For my previous articles on Clonmel Concerned Residents, see here and here.
I genuinely meant it when I said I didn’t intend to write about Clonmel Concerned Residents and their campaign against housing for refugees in the town again any time soon. I won’t pretend I haven’t gotten anything from the experience of investigating and writing about this group, but I equally won’t pretend it didn’t take a toll on me. The actual footwork mostly consisted of reading posts and comments and watching videos that were alternately tedious and disgusting. I needed a break and already had one booked, a visit with friends in London, my first holiday since before the pandemic apart from a weekend sojourn to catch a Frankie Boyle show. I’d everyone in my life telling me I needed to look away for at least a few days or I’d go cracked, and for once, I listened and looked forward to unplugging and detoxing and all that good shit.
Unfortunately, the pace of events did not respect the sanctity of my travel plans. First, two core members of Clonmel Concerned Residents, Dee Dempsey and Shane Smith, announced they would be running in the local elections in Clonmel. Then, on the 13th of May, members of Clonmel Concerned Residents established a camp on the Heywood Road and began a campaign of direct action to obstruct the development of 82 modular homes intended to house currently homeless Ukrainian refugees. They had previously announced their plans to occupy the site at the 2nd of May meeting I attended, though I chose not to publicise it in my previous post for fear of giving them free advertising.
That night, I also sent my previous posts to several local media outlets, including Tipp FM. I mention Tipp FM specifically because they replied immediately the next morning, so I know for a fact they’ve had everything I’ve reported since then, and I think it’s important they not be able to plead ignorance about how extreme this group is and has been from the start. I was already fairly anxious about how fast everything was happening as I was heading off, but I was still shocked by just how quickly things escalated in the next few days. By the 17th, there had been a night-time attack on the site in which a number of construction vehicles were burnt out, along with the small plywood shelter that Clonmel Concerned Residents had built for their camp. More concerningly, security staff at the site were assaulted, with one man requiring hospitalisation. I have no evidence that Clonmel Concerned Residents were involved in this attack or a possible second incident of arson, but they celebrated it all the same and doubled down on their campaign with, at best, complete indifference to the risk of further violence.
They organised a march in Clonmel on the 25th of May that drew in cranks from the South Tipp area and beyond to swell their own very small numbers and use the turnout to create a false impression of popular local support when the reality is that there is no appetite for this kind of politics in Clonmel. I’m under no illusions about Tipp being a lefty homeland either. We have one of the most conservative electorates in the country, but it’s a very traditional, cautious kind of conservatism already well-served within the spectrum of the Irish political mainstream. Before this march, Clonmel Concerned Residents had never turned out more than 30-40 people at a single event in a town of over fifteen thousand and even with outside agitators answering their call for support, they’ve barely fielded more than a dozen people on the Heywood Road at a time. They turned out substantially fewer people at a second march over the weekend, even though the first march was rained out and the stones were splitting for the second. The truth is that even most people in Clonmel who oppose the modular homes do not support Clonmel Concerned Residents and their campaign or their tactics. They can claim to speak for the silent majority all they like, but these are not marches by or for the people of Clonmel, they are marches by and for a national far right movement actively looking for towns to turn into sites of confrontation, whether the residents like it or not, and must be understood as such.
Events in Clonmel are now being reported on in both the national press and online outlets of the far right, with the former providing scant information and little context, while the latter are actively propagandising on behalf of Clonmel Concerned Residents, presenting them as the vanguard of a townwide rebellion instead of a handful of cranks so marginal only about half of their own public-facing members even live here. I have no illusions about anything I write making much of an impact in either of those media ecosystems, but I can keep doing my best to let the people of Clonmel know who this group really are, what they really believe and what they really care about.
This time, I have headings.
Who Didn’t Start the Fire?
I want to start by making it clear that I’m not just saying I have no evidence that Clonmel Concerned Residents were involved in the arson and assault because I’m trying to cover my arse legally. Whatever I might be inclined to suspect, I take no position on what happened and make no speculation. I’m too skeptical of my own judgement to make any assumptions, let alone accusations. The past doesn’t care what you reckon happened, it already did happen, one way or the other. We can try to figure out the truth, but we can only know what we can prove, and I have no hard evidence to go on.
But, for what it’s worth, they wouldn’t be my own prime suspects. My impression of the CCR strategy is that they’re very consciously staying on just the right side of peaceful and lawful so their protests won’t be shut down and they can disguise the ugliness of their beliefs behind the facade of simple “concern”. I just don’t buy them taking things so far so quickly. I’ve seen defenders of theirs cite the burning of their camp as evidence it was far-left attackers who only burnt the diggers to cover up their real target, which is obviously ridiculous, because no one does hundreds of thousands in property damage to draw attention away from torching a plywood shack. But I also don’t think the CCR torched their own shack to draw attention away from burning the diggers. I may not think highly of them, but they’re not the “knuckle draggers” I’ve seen some people call them online and I don’t think they’re stupid enough to undercut their own messaging so abruptly. I’m not pretending they’re strategic geniuses, but they have a strategy and they have been following it, and the sudden escalation to violence and destruction doesn’t track as part of that strategy.
What does track as part of that strategy is creating a social media spectacle around their campaign, broadcasting their activities in a simultaneous effort to recruit new members in the area, propagandise and misinform about the nature of their protest, and spread the call for like-minded people across the country to join them in Clonmel. That’s what the CCR is doing and while I don’t think they burned out those diggers, I think they’ve created the conditions in Clonmel for others to burn out those diggers while the CCR get to play the martyr when they are falsely accused of doing it. And, you know, I get it. They’re the obvious suspects. But the truth isn’t always obvious, and there are plenty of plausible scenarios where people neither involved with nor known to the CCR committed these crimes, for ideological reasons or other motives. But I don’t need to speculate to know they’re hateful people engaged in a hateful protest, because they don’t do that under cover of night, they do that in broad daylight, and they film themselves doing it and post about it all day.
When last I wrote about Clonmel Concerned Residents, they had just set up their new page on Facebook, currently called Clonmel Concerned Residents (Official Clonmel Concerned Residents). The original page, previously called Clonmel Concerned Residents Group, but recently retitled Tipperary Concerned Residents, is still online and its creator David Moloney is still posting from it. I had been under the impression that Moloney was no longer working with Dee Dempsey and the other core members, as he seemed to have taken a backseat in the campaign. However, the CCR page has shared a truly terrible video he made promoting the campaign, he collaborated with founding member Shane Smith on a slightly less terrible video about the Tipp village of Dundrum, and he seems to have been heavily involved in their second march. I suppose I’m glad David has at least stopped pretending to speak for a town he has no connection to whatsoever, but I’d be happier if he’d stop pretending to speak for anyone but himself and posted from his personal account, like a normal crank, or even better, just shut up altogether.
I previously believed Dee Dempsey was the primary if not sole operator of the new Clonmel Concerned Residents page, but Dee revealed in her speech after their first march the page is actually run by another member called Tina Denn, who briefly spoke herself. Nonetheless, Dee still seems to be their main ringleader, while Shane Smith seems to have replaced her as their main spokesperson. They and several others who’ve been part of this campaign at least as long as I’ve been monitoring it are the main people I’ve identified as protestors on the Heywood Road, and Shane is the only member I believe has visited their camp for more than a few minutes in over a week. I don’t think they’ve achieved much if any further recruitment to their cause within the town or even in the South Tipp area since I last wrote about them – in fact, I think the group has shrunk – and I think the few core people involved has remained basically consistent. There are three I want to focus on in some detail – Dee Dempsey, Shane Smith and a man called Keith – but I think it’s worth a quick overview of how the campaign has developed, how they’ve been protesting on the Heywood Road, and who they’ve had coming to town to support them.
