Amnesty International’s Occupied Ireland director gave a typical response:

It is shameful that the authorities allowed this despicable display of hate to go ahead. What a shocking message to send to local migrant families. […] The authorities must treat this as a hate crime, conduct a full investigation and ensure those responsible are held to account. […] Racism, xenophobia, and hate have no place here – and that must be made unmistakably clear.

This is the sort of language the Liberal Right used throughout the country, rightly saying that the racism of the invaders is inexcusable and clearly intended to threaten People of Colour. Then there was the good news that the RUC nua decided to investigate the Moygashel bonfire as a hate incident…though seasoned observers of the Occupation will guess the caveat: only the anti-migrant element of the whole Festival of Spite would be subject to investigation.

Now Macdara would like to posit the following: if one is against Racism, then one must be against all Racism. So what the fuck has happened here? Well, returning to the quote above: in what parallel universe can someone state that hate has no place in Occupied Ireland? Racism against Irish people is excused and enabled; it is so much a feature of Partition that we cannot expect that the Occupiers, who have to at least pretend to investigate this hate crime, will follow through on their newfound principles of anti-racism and investigate their own pervasive anti-Irishness.

As a bonus, this blindness to anti-Irishness while talking about racism, visibly prioritises certain types of racism, giving the rising Far Right ammunition for their insane great replacement rhetoric. That the Far Right are themselves illiterate in Irish culture and history, and make common cause with the Occupiers, will not prevent them from claiming that Black and Brown people are privileged above Irish people. As when the Irish Government gives homeless Ukrainian refugees tents, but the Irish homeless get no tents, this is a cynical divide and rule policy that allows the elites to run away from the squabbling mass of the people who fall for the oldest trick in the rulebook of tyrants.

In fact there is evidence in the slogans on the bonfire of the same trick being played by the English elites, who—despite having plundered the world for centuries—have promoted the false idea that there is not enough Money to take care of veterans and refugees. But of course there is more to it than this: the protection to be afforded to veterans is actually legal indemnity for their crimes, a reference to legislation to provide immunity to those who carry out English colonial violence in Ireland. They are not saying that local people should be cared for, but that settler violence against natives—and of course immigrants—must be condoned, protected, privileged, in the same way as are the Bonfires of the Violent.