In November 2023, the Dublin riots shocked Ireland and the wider world.

Sparked by an immigrant’s knife attack on three children, inflammatory online rumours spread in minutes. Parts of the city were wrecked, cars and buses torched. In 2024, a proposed site for refugees in North Dublin was blockaded for months and subjected to repeated arson attacks, and many other sites were burnt out.

Until very recently, Ireland had prided itself on escaping the wave of far-right, xenophobic populism rampant throughout Europe. That complacency has been rudely challenged.

In Burn Them Out!, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc explores the long history that led to this moment. He uncovers the pervasive anti-Semitism of the Irish political elite in the 1920s and ’30s, the energetic efforts of Oswald Mosley and other British fascists to extend their movement to the North of Ireland, the IRA’s alliance with Nazi
Germany in the 1940s and the many ultra-Catholic, anti-communist Irish movements that flirted with fascism. The openly-fascist Irish movement known as the Blueshirts, an integral part of the early Fine Gael party, is looked at with fresh eyes, and its supporters’ statements about Jews now make for hair-raising reading. Many of its proponents went on to become pillars of the Irish political and cultural establishment.

Ó Ruairc also investigates carefully the recent history of the far right in Ireland, its equivocal relationship with arson and other violence and its chequered electoral history. This is an essential book about an aspect of Irish history all too often swept under the carpet.