While the group has moved on to direct action on the ground, the campaign has remained very active on social media, primarily through the new Facebook page, but also on social media accounts belonging to its members, and there’s been a very interesting bifurcation between the two that really highlights just how dishonest their approach is. When the new page first started, there was virtually no mention of what they were actually campaigning about, just a load of soft language about vague “concern”. They also partook in what I’ve personally found one of the more disgusting tactics of the local far right, proclaiming support for a popular grassroots campaign for autism services in the area in an effort to use the existing good will toward that campaign in the town as a thin cloak of kindliness over the fundamental meanness and pettiness of their politics. I first saw this tactic when a local election candidate for Cahir called Tom Hennessy spoke at a march for autism services on the 4th of May and used the second half of his remarks to rant about how much the government was spending on kenneling the pets of Ukrainian refugees. It’s slimy and manipulative and betrays just how much more the far right care about hating those they hate than helping those they claim to love.
Thankfully, as the occupation began and the campaign shifted more overtly into outreach to the far right across Ireland instead of wasting more time on getting signatures for their dodgy petition, they dropped their efforts to appear involved in admirable causes in the area in favour of propagandising their own activities. The soft, positive tone has more or less remained even as it strains to fit the aggression and hostility it’s describing. It’s all “people power” this and “peaceful protest” that, even as they spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, and refer to anyone who opposes them as traitors.
On the 13th of May, the same day the occupation began, Mattie McGrath forwarded Clonmel Concerned Residents an email he’d received pursuant to a FOIA request confirming ongoing negotiations between the Department of Integration and Hearns Hotel in Clonmel about their possibly providing accommodation to asylum seekers. Mattie sent this sensitive information directly to Clonmel Concerned Residents even though he knows they believe any individuals or business who participate in or even support the housing of refugees here are “enemies of Clonmel” who should be boycotted and blacklisted. I know he knows because in the course of writing my original article, I sent him a graphic made and posted by the group in which a photo of Hearns Hotel itself is captioned “Enemies of Clonmel” alongside calls to boycott and blacklist them. Mattie was still replying to my emails at that point, and when I asked if he endorsed their call to boycott and blacklist businesses who house refugees, he said he didn’t, and yet he sent this sensitive information about a business possibly housing refugees to that same group the day he received it. I find that almost as astonishing as Mattie referring to this group as “ordinary citizens” of Clonmel during remarks in the Dáil when I know he knows this is a small group of extremists, many of whom aren’t even residents of Clonmel. The group have mysteriously stopped publicising their communications with Mattie since my efforts to highlight them online began to gain traction, so I couldn’t say whether he’s ceased any involvement with them or is just publicising it even less than he already wasn’t. But what I can say is that he had a private meeting with Clonmel Concerned Residents on the 10th of May, just days before the occupation began, and that at least Dee Dempsey was present at that meeting according to a video she posted on a since-deleted TikTok account. I don’t know the nature or extent of Mattie’s involvement with Clonmel Concerned Residents, but I remain hopeful that someone at some point will ask him to account for it.
I bring all this up because a particular focus of rumour-mongering on the page has been on the alleged ownership of Hearns Hotel by a local restaurateur the CCR seemingly have a problem with mainly because of his ethnicity. That man has previously made posts denying any affiliation with Hearns Hotel on his personal Facebook account, but recently made more posts of that nature from the accounts of his businesses, which, in typical fashion, primarily seems to have provoked further speculation and conspiracising. Dee Dempsey posted a video to TikTok the same day she received that email from Mattie, using a screenshot of that email as the background, where she threatened this man and his businesses, ending it by saying:
This is the contradiction in their messaging this group simply cannot sustain while trying to promote their campaign on social media. They can post all the soft words they want, and even sometimes bother to play nice on camera for individual videos. But the videos they’ve posted of themselves protesting on the Heywood Road are not nice, and posting them with smiley faces and hearts in the caption doesn’t hide the vileness of their behaviour, it just highlights the gap between their framing and their actions.
I’ve only watched a fraction of the videos posted online by members of the group myself, and while I won’t be linking them here because I am not going to help them destroy the privacy of the workers they’re filming and harassing, everything I’m about to describe comes from their own videos that they recorded and posted online of their own free will. I have copies of these videos in case they’re deleted, but to be honest, I don’t expect them to do any cleaning up. To quote a great film that makes me very angry whenever I watch it: they’re not confessing, they’re bragging. They don’t think any of this behaviour is shameful, in fact, they’re posting it online and basking in the praise they get from like-minded people. They clearly don’t think it makes them look bad, so they definitely shouldn’t mind me informing others about it.
Just citing to videos posted on Twitter by a single member of this group, I saw what seemed to be almost constant verbal harassment and abuse of workers on the site, possibly lasting for most of their work day. Even before I describe the content, I want you to just pause and imagine what it would be like to try and get through a day of work while a group of people shout and roar at you for hours. They claim to have successfully driven multiple workers to tears and even to quitting, and they only claim one of those workers quit in solidarity, rather than as a result of their relentless hounding. It may be a peaceful protest in that it has been a nonviolent one, but it has also been aggressive, cruel and intimidating.
They call the workers traitors and slurs, and tell them their wives and children are going be raped and murdered by foreigners and it will be their fault when it happens. They ask the workers where they’re from and accuse those that don’t answer of being illegal immigrants themselves. They mock them for refusing to engage and for wearing bandanas to cover their faces, while filming them and calling them cowards. I’ve even heard at least one person make a direct threat of physical violence against workers when they didn’t realise a live camera was nearby (more on that later). They make bigoted remarks to any workers they reckon are foreigners, but the worst they save for those they reckon are local lads. I’ve heard members of Clonmel Concerned Residents shouting at those workers, addressing them by name, telling them their reputations will be destroyed and they won’t be able to show their face in town again. I’ve heard them laughing about leaving young men’s faces red with tears from the crying after enduring hours of abuse from these “patriots”.
It was sickening to watch and I desperately wish I could forget it all, but it is clarifying. This is what “Clonmel Concerned Residents” mean when they say they care about this town and its people. They cynically appeal to all the real pain and frustration and heartache that people in this country are going through, they name all the real problems with housing, healthcare and education, and then they channel all their time and energy and passion into shouting abuse at workers on the site of future refugee housing instead of doing literally anything, one single thing, to fight those real problems. If your furious speech about autism services builds to a fiery denunciation of kenneling the pets of refugees, I’m going to reasonably conclude that kenneling the pets of refugees is a greater outrage in your moral universe than the failure to provide autism services. If your campaign of concern for the peace and safety of Clonmel drives you toward harassing and verbally abusing people, I’m going to reasonably conclude that you just enjoy harassing and verbally abusing people and your “concern” is just a thin excuse to do it while pretending it makes you a hero.
That is the style and the substance of this entire campaign: hateful people doing hateful things for hateful reasons. That is what they’re doing on the ground and putting out into the world on social media, where it is being boosted by a network of Irish far right influencers and alternative “news” sources that functions both as a parallel media ecosystem for those within the extremist fringe and a propaganda mill reframing far right activity as righteous and heroic populist resistance to the establishment. It’s here the far right narrative about Clonmel is being shaped and broadcast. There has been an especially bizarre ad hoc effort by these boosters to centre their story around an old tree in the field that some members of Clonmel Concerned Residents reckon is going to get cut down in the course of developing the site, though I have no evidence of that myself and only their obviously unreliable word to go on. But I wanted to briefly highlight it as an example of how weirdly the far right are portraying events in Clonmel online, because that in itself is a significant obstacle to people trying to find accurate information about it: not just misinformation itself, but chaotic and confusing framing that makes it seem like there’s more than one story when there really isn’t. There’s a bunch of racists on a hill, and a town waiting for them to fuck off for good.
