Cllr Malachy Steenson makes his wild claim in a new RTÉ documentary on the recent local election in Dublin’s North Inner City, in which he was one of five far-right councillors elected to local authorities in the Dublin area.
“In November 2022 the Government decided to put 400 IPAS (International Protection Accommodation Services) applicants, mainly single males, into an office building in East Wall without any consultation with the community or with anybody else, so a protest was organised by some people on social media, I went along,” he explains.
Nial Ring
“I took a leadership position, and we have built that into a grassroots movement right around the country. So I got drawn back into save our country from annihilation.”
He says he has run in other elections too, for the likes of Republican Sinn Féin, the Workers Party and the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
He is now an Independent.
“I’m still a Republican, but what does socialism mean now? If you take their definition, it’s effectively open borders, a liberal agenda.”
He adds: “We are living in revolutionary times, and Ireland is to the fore of that. And this nationalist movement we are building is to the fore of it.”
Cllr Steenson is one of six out of 19 candidates the programme focuses on, including far-right Independent candidate, Brian Garrigan.
“I feel as if we are second-class citizens in our own country. I’ve seen the way London has changed, Manchester has changed, Leeds has changed. We are now being conquered,” he fumes, having earlier held up an ‘Irish Lives Matter’ poster.
Brian Garrigan
“I love Nigel Farrage. I’m going to be talking to him next week. Trump, I like him, he said a lot of things…As far as putting that wall up on the border it definitely needs to happen.”
Cllr Nial Ring (Ind) reveals he big issues he comes across on the doorsteps.
“It’s immigration I’m getting on the doorsteps, ‘why is there no control, why is there no consultation, why is there no communication’ and this idea are saying ‘we didn’t know this was going to happen’, where seriously you have a Rwanda issue, you have Brexit, this was always going to happen.
Cllr Daniel Ennis (Social Democrats) runs a local football team in East Wall, which welcomes immigrants.
“There’s a lot of vulnerable people,” he reflects.
“There’s a lot of anger around, because of the housing situation. The extreme neglect of the north inner city, a lot of us feel the Government have turned their back on us, so I don’t want to prey on the vulnerability, and that’s what people are doing, they’re preying on vulnerability.”
He admits his area has its problems, but should not be focussed on migrants.
“The community is on a knife edge, with crime, with the social issues that have blighted it for years and generations. Our work is already made hard. We don’t want other people making it even harder.”
Cllr Janet Horner (Green Party)reveals she had a nasty incident with a man during canvassing.
“He was very aggressive. He was shouting, ‘we don’t want your Green Party s**te around here’. When I held up my hands to hold him back, he hit my hands away. At one stage he said he was going to kill me [and] my friend. It was very aggressive.
“For women… it becomes really challenging to see yourself as part of public life when you know that that’s the price you might be paying. To end up with it only being hard men, or people who want that hard men approach to politics getting into it in the first place and last thing Irish politics needs at this stage in more hard men in it.