Update on “Clonmel Concerned Residents”

I wanted to do a quick follow-up to my previous piece regarding the “Clonmel Concerned Residents Group” and their apparent spokespeople Dee Dempsey and David Moloney. I wrote a long one instead, because I can’t even follow through on being lazy, apparently.

First, I wanted to address my attendance at their public meeting at Kickham Plaza on the 2nd of May, which they seemingly only discovered when a family member shared my piece into a local Facebook group two days later. I’ve been called a coward by members and supporters for going to the meeting and not, I guess, announcing myself and immediately challenging them to a public debate. But I wasn’t there to speak, I was there to listen. Partly just to see what they were really about in person, in their own words and on their own terms, but mostly because David Moloney had publicly threatened to name and shame a “local keyboard warrior” at this meeting. I knew the two social media accounts he identified as belonging to this “local keyboard warrior” actually belonged to two completely different people who didn’t even know each other, and though I was very tempted to chicken out of attending, I went anyway mainly to see if David followed through on his threat. It turns out I needn’t have bothered: there was no naming and shaming portion of the meeting, unless it happened after the group photo when people were chatting amongst themselves, and the meeting was livestreamed in a community Facebook group anyway. I could have just watched it at home.

I don’t regret going, though. Most days, I would agree with anyone who called me a coward. I am an anxious, fearful, cautious person. I don’t take risks, or put myself out there. Before this piece, I hadn’t done any substantial writing in almost three years because the last time I tried I had an anxiety attack so bad it gave me back spasms. But I didn’t feel like a coward writing this piece, and I definitely didn’t feel like a coward when I showed up alone and undisguised to a public protest primarily organised by two people I’d just publicly accused of being lying conspiracy theorists trying to recruit well-meaning people into a racist political endeavour. I want to stress “undisguised” because one supporter of the group, who threatened to assault me after learning my identity, mentioned the fact I was wearing sunglasses and had the hood of my coat up at the meeting as evidence of my cowardice. I had my hood up because it was raining, as did many present, including in the group photo at the end, and I almost always wear sunglasses when I go out for sensory reasons.

Also, I may have been silent, but I was not inconspicuous. I wasn’t hiding in a bush or spying on them from a nearby rooftop. I was stood right on the ramp leading from the street to the somewhat covered area where we were all sheltering from the weather. Dee Dempsey and David Moloney both walked right past me more than once. I drank a whole bottle of iced tea, ate a Wispa and smoked like five cigarettes. I kept foostering with my bag because I didn’t want to carry it, but the ground was wet, so I was trying to sit it on a railing, but then rain was dripping on it and I had paper inside, etc. I was bricking it the whole time, actually, because David Moloney had messaged me that morning and accused me (in a cryptic, roundabout way I didn’t fully understand at the time) of also being this “local keyboard warrior” he was threatening to name and shame.

But I went anyway, alone, and I stayed, I watched, I listened. I heard what they had to say, and to be honest, I don’t have much to say about it. It was a mix of legitimate criticism of the government’s failures in housing, health and education, scaremongering lies about refugees and immigrants, and the personal bugbears of various people piping in from the crowd. The most refreshing moment, for me, was when someone cut past the waffle and the conspiracy talk to say his only concern is safety, he reckons people coming over here are all rapists and murderers, and he just doesn’t want them. I genuinely wish more people would be as upfront and straightforward about what they feel and what they believe instead of dressing it all up in concern and conspiracy.

David Moloney posted a choppily-edited video of this meeting on the Concerned Clonmel Residents Facebook page, but I believe the full livestream remains available in the local Facebook group where it was first broadcast. I want to be very clear that I do not believe the operator of this Facebook group to be a member of the CCRG or involved in their campaign in any way. I believe they streamed it because it was a public event and they were asked to, and they would do the same for any public event in Clonmel. They also streamed the protest in support of autism services over the weekend, for example. David’s edited version of this stream is now one of only two posts left on the original “Concerned Clonmel Residents Group” page at time of writing.

The other declares the page “has been replaced for logistics by” a new one simply called “Concerned Clonmel Residents“, which already has a positive review from one of its own supporters calling it a “proactive – progressive group”. (I hope, regardless of our politics, we can all agree that’s very, very funny.) Presumably the previous page was scrapped because both its mysteriously Dublin-based address and David’s own increasingly deranged posts about the “local keyboard warrior” (whose name and photo he did ultimately post on this page prior to deleting all the old posts) were making the page a bit off-putting to new recruits and provoking a lot of negative feedback. The comments sections on most of the posts had already been completely cleared because David had to delete so many from people asking piercing questions like “aren’t you just some guy from a completely different town?” and “do you have any evidence for that?” and so on. I have to imagine the new page will be primarily operated by someone less volatile and more capable of maintaining this new, more positive tone they seem to be striking. David is certainly still involved: the profile picture on the new group at time of writing is an “infographic” about an imaginary opinion poll made and used by him previously. But it seems like maybe, just maybe, someone else finally took him aside and begged him to stop posting, and maybe, just maybe, he agreed.