Fortunately, as work seems to have stopped on the Heywood Road site for the time being, the group announced they were ceasing active protest there and shifting focus to providing support to similar groups in other towns in Tipp, though they also immediately announced a second march in Clonmel. They haven’t abandoned the camp per se, but to the best of my knowledge, it is not currently occupied by anyone from Clonmel, but rather an ally of the group from Wicklow called Leroy McGuire, an agitator who’s been travelling the country to support protests like theirs. He posts on Twitter and TikTok as both “Arklow Says No” and “Kildare Says No”, and his live stream of the CCR’s first march in town was promoted by CCR member Keith on Twitter, apparently unaware of the visual irony of saying “Well done Clonmel” over a link to a TikTok called “Arklow Says No”.
Unfortunately, two of the CCR’s founding members have decided to run in the local elections: Dee Dempsey here in Clonmel and Shane Smith in Cahir. I’ll take a closer look at this pair in the next section, but I think it’s worth reviewing some other candidates who came to visit the camp during their occupation or joined them at the second, smaller march.
Tom Hennessy, the candidate I mentioned from Cahir, has posted videos from the Heywood Road on two different days (1, 2, 3, 4). Tom is obviously running to unseat sitting councillors from Cahir, so it’s extremely inconvenient for him that Tipperary County Council have no say over the development, as the site is owned by the HSE and the homes are being put in by the Department of Integration. He wants to be able to blame it on the sitting councillors so he can claim he’ll reverse it if elected, and even though that’s not true, he blames them anyway. He also speaks in one video of his demand for the council to not only stop cooperating with Minister Roderic O’Gorman on the development, but to stop all communications with him and his department altogether. I’m not sure how he thinks a local consultative process on refugee housing would even happen in this scenario, but then again, I don’t think he or anyone else really cares about having a consultative process unless they can hijack it for their own ends. I’m not personally familiar with Hennessy or his political background, but he posts a lot about Irish republican history in Tipperary and his campaign launch was attended by Mattie McGrath and a fellow local election candidate, Liam Browne, who previously ran as a Sinn Féin candidate in both local and general elections without success, but is currently running as an independent on an anti-immigration platform. I also don’t know how serious Hennessy is about getting elected, especially since his campaign literature suggests he thinks county councillors have a say in immigration policy, but if he’s genuinely running to win, I’m curious how he feels about Shane Smith running in the same constituency and potentially splitting the vote.
Derek Blighe of Ireland First posted a video from the site on the 17th of May, claiming “the locals aren’t happy”. I have no evidence he spoke to any locals, even to members of Clonmel Concerned Residents, and I’d actually assume he hasn’t because he condescendingly exhorts people to get organised and obstruct work on the site in the video, even though he posted it four days into the CCR’s occupation. It’s far beyond the scope of this piece to go into Blighe’s long history of racist agitation and misinformation, but some highlights would include him organising a protest outside Mount St. Joseph in Cork because he thought some African Presentation Brothers coming back from a conference in Tallaght were “military-aged males” being “planted” in Cork, or faslely claiming the child victim of the Parnell Square stabbing had died a week after the attack. Blighe is currently running to become an MEP for Ireland South, though I’ve little fear he’ll get in, if for no other reason than the far right vote here will be split between him, the Irish Freedom Party’s Michael Leahy and the Irish People’s Ross Lahive, never mind the smattering of independent far right candidates running this year. As the arson and assault on the site occurred shortly after his visit, I’ve seen speculation he or people known to him were involved, but again, I’m skeptical. People like Blighe don’t need to get their hands dirty when they can incite other people to do it. I’d find it far more plausible he inspired the attack than ordered it.
Una McGurk is another Ireland South MEP candidate, who marched with the CCR on the 1st of June and gave a speech afterward I found so boring I can’t even remember most of what she said as I type this minutes after watching it. McGurk is a barrister and former member of the International Protection Appeals Tribunal who faced criticism and calls for her dismissal from that body when she spoke at an anti-mask rally in 2020, alongside such luminaries of the anti-lockdown and COVID denial movement as disgraced ex-chair of the Irish Freedom Party Dolores Cahill, fascist barrister Tracy O’Mahoney and former Aontú councillor Dr. Anne McCloskey. I’m not sure how much further down the rabbit hole of conspiracism she’s fallen since then, but back in 2021, she was claiming media coverage of COVID was “nothing more mass hypnosis”, and that the World Economic Forum was trying to establish a one-world government as part of a “transhumanist agenda”, whatever that means. The only interesting part of McGurk’s contribution, to me, is that she encouraged people to vote both for her and a local election candidate in Waterford called Michael McCarthy.
Michael McCarthy described himself as an independent candidate when he briefly tried to speak at the Main Guard in Clonmel prior to the start of the second march, though the official TikTok account of The Irish People claims him as one of their candidates. I have never heard of the man before, and I’m baffled by his presence at the march because although parts of Clonmel and the surrounding area are in the Dáil constituency of Waterford, they’re in the Portlaw-Kilmacthomas LEA, not the Lismore LEA where McCarthy is running. I’m also baffled because I immediately discovered on doing the slightest research that McCarthy is such an obvious political liability I can’t imagine why anyone would want to associate with him, even other racists. He’s running on a platform he calls “the McCarthy Plan”, which he believes will end all war forever, which is already pretty ambitious for a local election candidate. But the details of this plan include some of the most insanely racist things I’ve ever heard from any candidate in any Irish election ever. He believes any “foreigner” who commits a crime with a custodial sentence should serve it in “a secure civilized labour and education facility”, then be permanently deported, and even more incredibly, that “miscegenation”, i.e. people of different races or ethnicities having children, “is something to be discouraged”, including by outlawing it if “necessary”. I consider myself a pretty jaded and cynical person, but I have to tell you, my jaw dropped reading that one. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Clonmel Concerned Residents invited him to the march, and he probably just showed up with Una McGurk, but presumably someone in the group invited Una McGurk, so it’s not exactly six degrees of separation either.
I suppose for completion’s sake I should also mention Martin Murphy, the local candidate for the Irish Freedom Party in Carrick-on-Suir LEA. Even though Murphy has been involved in Clonmel Concerned Residents from the start and was mentioned in both my previous pieces, I frequently forget he exists because I find him desperately boring. After reading my first piece on the campaign, Murphy told me I had 24 hours to retract my statement that I feel no need to prove the Irish Freedom Party is a racist organisation or I’d hear from the IFP’s lawyers, but that was over a month ago, so I wouldn’t trust him to deliver on any campaign promises either. Despite running in a different electoral area, he spends way, way more time tweeting about Clonmel than Carrick, in fact, at time of writing, he’s tweeted about Clonmel more than twice as many times as he’s tweeted about Carrick. I know counting tweets is a petty metric, but his is a petty campaign, and deeper analysis would require his candidacy to have any depth in the first place. He’s the least serious far right candidate I’ve come across in Tipp so far, and two of those candidates are CCR members who aren’t even running to win.
Meet the Candidates
Dee Dempsey and Shane Smith have been involved in this group since day one, and both are running in the locals this coming weekend, Dee in the Clonmel LEA, where I live, and Shane in the Cahir LEA, where I’m from. I’ve been working on this piece for weeks now, and this has been the hardest part to get done. Dee has been politically active since at least 2014, but her public footprint, at least as it’s recorded online, is fairly scattershot and especially hard to wade through because she seems to start new accounts over and over on different social media websites. Sometimes because her previous accounts were banned, sometimes because she locked herself out of them, and sometimes for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom. She also frequently changes the spelling of her name, and sometimes has multiple accounts at the same time, usually one under her name and one under the moniker “Dimple” or “Dimples”. From what I can see, she’s currently on her fourth TikTok account, and apart from videos I preserved from her last one, the only trace of her previous ones are videos uploaded by supporters on YouTube or critics on Twitter . Shane’s footprint is sparser still: as far as I can tell, his only social media account is his TikTok, where his oldest videos with any political content date to February of this year.
