On Tuesday the 21st of February, in an event that further damaged the idea that the Hard-Left in Ireland are out of power in Ireland, the Oireachtas held a Committee meeting on Integration and Refugees. If this were a slightly more normal Western country, I would highlight how there is only one Right Wing voice on the panel of 8, however as this is Ireland this is a penal entirely filled with pro-migration figures. The group that sticks out most of all at this is the deceptively-named Far-Right Observatory, a state-funded NGO, with both Mark Malone and Niamh McDonald speaking at this event.
Regular readers will need no introduction to Mark, a long-time hard-left migration activist playing the vanguard role for the country's open borders policy. Life on the front line of Globalism has not been easy for Mark, who is looking like he is roughly 40 years older than his Twitter profile picture.
As has become common with other organisations such as Kinzen, the Far-Right Observatory is the Hard-Left realising that the path to power for them will not be won at the ballot box, and the best way to achieve their ends lies through taking control of the bureaucracies of major institutions, both Private and Public, with the FRO having previously lobbied to the very top of Facebook. Little is known about the Far-Right Observatory due to the lack of available public information, but the meeting did allow us to learn more about the organisation, such as the fact that they have been directly contacted by TikTok.
When answering a question by Sinn Fein's Mark Ward on misinformation and Social Media saying "I will say actually on record, TikTok have come to us and said, there is a problem on our platform, what can we do. " . Mark Ward himself characterised the Asylum protesters as spreading "hate", and lamented the sight of "Mammies with Buggies" on the side of the anti-Asylum protest.
The fact that TikTok have made the first move and gone to the FRO is telling, as anecdotally the platform appears to be the quickest and most willing to ban anything that smacks of Right-Wing on its platforms. Videos of the Irish asylum protests have gathered hundreds of thousands of views on single videos, so the decision whether to remove themwould clearly have a large impact on Irish politics. On Migration, as on many other issues (most notably those related to Covid), the Establishment political class and the hard-left are united in their quest to enforce a policy of only one opinion allowed.
Mark's colleague Niamh McDonald's decried that the major Social Media Platforms are "systematic in failing to enforce their own community standards including ignoring reported harmful content", and in particular noting the element of monetization. "assisting in the monetisation of protests and FRO has documented far-right entities using payment platforms to raise funds e.g. Paypal, stripe, GoFundMe and others. The algorithms drive the content people see, amplifying and toxic and manipulative content". To Niamh (and the entire panel) the protests and "The Far-Right" are interchangeable, deliberately pretending there exists no nuanced position, happy middle-ground, or good-faith disagreement on Migration and other cultural issues. There is open borders, and there is the Far-Right.
This characterisation of one acceptable position was invoked by the entire Panel, with Steph Hanlon of Le-Cheile calling on the government to show "Clear commitment to impartiality when we're talking about migration at a political level", and further stating "Political narratives and the responsibility of politicians. Feeding narratives - do not feed into the language of the genuine vs. ingenuine, of exploiting the system, That construction of who is deserving and who is not deserving".
So the government must show impartiality, but it must also only take the pro-migration, open borders position, and any criticism or deeper analysis of this should not be done by politicians or the public. The Green Party's Patrick Costello complained of a growing view of NGOs as partisan, and labelling the leaders of anti-immigration protests as having ultimately anti-democratic motives.
The main argument of Malone and McDonald is that the Social Media Companies' own community standards already call for the banning of online content that is on the side of the Asylum protests, invoking the usual nebulous terms of "hate" and "harm", and taking it as a given this applies to any political position in opposition to theirs (and the government's"). Malone also revealed the influence FRO has begun to have on Social Media platforms, stating "We're, as part of FRO, are part of trusted flagger status on every one of the main platforms, and everyone has singularly failed to remove content as reported".
This outsourcing of moderation has been seen elsewhere with Kinzen, who received Є108,000 by the HSE over a 9-month period to combat "misinformation" during the Covid era. This contract was brought to an end after it was revealed by Gript that it had grossly overstepped it's role, falsely flagging as misinformation any content that was in opposition to the government's Covid policy. Kinzen would later pressure journalists at the Journal and the HSE to cover up the company's involvement with the management of disinformation.
McDonald also lobbied for money to be invested in a messaging strategy, and funding "community leaders" who can be mobilised quickly wherever local opposition arises, lamenting how quickly issues can "Emerge quickly, dominate the local media cycle, quickly assumed to reflect the majority views and interests of the community.". This tactic of mobilising suspiciously looking "locals" has seen already with the "East Wall For All" campaign.
It should be noted that McDonald has previously tried and failed to seek office in the local council elections in 2019. Now a left-wing politician-to-be that was rejected by the public is working, with state funding, to limit and police what are acceptable views that can be expressed both online and in the real world. This strategy by FRO, to avoid electoral politics, and instead focus on capturing major institutions has its roots in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who felt that the working class would never embrace Marxism and that instead a "long march through the institutions" was required for the Radical Left to take power in the West.
For any Left-Wing readers who think I am reading too much into this and verging on conspiracy theories, McDonald is crystal clear in how she views public opinion and the role of the State by saying "Research shows clearly that the majority of people do not have fixed positions on virtually all issues and are persuaded by dominant narratives, and how policies and responses are presented to them. So then we call on the government to invest in strategic communication to support, to avoid at all costs feeding the far-right narrative". This view is completely top-down - dominant institutions and figures construct and shape the narrative, and the ordinary people follow along. This is a complete inversion of what Liberal Democracy is at least in theory supposed to be, which is that the democratic state responds to the changes and evolution of public opinion.
One end goal of the Far-Right Observatory is for the complete outsourcing of Social Media moderation policy to itself and similar NGOs, who possess views radically to the left of the general public, and who would shape what is acceptable to publish on Social Media to exclude all political viewpoints in opposition to their own. Should this occur it would be blatantly anti-Democratic, and completely undermine the Irish people's right to participate in their country's affairs, and decide their own future.
While the FRO and others went to great lengths to speak of the supposed Far-Right and their goals of undermining mainstream democratic institutions, the greatest threat to Irish Democracy comes not from the Right but from these Left-Wing NGOs, who are funded by the government and are the de-facto Vanguard of the Government's migration and Cultural politics.
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