what the petition is actually asking for on their Facebook page, and they definitely haven’t told anyone who’s signed the petition so far who they’re really signing up with.

In my opinion, that makes them liars and frauds. They should not be trusted or treated as a credible voice on these issues, and they definitely should not be amplified further by local media, who have already done a very disappointing job covering their activities. I don’t know the appropriate way to address what concerns surely do exist in Clonmel and in the vicinity of the site about this development, and I won’t pretend I do. But I am absolutely certain that this group is not acting with the interests of the town or its people in mind, and you shouldn’t buy whatever shit they’re selling.

If you want to know how I came to this conclusion, and see my evidence for my claims, you can read the full story below.

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Last week, I was disappointed to read a story posted on the website of my local radio station, Tipp FM: “Locals fear Clonmel modular homes will house International Protection Applicants” (23/04/24). You see, a handful of people had shown up outside a parcel of land that has been announced as a site for 82 modular homes for refugees and put up three shit signs, the shittest and most unsettling of which promised there would “be big trouble” if the plan was not abandoned (a photo of the sign is the header on the article). I’d already seen photos of their demonstration online, but I’d not heard that they were calling themselves “Clonmel Concerned Residents Group”, or that one of them had been interviewed earlier that day on Tipp FM’s flagship show, Tipp Today, as quoted in the article. I immediately clocked their incredibly vague name as suspicious, and decided to search for any trace of them on the Internet or social media before that day. My web searches returned only one result: the article I had just read. Irritated by what seemed like my local radio station falling for fairly obvious efforts by racist agitators to pass off their bigotry as concern, I wrote the following comment under the story on Facebook:

“Here lads, just wondering, do ye think ye have any responsibility to make sure the “Clonmel Concerned Residents Group” actually exists and isn’t just a name made up by a handful of local racists to barely disguise their obvious hate campaign as something more palatable? I’m just wondering because searching for this group on the Internet only turns up this article, so it kind of seems like me checking that just now involved more actual journalism than went into this article.”

Personally, as far as Facebook comments go, I think this is pretty good, and as I write this a week later, I feel pretty good about it. But right after posting it, doubts started to creep in. I’m not someone who’s comfortable just throwing out false accusations, and while I had literally zero doubt whatsoever that I was right about the racists, I worried I’d been too harsh on Tipp FM. Maybe it isn’t so obvious if you’re not a mildly paranoiac and deeply cynical crank like me, brain steeped in years of research into both conspiracy theories and real conspiracies, and the adjacent growth and development of far-right extremism over the last ten years. (I’m not an expert, to be clear, I’ve just followed the work of some journalists and researchers in these areas, read coverage, listened to podcasts, watched documentaries, even picked up a book or two.) I felt bad for assuming that Tipp FM could have reached my conclusion on their own and publicly lambasting them for not doing basic journalism when I hadn’t even checked if basic journalism would have worked.

Of course, I’m not a journalist and I have no journalistic training except maybe a couple of classes on reportage from the non-fiction semester of my creative writing degree. I did a bit of student journalism in university, but it was mostly criticism and commentary, and I wrote for a couple of wrestling news websites a few years ago, but I’d never investigated a story before. But I had a phone, an Internet connection and nothing better to do, apparently, so I decided to do some snooping and see what I came up with.

Continue reading ““Clonmel Concerned Residents Group” is a Racist Fraud” →