I’d rather not have to rely on social media at all, but for all their crowing about transparency, neither Dee nor Shane is being transparent with the people of their respective electoral areas about their political agendas, and the only way I’ve been able to piece together anything like a clear picture of them has been trawling the Internet, and at a time when it’s never been less searchable. There’s every possibility that they’ve been mentioned in news stories I’ve just not been able to find, and it’s almost a certainty with Dee, not least because of her background as a dancer and dance teacher. Neither Dee nor Shane is running to win, by their own admission, though Dee is at least pretending she’s running to win and made a very interesting promise in her speech just after the first march. They’re running to try and force their agendas onto the table by availing of local media coverage that generally aims to give every candidate on the ballot a chance to make their case, and to raise their own profiles in the Irish far right.
When I first wrote about Dee back at the start of May, I had no idea about her long history on the Irish political fringe. The whole point of that first piece was to show how quickly anyone could find out how ridiculous her beliefs are if they did a little due diligence, so I focused on things she’d expressed recently on her (since-deleted) TikTok account dimpledempsey555:
Dee believes the Irish government is under the direct control of Israel, and that immigration into Ireland, including our acceptance of refugees and asylum seekers, is part of a Zionist plan to replace white Irish people with foreign invaders. She has repeatedly compared this “plantation” to the Israeli settlement of Palestine. She claims Roderic O’Gorman, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, is trafficking children through state services for an international human trafficking and child abuse ring, including deliberately placing children in the care of pedophiles. She believes the weather is being controlled with chemicals “farted out by the planes”, because recently it was raining heavily on an otherwise sunny day. She thinks Michelle Obama is secretly transgender.
Despite what some people have assumed, I’m unusually sympathetic to conspiracist belief, and would go so far as to say that believing in conspiracies is a perfectly rational response to prevailing social and political conditions, even if a given conspiracy theory is irrational. I’m a conspiracy theorist myself by many metrics, largely just because I think intelligence agencies have done even more evil shit than we already know about, and I actually don’t think believing in conspiracies is inherently disqualifying. Conspiracies are both a fact of history and a fact of life. What’s disqualifying, to me, is not just believing but advocating beliefs that break the laws of physics, deny the general historical record, defy all sense, or can’t be substantiated with credible evidence. In fairness to her, Dee’s new TikTok has a lot of less that shit on it than her previous one did, even if her new TikTok has given me the impression she genuinely believes fairies are actually real. But in even more fairness to her, I’ve learned in the last few weeks that Dee has been a crank for a long time, at least ten years.
Way back in November 2014, Dee spoke to Seamus Martin on Tipp Today, as a member of the Irish Democratic Party, a tiny fringe party which had recently split from Direct Democracy Ireland, a slightly less tiny fringe party now known as Liberty Republic. Since she split from them, I’m not gonna hold Dee’s membership of DDI against her, though DDI’s “freemen of the land” / “sovereign citizen” conspiracist politics still influence her own bespoke blend of batty bullshit. The Irish Democratic Party never really got off the ground, but while they split from DDI in part due to DDI’s conspiracist associations, they also launched with getting fluoride out of the water as a key plan in their platform, a conspiracist bugbear so old that Stanley Kubrick mocked it in Dr. Strangelove. A couple of years later, she was actively involved with the Anti-Eviction Taskforce in Limerick, a controversial group who agitated for an eviction ban and tried to disrupt home repossessions, including through direct action in court. Before the pandemic, Dee’s moment in the spotlight seems to have been this interview she gave outside a courthouse in Limerick about evictions and repossessions driving people to suicide, and I have no trouble admitting she’s surprisingly good here, especially when the guy interviewing her accuses her of being “over-dramatic” for saying the banks are putting people in a position where a noose seems like the only way out. I mean, my respect was undercut a fair bit when I realised she’d given this interview minutes after entering the court in a stupid mask and silly cape to give a rambling speech as “The Death (Debt) Collector“, but I think the Dee Dempsey of 2016 is someone I could have talked to without wanting to kill myself after three minutes.
Unfortunately, by the time I can find any traces of Dee after the pandemic, she’s already been fully far right for years. She says in her campaign leaflet that since 2019 she’s “travelled the country opposing lockdowns, experimential trial injections, the attack on free speech, and the sexualisation of our children”, but I can’t really account for her political activities between the demonstration at the courthouse in 2016 and her second moment in the spotlight last year, when she made a video falsely claiming over 25 cases of rape and sexual assault committed by migrants occurred between the 5th of January and the 19th of February, with no resulting prosecutions. The Journal did an excellent and thorough debunk of this video I’d encourage anyone to read if they want to see just how dishonest Dee Dempsey is, but the big one is that, of the 17 cases she mentions that The Journal could match to public reports, literally zero of them occurred in 2023, with the most recent in 2017 and the earliest in 2000, over two decades ago. This is what really gets to me about Dee: not what she believes, but what she says she believes even though she knows it’s not true.
This isn’t misinformation she picked up somewhere else, this is misinformation she created to spread the false idea that migrants in Ireland are particularly likely to commit violent crime, and I find this especially disgusting when said in reference to sex crimes. If you give even the slightest shit about the nature and extent of sexual violence, especially against children, it is basic 101 knowledge that the overwhelming majority of all rape and abuse is committed by people known to their victims, not by strangers in the street. Statisically, you’re far more likely to be raped or abused by a family member than a random migrant, but the far right don’t care about what’s true, they just care about promoting their hateful agenda. Dee’s video went viral in online far right circles and scored her a since-deleted interview with Derek Blighe five days after The Journal had already demonstrated her claims were bollocks. It infuriates me that anyone could claim they’re trying to protect women and children from sexual violence and abuse while knowingly misleading people about how sexual violence and abuse happens. I find it especially hard to take from Dee, who posted a video less than a month later in which she said, in part:
…because, you know what? The Irish rapists and the paedophiles? At least they did it in secret. They didn’t take it out onto the streets. So all you rapist enablers – because that’s what you are – who did hold a candle for Ashling [Murphy] ’cause she’s dead, and now you can use her death for your ego: know Ireland’s history.
It’s not just racial or ethnic prejudice that drive Dee either: on the 10th of May 2023, she read a shit poem at a far right demonstration against a new SPHE curriculum that dares to give children more accurate information about sex and sexuality than was previously taught in our schools. The clip I found only features a segment of the poem, in which Dee reveals herself to be an anti-trans bigot who believes “they” want to force children to change gender, but I’m sure the rest is just as shit. I’m obviously disgusted by the prejudice itself, but I also can’t help but think of how opposition to comprehensive and accurate sex education directly increases the risk of child sexual abuse. Again, it’s basic 101 knowledge for anyone who gives enough of a shit to learn about it that teaching children and teenagers about sex and sexuality as they grow up is vital to combating sexual abuse, because it’s impossible for young children in particular to understand or communicate when they have been abused if they don’t know what parts of their body are private, what behaviour is inappropriate, and the simple fact that they should never be too scared or ashamed to talk to a trusted adult. It is beyond a joke that Dee Dempsey could ever accuse anyone else of enabling sexual violence when she herself is a militant activist against a curriculum designed in large part to reduce children’s vulnerability to sexual abuse.
