Category: Investigative Reports

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.

Continue reading “The Fire at Heywood Road” →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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