Dean Buckley Investigative Reports

“Clonmel Concerned Residents Group” is a Racist Fraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dean Buckley Political Analysis

Tax Credits Are Subsidies

Imagine you’re a landlord. Once the nausea has passed, imagine you receive €1000 per month from your tenants, or €12,000 for the year. You pay a ten percent tax on your rental income, so at the end of the fiscal year, you should owe the state €1200. However, there is a tax credit for landlords, so you fill out that part of the form. Your bill is reduced by €500 to €700, and you walk away with €11,300.

Now, imagine there’s no tax credit. At the end of the year, you hand over the entire €1200. However, there is a grant for landlords, so you apply and receive it. The state sends you €500 and you walk away with €11,300.

This is obviously a simplistic hypothetical, but I think it illustrates quite clearly there is zero meaningful difference between the state voiding €500 of your tax bill and the state giving you €500 in subsidies. Either way, you started with €12,000 and a tax bill of €1200, but you ended up with €11,300 and the state ended up with €700. Whether the state let you off the €500 or gave it to you, it’s €500 more in your pocket and €500 less in the public coffers. The only difference is where the numbers go in a ledger.

Yet this difference is treated with profound metaphysical significance in the official logic of capitalist politics. When I get my disability benefit every week, it’s a handout, but a landlord who gets tax relief on his mortgage interest is getting, well, relief. Tax credits and other ways to reduce your tax bill are the state cutting you a break on the burden of tax, whereas welfare benefits are the state giving taxpayers’ hard-earned money to the lazy and unproductive. But if you don’t care about the route the money takes, just where it ends up, a tax credit is at least as much of a “giveaway” as my weekly pittance for the becrippled and mentally strange. It’s a distinction that should only matter to accountants, but it’s used to shovel huge amounts of public money into the private sector via tax write-offs for business expenses while pretending it doesn’t count as spending.

Ireland is a country particularly afflicted by the paradoxical whims of an electorate that wants good public services, but doesn’t want to pay for them with taxes. It’s no surprise we’ve ended up one of the world’s premier tax havens for giant corporations, though the audacity of our government appealing a court judgement that ordered Apple to pay back billions in dodged taxes still staggers me. But issues like the government giving tax relief to landlords during a housing crisis or giving everyone electricity credits to help pay soaring power bills instead of forcing the companies the lower their prices seem to have raised the public consciousness a bit when it comes to just how much the Irish state exists to subsidise the private sector, not just in our country, but around the world. I’m not necessarily optimistic about the possibility of a reforming government in the near future, but there’s still something heartening in seeing the outrage grow.

Dean Buckley Irish Politics

The End of Neutrality is the End of Peace

The Irish government are planning to hold a series of “public forums” on the question of Ireland’s military neutrality later this year. These forums and their expert panels have been given the reins on this issue, rather than a Citizens’ Assembly, because the Irish government has a preconceived answer to that question it wants our political processes to arrive at. I am not saying these public forums will necessarily be “rigged” in some way, per se, just acknowledging what anyone can see, but no one in support of ending Irish neutrality would ever admit: that they were very blatantly chosen in lieu of a Citizens’ Assembly because given the two options on the table, one is more likely to produce a more supportive result for their preferred future vision of Irish foreign policy. I am 100% confident that is the case, for the simple reason that support for maintaining Irish neutrality remains consistently high and support for Ireland joining NATO remains consistently low, so even if a panel is only composed of an equal number of experts for and against neutrality – however expert is defined! – it’s still more likely to produce a result favourable to the government than a group drawn from the citizenry. I don’t think that means these forums aren’t worth engaging with; if anything I encourage everyone in the country to look into the process for making submissions to them whenever that’s announced and do whatever else you can to fight for maintaining our neutrality.

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Dean Buckley Housekeeping

Prolegomena to Any Future Posts

Please read this post before or after reading this one.

I haven’t written on this blog in over five years, and I’ve turned most of what I did write private because it’s embarrassing. I want to start writing on it again soon, so I thought it might be good to contextualise it a bit. People tend to assume context if you don’t provide it and I really don’t enjoy being misunderstood.

My name is Dean Buckley, and I’m just some guy. I’m not a pundit or activist or commentator or whatever. I write and edit pop culture criticism for The Sundae, a website I co-created with my friend Ciara, and I co-host and edit our film podcast, The Sundae Presents. I want to write about social, political and philosophical topics on this blog because I enjoy doing that, not because I am trying to convince anyone of anything. I did competitive debating for eight years and studied philosophy in college and one of the things I liked most about both those things was just picking apart logic and rhetoric and arguments and ideas, for what I imagine are the same reasons other people like to tinker with machinery. I’ve noticed a lot of people online seem to think if you write a post about something, you must think it’s a very important topic and that you are making a very urgent intervention into it. They especially think so if you do a blog about it in an era when, frankly, who even fucking blogs anymore? After all, the only reason to post on the Internet is for attention, so if you’re posting you must want attention, which means you must think what you’re posting is attention-worthy.

So, with all that in mind, I want to say: unless I say that what I’m writing about on this blog is important, please presume I merely find it interesting. I know I can’t actually make anyone do that, but if something I post here does get attention for some reason, I thought it would be handy to have this already written.

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Dean Buckley Old Posts

Stitches May Strain, but Sutures Don’t Split: In Defense of Gotham’s Gothic Identity

Dollmade

Gotham is not a perfect show, and maybe not even a good show. I’m not going to defend the crazy pacing of Penguin’s rehabilitation/relapse storyline, the utter waste of Tabitha or pretty much any of Bruce’s dialogue, at any point, ever. I’m not going to pretend I’m not disappointed by the ways in which its second season has failed to live up to my highest hopes.

But there’s this notion about Gotham, most abrasively trumpeted by The AV Club, but parroted elsewhere as received knowledge, that Gotham is a show that struggles with its identity, and particularly that it’s “two shows, and never knows which it wants to be at any time” or some variation thereof.

This is not true now, nor has it ever been true. Gotham has a perfectly coherent identity, possibly one of the most rigidly-defined identities of any show on television right now.

Continue reading “Stitches May Strain, but Sutures Don’t Split: In Defense of Gotham’s Gothic Identity” →