But this is all just track record, and a very limited snapshot of that track record at that. What is Dee actually campaigning on as a local election candidate? Her campaign leaflet is online for anyone who wants to look at it, though I think anyone old enough to vote in this country is already too long in the tooth to think a campaign leaflet is a trustworthy document. I’d rather look at what she’s said in her speeches before and after the CCR’s two marches in Clonmel, when speaking to people who already support and agree with her. I didn’t attend either march to observe due to a standing threat against me from a member of the CCR, but I watched a stream of the first march by a local man who broadcasts and documents all sorts of public events in the town, as well as all the streams of both marches posted on the CCR’s own Facebook page. Neither gives me a complete picture: for some reason, Tina Denn kept stopping and starting the CCR’s streams at both marches, and the local man’s stream was disrupted before the march by a CCR supporter trying to pick a fight with him, then ended once Dee started speaking after the march because it was, in his words, “rubbish talk”.
I can’t disagree with him. Most of it is the same auld shite she’s spewing the whole time, “unvetted” this and “military-aged” that, but she had some new material at the first march. I’ve clipped this from a screen recording of the CCR’s own live stream, just in case they decide to delete it, and the audio is both not great in places and desynced from the video. But I think it speaks volumes about Dee’s candidacy all the same. First, she says she’ll fight to the death for Clonmel, then immediately pivots to saying she won’t actually deliver any practical benefit to the town, including in housing. But then comes her big pledge, the one thing she says she can do: “I can expose every lying piece of scum that’s in there that’s profited for themselves”. I thought she was just making an insinutation of corruption and criminality against the sitting councillors without saying any of their names, but she goes on to talk about Sinead Carr, an executive officer at the council who Dee describes as “the one in charge of the money here”. I can’t make out everything she says after this, but she clearly insinuates that Carr has at least been mismanaging the council’s finances, and possibly embezzling, because she apparently “likes to pay people in paper”. She says the first thing she’ll be doing if she’s elected is asking Carr to show her “the accounts for this town and where the money really is going”. Dee is just about too smart to actually come out and say where she thinks it’s going but someone else in the crowd finishes the thought for her: “in their pockets!”
I think this speaks volumes about her candidacy because it underlines the fact that Dee is so unserious she can’t even keep her own political priorities consistent. She’s addressing people at an anti-immigration march she organised and her sole pledge is to look at the accounts at least once during her tenure as a councillor. Dee tries to portray herself as this great warrior for the Irish people, but by her own admission, all she’s done for her last five years of political activism is roam around the country finding far right protests to join. The closest she comes to an actual policy in her whole leaflet is “to convince the council to donate a vacant building in Clonmel” for a youth arts centre, which would sound great if it wasn’t the sole non-insane part of a leaflet otherwise devoted to her pet conspiracy theories about migrants and COVID. I also can’t help but think it sounds a little self-serving, coming from the former proprietor of a dance school, and perhaps not entirely based in an altruistic concern for local youth.
Speaking entirely in my capacity as a constituent of the LEA she’s running to represent, Dee doesn’t just strike me as a lying bigot and conspiratorial extremist, she strikes me as a total fucking poser. She plays the new age spiritual guru in one video, then the hard-nosed political veteran in the next. She told people in the comments of her TikTok announcing her candidacy she wasn’t running to win, then went and got thousands of leaflets printed so she could go door to door handing out pictures of her face with her opinions next to them. Just look at the version of her video threatening that local restaurateur on (one of her) Facebook page(s): it cuts off just before the bit where she explicitly says she’s going to destroy his businesses. Is that someone who has the courage of their convictions? Someone who says what they mean and means what they say? No, that’s someone who thinks they can have a different face for every audience, but can’t even clip her own TikToks properly.
Shane Smith is a lot of things, but he’s no poser. He did a candidate interview with Tipp Mid-West Radio, and he’s incredibly upfront about his own total ignorance of politics and the fact he’s not running to win, but to get people talking about his pet issues. He freely admits he has no idea what a county councillor does because, he claims, they meet in secret, even though you can watch most county council meetings on Zoom, as interviewer Catherine Fogarty is quick to point out. He seems to think Ireland joined the EU in either 2002, via the Nice Treaty, or 2009, via the Lisbon Treaty, rather than way back in 1973, before the EU was even called the EU. Shane is a tree surgeon by trade, working since he was a teenager until degenerative damage to his lower back caused by repeated injury left him unable to do so. As someone with plenty of degenerative damage to my lower back, I sympathise. That pain is no joke. I’ll admit, I find Shane kind of relatable, especially when he says the silver lining of his disability is the free time he has to develop his political thinking and stand up for causes he believes in, which is in part what I’ve been trying to do with this blog. Unfortunately, he seems to have developed his political thinking by bingeing far right nonsense on TikTok and the causes he believes in are either stupid or evil.
His main issue, apart from immigration, is what he calls paedophilia, and what I call a bunch of conspiracy theories about paedophilia unrelated to the reality of child sexual abuse. Like a lot of far right activists in Ireland, he has a particular fixation on Roderic O’Gorman, Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. O’Gorman is gay and because he’s gay, far right people love to spuriously accuse him of not just being a paedophile himself, but an international child sex trafficker who’s using his ministry to funnel vulnerable children directly into the hands of sexual predators. This is what they’re getting at when they call him the “Sinister Minister” or “the Minister Without Children”. Roderic O’Gorman is a shit minister who’s done a shit job, and I hope he loses his seat in the next election, but he is not, in fact, an international child sex trafficker and all claims to the contrary are based on literally three tweets, only one of which has even a glimmer of reality in it. He shared a photo once with a well-known British LGBT campaigner called Peter Tatchell, who O’Gorman was unaware had written some dodgy things as part of a campaign to lower the age of consent in the UK in order to decriminalise sexual behaviour between teens. Personally, I think Tatchell, for all the good he did fighting discriminatory and oppressive laws in his early career as an activist, has long devolved into an attention-seeking, self-dealing professional “campaigner” who only cares about promoting and maintaining his own brand. But he is not a paedophile rights activist and he’s definitely not, as Shane claims, best friends with Roderic O’Gorman, a man he met one time six years ago. The far right just like to accuse people of being paedophiles because it’s basically the worst thing anyone can be, and if anyone dares point out they’re lying, they can immediately tar them as paedophile defenders.
I actually tried to watch every video on Shane’s TikTok so I could say I’d genuinely heard all he had to say, but I hit a wall 72 videos in when he posted about a 5G tower. I think I’ve made it fairly clear that I struggle to do things I find boring, and I first heard about 5G from a woman on the street in Galway in 2017 who believed mind control technology was being developed at Renmore Barracks, so it’s really, really old hat for me. So if Shane said anything bigoted or insane on TikTok past the 11th of April, I don’t know about it. I just couldn’t listen to him shite on for another hundred fucking videos once the word “5G” took the wind out of my sails. Pretty much the only mildly novel or interesting thing he said in those first 72 videos was that he wanted to abolish the Oireachtas and replace it with a bizarre system presumably of his own invention. In Shane’s vision, each county would elect four people who aren’t landlords or business owners between thirty and fifty to some new assembly or parliament, and then a man and a woman from each county over the age of 75 called “the Grands of Destiny” or “the Gods”, who would seemingly have the power to overrule the younger representatives on issues of national importance. I have no idea where to begin responding to that as an actual suggestion for how to run a society, but it might have some merit as worldbuilding for a shit fantasy novel.