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Second, I wanted to say that I have still not received an answer to my previous two emails to Mattie McGrath. I sent a third email this afternoon, reiterating my unanswered questions and asking some new ones about claims made by Dee Dempsey and another speaker at the 2nd of May meeting that Mattie McGrath has been helping the group behind the scenes. They said he’s the only local politician willing to help them, but I have to assume they mean the only elected official willing to help them, as an Irish Freedom Party candidate named Martin Murphy is also a supporter, though he’s from a different town and running in a different local electoral area. I mention Murphy because he made a frivolous legal threat about my claim in my piece that I do not feel the need to prove the Irish Freedom Party are a racist organisation, which I find very funny because obviously the only way to prove that claim true would be for me to refuse to even try to prove the Irish Freedom Party are a racist organisation, since I don’t feel any need. I also mention Martin Murphy because the Irish Freedom Party’s chairperson, Michael Leahy, met Mattie in Clonmel while canvassing with Murphy and shared a friendly photo with him.

This reminded me of another friendly photo Mattie shared on the campaign trail in 2020 with the IFP’s previous chairperson Dolores Cahill, who ran unsuccessfully for the Dáil here in Tipperary and who was later driven out of the party because her extreme anti-vaccine views were starting to get embarrassing, even for them. It’s not just the circumstances that reminded me either, the two photos were literally taken around the corner from each other, four years apart. I’m not the first person to notice that Mattie McGrath has been very friendly with the IFP for a long time, but I’ve seen no substantial investigation into this link from the Irish media so far, which is pretty alarming when a German judge who actively plotted to overthrow her government in a violent coup has been a guest of the IFP and their leader Hermann Kelly on more than one occasion. I would personally love to know about the connections between a sitting TD and a right-wing party whose leader was besties with a sitting judge and far-right lunatic until she was arrested for trying to make herself Minister for Justice of the restored Second Reich. But I suspect I will have to settle for wondering. Anyway, if Mattie gets back to me on any of my questions, I will provide an update, but only if he actually answers them.

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Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who reached out to say they appreciated the article. My goal in writing it was to inform the people of Clonmel, and I am especially grateful to those who’ve shared it within the community. While I clearly do not take the CCRG and their activities in the town lightly, I believe at this point they’re still small enough for word of mouth about their real agenda to prove a serious obstacle to recruiting and organising here, and I’m more sincerely hopeful about that now than I ever was while writing the article itself. Even the CCRG know they’re running out of people to convince in Clonmel, which is why David announced in a now-deleted post they were expanding their petition campaign to get signatures from all around South Tipperary. They still haven’t publicly explained what the petition is actually for, with all questions about its content swiftly deleted on social media, which leads me to suspect they aren’t being honest about what it’s for with the people signing it either. Despite the positive bluster at their meeting about how 90% or more of people support them at the door, I reckon there just isn’t much appetite for campaigning against refugee housing around here.

I’ve never really had a piece primarily reach its audience through social media before: the best-performing articles I’ve written for my other blog are all about niche films and TV shows that do well because no one else writes about them, so they show up high when other nerds search for them online. I actually planned to stay off social media until today when I first posted it, assuming it’d get no attention outside my friends and family and I could leave checking in until then. If reacting to what actually happened made the long weekend a bit more stressful than I’d planned, it was thoroughly outweighed by the lovely messages and warm conversations that followed. I have often felt politically alone in my life, but the last few days, I can’t help but keep thinking there really are more of us out there than either the ruling class or the fascists want us to know.

I will definitely be keeping an eye on these clowns moving forward, but I don’t know if I’ll be doing further investigation, and I’m definitely not doing any kind of ongoing updates. I don’t really buy either side of the “platforming” debate, but I know that I don’t want to participate in turning far-right political activity into a media spectacle. The people who called me a coward for not speaking to them at their meeting are just annoyed I didn’t give them a chance to be in a video where a TRUE IRISH PATRIOT EPICALLY DESTROYS LEFTIST TROLL and get wanked off by all their racist friends for being so tough and smart. Dee Dempsey is so desperate to talk to me, she messaged me privately and approached me in public to tell me she’s always available for an interview. But I know better than to point a microphone at someone who wants to use my “platform”, however tiny it is, to amplify their horseshit.

More practically though, with the original CCRG page stripped bare and the new one trying a more subtle approach, I’m just not sure there’s much for me to investigate. I didn’t actually do a lot of deep digging to find the information in my previous piece. Half my point was to show how trivially easy it would have been for a journalist to do. But I’m not a journalist, and I don’t have either the training or the resources to do more. To me, the holy grail would be accessing the mysterious WhatsApp group where David claims the details of people who speak against the group are shared, and where I presume the majority of their internal communication and organisation happens. I know of researchers and journalists who have managed to infiltrate far-right groups at this level, but I guess I’ll just have to let the mystery be.

I may write further on some of the issues and themes raised, and I will almost certainly write again about Mattie McGrath unless he does both his county and his country a huge favour by losing his seat and fucking off into private life. I won’t hold my breath though. As the old joke goes, why was Osama bin Laden buried at sea? So Mattie couldn’t attend the funeral. He’s a gombeen for the love of the game, and I’m sure his only regret on his deathbed will be that he can’t shake hands at his own wake.

If anyone just enjoyed my writing and reckons they might also enjoy my writing about film and TV (and occasionally music), you can find almost everything I’ve ever written over at The Sundae, a website I co-created with my friend Ciara. You can also listen to our very, very good podcast, The Sundae Presents, if you prefer to hear people chat about films. Thanks again to everyone who sent me messages of support.

Solidarity forever.