Since Shane is honest about the fact he’s not running to win, he hasn’t done any canvassing to my knowledge, let alone a leafleting campaign like Dee. But he obviously seems a future for himself as a far right activist in Tipperary, which is why he’s spent the weeks he should be campaigning in the Cahir LEA in Clonmel and Dundrum instead. So we may as well have a look at what he’s had to say for himself since he announced he was running. I always try to give credit where due, and I have to say, when he’s not shouting and roaring, undermining his own credibility by calling himself ignorant or explicitly invoking conspiracy theories, Shane is a much better speaker than Dee. He has a more natural, authentic patter and he’s way better at weaving real, legitimate grievances about the state of this country and the real sins of its ruling class into his far right conspiracist nonsense. I spent a lot of 2015 and 2016 getting either mocked or accused of being a Trump supporter because I very accurately noted that Donald Trump was by far the best debater not only in the Republican primaries, but in the whole election cycle and maybe every US election in the century to that point. I don’t think Shane is that good, obviously, and I also think Trump lost his mojo the second he won, for what it’s worth. But I think it’s useful to acknowledge the strengths of your opponents, not just so you can understand how to beat them, but because knowing their strengths often helps to highlight their weaknesses.
Shane’s biggest weaknesses are that he’s not just ignorant, but gobsmackingly incurious, and he doesn’t know when to whisht. He constantly asks questions in his videos, but never seems to seek out any answers, even when they’re basic questions about how political decisions are made or government policies are implemented he could easily find answers to if he bothered to look. If that seems like a cheap shot, you should tell Shane first, given he’s also constantly whingeing about how he doesn’t understand how everyone else doesn’t know about what’s “really” going on when all the information is out there online, as if he thinks all the shit on his TikTok feed is getting served to everyone else and they’re just ignoring it. He’s always saying migrants are a threat to “the Irish way of life”, but if he’s ever explained what “the Irish way of life” is, or even given an example of it, I haven’t heard it, and I’m pretty sure he just means the way he thinks people should live and only calls it Irish because he’s Irish. He seems to have some distorted version of freemen of the land beliefs from how he talks about sovereignty, but I’m also pretty sure he has no idea what freemen of the land are and just picked up their ideas secondhand online.
Shane didn’t speak much early in the CCR’s campaign, even though he’s been involved since day one, possibly because he’s from Ballylooby and lives in Clogheen, and knew better than David how bad it might look for him to speak on behalf of Clonmel when he’s neither from nor living there. I knew him to see with years – he’s quite tall and has a distinctive hairstyle – but until he became a candidate, I didn’t even know his surname. He was just the guy who always stood silently beside Dee at CCR events, including the meeting I attended on the 2nd of May, or who walked with her at the autism services march we all participated in. But he seems to have gotten both bolder and sloppier in the course of the campaign. Dee asked the second march to proceed in silence, especially as they passed Hearns Hotel. During the first march, she’d called on the crowd to have a moment of silence in front of Hearns, only for them to loudly chant “Clonmel Says No” instead. When the second march reached Hearns Hotel, instead of silence, Shane decided to stop the whole procession and cut a promo about how calling people racists is bullshit or something, to the visible irritation of Dee. Up on the Heywood Road, he made the very silly mistake of letting his buddy Keith catch him just off camera saying “you’re not wanted in this town, ya fucking rat” and “ya worm, I’ll punch ya” to a worker. When another CCR supporter speaking after the second march called Roderic O’Gorman a dictator, Shane chimed in to add “he’s a dick taker as well”, completely giving the game away as far as their homophobic reasons for hating O’Gorman. He may well be the most naturally gifted speaker in the group, but he has no discipline or sense of tact, and I expect that will always make him too much of a liability to ever flourish on the far right, especially if the movement ever tries to gain some respecability.
I suppose I should acknowledge at this point that both Dee and Shane would probably object to my characterisation of them as far right, and might even ask what this “far right” I’m going on about even is when it’s at home. One of the stranger things I’ve encountered as I get to know the Irish far right properly is that many don’t just deny they are far right, they deny that a far right exists at all. I find this tendency very reminiscent of how believers in QAnon will deny that such a thing as QAnon exists, because “there is Q and there are anons, but there is no QAnon”, only this is way, way stupider. Most people are at least aware that some political tendency called the far right exists, so it’s immediately suspicious that anyone would loudly insist otherwise, especially as a response to someone accusing them of belonging to the far right.
Traditionally, the tactic would be to deny that you yourself are far right, and then point to a more openly extreme far right figure and say “they’re far right, and I don’t agree with people like that, so I can’t be far right”. It would be very easy for Clonmel Concerned Residents to point to, for example, an explicit and open white nationalist and performatively disavow him so they can say “look, you might find us extreme, but at least we’d never associate with an explicit and open white nationalist”.
Or rather, it would be very easy if one of their core members wasn’t an explicit and open white nationalist.
A White Nationalist in White Nationalist’s Clothing
Keith, aka NewAdda on Twitter and YouTube, is a white nationalist who has been intimately involved with Clonmel Concerned Residents, their campaign and especially the occupation of the Heywood Road for weeks now. For a while, I thought he only became actively involved once the camp was set up, but in reviewing videos he posted on Twitter, I realised he’s been part of the group since at least the 1st of May, when he, Dee and Shane were out trying to get signatures for their dodgy petition. In that video, he tries to come off even-handed by saying he doesn’t know if housing refugees will be good or bad for the town, but seconds later, he’s comparing it to a medical experiment, invoking Nuremberg and saying “there’s been trials and stuff for this before”. He also posted a video of a now-former member of CCR1 following sitting councillor and local election candidate Siobhán Ambrose to her car, shouting at her, asking what she’s afraid of and mocking her for not engaging with him. I can’t speak for Siobhán Ambrose, but if I could hazard a guess, she was likely afraid of him assaulting her, since he was a stranger who started shouting at her in the street about refugees and migrants just days after a sitting councillor in Dublin was punched in the head by a racist thug while out canvassing.
Keith would no doubt object to me calling him a white nationalist because he cloaks the core of his belief in layers of code and obfuscation that he can plausibly describe as traditionalist or alternative or whatever. But the problem with codes is they don’t work on people who can read them, and, for my sins, I have spent a preposterous and previously useless amount of the last decade researching far right extremism as part of a lifelong interest in conspiracy theories, the occult and fringe politics. I can do more than substantiate my claim that Keith is a white nationalist, I can tell you the exact kind he is, an esoteric neo-pagan. Sounds strange, I know, but I promise it’s much simpler and less interesting than it seems.
When I say esoteric, I basically mean a style of thought or philosophy that frames its truths as mysteries to be uncovered, often presented as coming from a lost or suppressed “real” version of history. It’s a kind of “seeking” approach to knowledge, where every new thing you learn just whets your appetite for the next until you’re not being led down the garden path, you’re sprinting down it of your own accord. If you just read the right books or watch the right videos, the esoteric says, you too can come to understand the incredible truths I’ve learned. Conveniently, the incredible truths are always proof that their political beliefs are correct and maybe even divinely ordained.
It has its actual historical roots in the practices of Greek and Roman mystery cults, which were religious groups devoted to the worship of specific gods or aspects of gods, but who only revealed the full nature of their beliefs and rituals to new members if they passed through various stages of initiation to prove their devotion. Freemasons and other fraternal orders who practise occult or mystic rituals as part of initiation or promotion borrowed that structure from these mystery cults, though they usually don’t believe in the occult and mystic bullshit they’re saying. Your knowledge of their secret truths is a way to covertly signal not just your membership but your status to other members you might meet, especially when trying to make professional connections with people outside your local lodge. More recently and infamously, the Church of Scientology paywalls all the highest truths of their space ghost nonsense behind increasingly expensive tiers of membership for its followers to purchase.
But that’s esotericism as an institutional practice, not as an individual practice, which is Keith’s bag. Basically, Keith believes that the way he sees the world is not just his opinion, but completely and factually correct, in fact, he believes his worldview is something he’s arrived at because he has spent years reading specific books that contain lost or suppressed truths about the world, like how history really happened or how white people are superior to other races, and if you don’t agree with him, it’s because you haven’t done the research, and if you have done the research and still don’t agree with him, it’s because you’re not willing to open your mind to other viewpoints. But if you don’t disagree, and you are open-minded, he will tell you all about the books they don’t want you to know about and link you his YouTube videos about them, where he will patiently explain how those books and videos show you the real truth – his truth – and encourage you to keep doing your own research, based on his recommendations, of course. The difference is that Keith’s body of secret knowledge isn’t based on a scriptural tradition passing the same texts from generation to generation like a mystery cult or fraternal order. His body of secret knowledge is just books he’s happened to read that he reckons prove his point of view, and the exact combination of sources is unique to his tastes and interests, even if it leads to the same old racist conclusions. Keith thinks this blandly overseasoned stew of mangled Jungian psychoanalysis, nonsense Theosophist spirituality, conspiracy theories and misrepresented or outright fabricated Irish myth and history makes his white nationalism particularly nuanced and complex and well-founded, but actually it just makes his white nationalism more tedious to explain.
When I say neo-pagan, I mean that, for reasons I will explain shortly, Keith essentially views the Christianisation of Ireland as the beginning of the fall of Ireland, and so when he frames his beliefs as based on ancient Irish tradition, he means his distorted view of pagan Ireland and its history and cultural practices. It’s not that nothing truly Irish has existed since pagan times, in Keith’s mind, but there’s been nothing “purely” Irish, nothing untainted by the cultural beliefs or gene pools of one foreign invader or another. I can’t speak to whether he genuinely believes in or practices neo-paganism as religion, or if it’s just a component of his larger philosophical beliefs, but it’s core to his presentation. His username “NewAdda” is a play on the legendary Irish hero-king Nuada Silverarm and the Welsh “Adda”, or Adam.
Obviously, by the nature of his esoteric neo-paganism, and especially because of this mix of sources he draws from, largely unfamiliar to me, it would take ages to watch all of his videos and extensively research the works he cites for me to give you a comprehensive summary of Keith’s beliefs and refute them point by point. Fortunately, I don’t give a shit about doing that and I especially don’t give a shit about doing it when Keith is constantly begging people to debate him. He wants people who aren’t as prepared to rattle arguments and evidence off the top of their head to try arguing with him so he can film himself rattling arguments and evidence off the top of his head and then post it online as proof of how smart and cool and right he and white nationalism are, and how dumb and lame and wrong the traitors and their stupid traitor beliefs are, and get wanked off by all his far right friends for destroying a cuck with facts and logic. I know from experience that anyone eager to debate and expecting to win is not worth engaging with, either in good faith or in an attempt to “defeat” them. I’m not going to give Keith the arguments he wants because then he would just use them to make a video where he responds to me, and while I can’t stop him making more shit videos, nor am I trying to, I won’t encourage him to do it either.
But, for the sake of clarity, here’s my best attempt to summarise his beliefs based on what I’ve seen him post on Twitter, in my own words. Keith believes humanity is naturally divided into races like “white” and “black” whose differences are not just physical, but spiritual. He believes all the people of a single race share a common soul and the souls of people within races are like each other and different from the souls of other races. This kind of racism is reminiscent of the philosophy of Julius Evola, a very influential far right thinker who once objected to being called a fascist in court on the basis that he was, in his own words, a super-fascist. Keith is a white supremacist, but also an Irish nationalist of a sort, as he takes particular pride in being part of the Irish people. He just also believes the Irish people are but one component of the white race, that you must have white Irish blood to even be part-Irish and only pure white Irish blood to be truly and fully Irish. He believes the suppression and destruction of the white race has been a principal objective of the secret rulers of the world since ancient times, specifically since the time of the Roman Empire.
In fact, he thinks the Roman Empire never fell, and has been expanding and tightening its control over humanity for centuries, in various forms, first as the Roman Catholic Church and in modern times through the EU among other organisations. He believes this ancient Roman conspiracy aims to create a global totalitarian state, but can’t do so as long as the white race exists, because white people are too intelligent, creative and independent to accept their domination, unlike other races. He believes white people who refuse to submit will be killed and those who submit will be cross-bred with people of other races to produce a hybrid race with all the strengths and talents of white people, but no instinct to rebel. He thinks basically all immigration by non-white people into European countries is how the Romans are carrying out their plan, a variation of the “Great Replacement” or “white genocide” conspiracy theory, which is commonly called the “Great Plantation” by Irish racists. He believes this Roman plot can be foiled, but only if all white people start to think of themselves as one race and rise up together to both overthrow the elite and purge all non-white people from “white” countries.
Keith won’t just come out and say all this insane and obviously racist shit most of the time, because he knows it sounds racist to most people and insane even to most racists. In his live streams from the Heywood Road, he is almost a caricature of the “debate me, bro” archetype, a guy who goes up to strangers with a camera, filming them without permission, and makes a feigned effort to seem like he’s an honest broker just trying to engage. Then, when they don’t engage with him, he calls them dishonourable cowards unwilling to defend themselves because they know what they’re doing is wrong. He acts like shouting at people for hours, insulting them and filming them is just part of the cut and thrust of a civil debate, and not the ridiculous behaviour of a crank with a hateful fixation. He tells himself other people don’t want to talk to him because he’s actually too right and smart for them, because otherwise he’d have to consider the possibility that people don’t want to talk to him because he’s an unpleasant and tiresome conversationalist.
But what’s even worse is how he treats those who do engage, as with a young worker who spoke amicably with him in one stream because he felt bad about the other workers ignoring them. Later in the stream, reflecting on their conversation, Keith says the young man had probably never thought deeply about anything in his life before. Because that’s the only way someone could disagree with him, right? It’s such a pathetic act of unprovoked cruelty against someone genuinely trying to offer an olive branch. First, he plays nice (or his idea of nice) to the lad’s face, then says he’s too stupid to even have opinions to a live audience in as good as the same breath. This is what makes his calm and reasonable schtick so hard to take, not just the falseness of it, but that it doesn’t even disguise the fact he’s a nasty, hateful person who believes and says nasty, hateful things. In one video, he chuckles to himself as he explains that locals among the protestors were getting calls from family of the men they were harassing and abusing, especially the younger lads on the job, asking or telling them to leave them alone. That’s not a real argument, he says, laughing, as if it makes him so wise and worldly to think basic decency and compassion are beneath him.
I was worried it would be difficult to expose Keith as a white nationalist because of all those layers of esoteric neo-pagan bullshit. I can give you my impression and tell you how I came to it, but how could I possibly make my case stick when Keith goes to such lengths to hide the nature and extent of his beliefs, especially in the videos he’s made for Clonmel Concerned Residents? But the thing most people who use Twitter still don’t seem to realise is that, however you use it and whatever you say on it, your account is ultimately just a database of everything you’ve ever tweeted that hasn’t been deleted. A searchable database. So rather than link each of my own claims about Keith’s beliefs to a corresponding tweet that proves that specific claim, I have instead prepared a folder containing dozens of screenshots of tweets where he explicitly expresses his white nationalist beliefs. You see, it turns out it doesn’t matter if you only come out and say you think white people are superior to all other races a tiny percentage of the time if I can just search “from:keithisi white” and instantly find every single time you did. These tweets represent a fraction of the results of that one search, but Keith is so racist that’s all it takes to prove it.
I genuinely don’t know how aware the other members of Clonmel Concerned Residents are of Keith’s extreme beliefs – I imagine they mainly bonded over conspiracy theories, not race science – but if they still care about not being called racists, it would probably be in their best interest to cut ties with Keith and ask him to stop participating in their campaign. Though it might be a little late, since he’s been with them for weeks now, loads of the videos from their campaign are by him or feature him, and he’s been the main member doing their outreach on Twitter. His videos have already been shared so many times by so many far right figures who’ve personally endorsed him as a good source for news and updates on Clonmel that he’s kind of made himself indispensable, at least in the short term. I guess it depends on whether his help is worth the reputational damage they’ll continue to take every second they continue to associate with an avowed white nationalist.
Plastic Patriots
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to end this piece. I would like this to be the last time I have to write about Clonmel Concerned Residents, so if this is my final word, what about the situation should I emphasise? Should I make a serious point about how this group is abusing local and national history, as well as the good name of Clonmel, to advance their hateful agenda? Should I crack some jokes about how weird it is they’ve developed a fixation on a tree getting cut down when Shane Smith used to cut down trees for a living? How about a seemingly unrelated but ultimately very relevant and insightful commentary on the human right to privacy?
Nah. Let’s talk about their fucking theme music.
You see, a member of the group, “made” two “rebel” “songs” to promote their campaign. I put “made” in air quotes because both “songs” were “made” with the generative AI program Suno. I put “songs” in quotes because even grading on the curve of shitty AI art, AI-generated music is especially terrible and calling them songs feels like an insult to songs and songwriting and music and maybe even sound. I’m not going to talk about the second song, because it’s both way shittier than the first and way more boring. But I have to talk about the first, because in its abject awfulness, it might actually be the perfect metaphor for this entire campaign and perhaps, in that sense, an unintentional conceptual masterpiece.
“The Ballad of the Fiery Diggers”, if you dare to listen to it, will almost certainly be the worst three and a half minutes of your day, if not your entire life. It’s so bad it feels like bullying to point out how bad it is, even though it was shat out by a computer program, not produced by any meaningful creative labour. I tried to play it for some friends just so I’d have someone to share in my suffering, but I turned it off before the first chorus was done because I genuinely couldn’t inflict it on another human being in good conscience. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to say one good thing about this song, I would pull the trigger myself before they could finish their demands. I’m almost afraid to give it any publicity in case it’s used to torture detainees at Gitmo.
If any of that seems harsh, it’s not. Leaving aside how aesthetically abhorrent and ethically despicable I find all generative AI “art”, this song is both artistically repulsive and politically contemptible. Artistically, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s literally a bit where it goes into an instrumental bridge and then immediately smash cuts to the next chorus. One of the lines in the chorus – “faulty wires and climate dire / set their dreams acoil” – ends on a word that doesn’t exist and which I can’t even infer a possible meaning for. But even if I look past all that low-hanging fruit and try to imagine it as the song it wants to be, the kind of song it is trying to be, I still hate it. It’s the worst sort of stadium country-inflected, overproduced, pop-trad shite, the absolute lowest bastardisation of the Irish folk music tradition into bland, slick, mass-market bollocks. I would literally rather listen to the High Kings’ entire discography than listen to this song once, and anyone who knows my feelings on the High Kings knows that’s really saying something.
This is the anthem these “patriots”, these defenders of “Irish culture”, held up as great art, at least until the same guy made that second, worse song, which they played at both marches. I do not recommend listening to “The Ballad of the Fiery Diggers”, but if you do, I think it says all you need to know about how shallow their alleged love of this country and its culture is. I don’t know if anyone involved in the CCR and their campaign has ever said anything as funny as Keith earnestly describing this song as “the stirring of the figurative and the mythic“. I’m not going to give a whole history lesson about Irish music here, even if the CCR clearly need one, but it’s especially galling / hilarious when the valley of the River Suir is one of the cradles of not just the Irish traditional music revival, but the worldwide folk music revival that began in the decades after World War II. We literally would not have Bob Dylan if he hadn’t been both musically influenced and personally supported in his career by the Clancy Brothers, born just down the road in Carrick-on-Suir.
If you haven’t listened to the song – and good for you if you haven’t – you may be wondering to yourself: hang on, don’t the CCR deny responsibility for burning the diggers? Yes, they do, and that’s why I put “rebel” in quotes back at the start of this section. Of course the CCR deny burning the diggers, but that means the song has to bizarrely incorporate their own sarcastic comments about how it must have been faulty wires or climate change that started the fire as sincere lyrics. Even in their own song, Clonmel Concerned Residents simultaneously claim the halting of works on the Heywood Road as their victory, even though work was obviously halted because persons unknown assaulted security guards and did hundreds of thousands of property damage by burning those diggers. As I’ve said, I genuinely don’t think anyone in the CCR did those things, which just makes it all the more dishonest and pathetic for them to take credit for their results. All Clonmel Concerned Residents could achieve on their own was reducing grown men to tears by hurling abuse at them for hours. They’re just a load of bullies trying to take all the credit for the work of proper criminals.
So yeah, I think this song represents them perfectly. It’s a soulless, inhuman reproduction of the aesthetics of Irish patriotic tradition by people who know fuck all about it, and it tries to take credit for the results of violence while refusing to take any responsibility for the violence itself. It’s an embarrassment, and they’re an embarrassment. I think I’ve made it clear that I believe – based on the evidence of my own two eyes – that Clonmel Concerned Residents do not represent Clonmel or its people. They have no meaningful support here, no constituency, no local backing except from a handful of sympathisers and fellow-travellers. At this point, I don’t even think they’re anything more than an interpersonal threat to anyone in Clonmel, except in so far as they can draw other more dangerous far right agitators into town.
But that’s exactly why I’m writing this: not just to inform fellow residents of Clonmel and the wider area about this group, but to ensure there’s an honest and accurate account of them before work on Heywood Road restarts and they presumably resume their protest. Barring a complete reversal of their fortunes in the future, if any news outlet – local or national, fringe or mainstream – present this group as anything but a tiny gang of disgruntled cranks with no real support in the town, they are lying to you. Whether it’s Tipp FM or RTÉ or especially those ghouls at Gript, it is a dereliction of both their journalistic duty and any sense of responsibility to truth to claim Clonmel Concerned Residents speak for anyone but themselves and for any “concerns” but their own.
The government has made such a complete bollocks of managing the asylum process that they’ve not only somehow made direct provision even worse, they’ve opened a crack in the suffocating consensus of the Irish political mainstream where the far right have been able to worm their way in. I dearly hope the next general election will eject both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil from power for literally the first time since we achieved our independence, and that a new government will be formed and do basically anything to make our country a decent place to live instead of just “the best small country in the world to do business (for multinationals and money launderers, not local small business owners, fuck those guys)”. I’m not holding out too much hope, just because every time I’ve ever done that for any election, I’ve been thoroughly disappointed.
But I still know, in my heart, that the nascent far right in this country can’t and won’t achieve power unless the Irish ruling class and the most cowardly, compliant and corrupt people in our media hand it to them on a silver platter. The vast, overwhelming majority of people in Ireland, of every stripe and creed, simply have no time for their bollocks, and the far right themselves are, quite frankly, too shit at the fundamentals of serious political organising and grassroots activism to build a popular movement here on their own. We need radical change in this country, and you don’t need to be a radical to see it. The far right don’t promise radical change, they promise more of the same, but with extra brutalisation of minorities on top to sate their supporters’ bloodlust. I love my country, and my county, and the two towns – Cahir and Clonmel – that I consider my hometowns. I hope this is the last time I write about the CCR, not just because I hope they falter and fail and fall apart, but because I want to finally get up off my arse after a lifetime lived on the sidelines and start putting more of my time and energy and passion into helping my community and fighting for what it really needs to thrive.
I’m not sure where to start, but I hope I’ll see you there.
- A previous version of this article stated that Keith was the man who filmed himself following Cllr. Ambrose. Another CCR member has since informed that is not true and, despite not providing any evidence, I believe them. ↩︎
Left in the Lurch 
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