Anti-immigration activists were involved in promoting protests in Oughterard against a planned asylum centre, and social media posts about the resulting demonstrations have been widely shared by far-right groups across Europe.
An analysis by social media intelligence agency Storyful shows that supporters of Gemma O’Doherty, an anti- immigration campaigner and conspiracy theorist, have been actively pushing for opposition to a new direct provision centre at the former Connemara Gateway hotel in the Galway town.
Before a protest meeting held in Oughterard on September 11, Conor McZorba, also known as Conor Rafferty, an administrator of the Gemma O’Doherty supporters’ Facebook group, posted links to a now private group where opponents of a direct provision centre in Oughterard could talk about “rising up to take control of their destiny”.

McZorba and Patrick Curran, one of the organisers of the protests in Oughterard, have shared a video from Gearóid Murphy called The Asylum Industry, in which Murphy, who has supported O’Doherty online, complains about “gombeens” involved in the “immigration industry”. In the video, which Curran has praised as “extremely factual”, Murphy criticises the number of Syrian asylum seekers coming to Ireland and falsely claims that the Syrian war has been “ended for some time”.
In the private Oughterard Facebook page, Curran, a businessman, posted that while immigrants in Gort were “nice working Brazilians”, he believed those coming to Oughterard would be “mostly males and Muslims”.





Videos about Oughterard were shared with groups linked to the far-right party Alternative for Germany
JENS SCHLUETER
In an interview this weekend Curran said his wording was “regrettable” but he was “trying to respond to a racist comment about Gort”, which he described as “an example of integration done really well”. He said he felt he had been “played” and added that comments made by local TD Noel Grealish at the protest meeting, in which he referred to refugees as spongers, were “not good”.
Storyful’s analysis of online conversations related to Oughterard shows that, since September 1, across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, individuals, groups and media associated with promoting far-right rhetoric were the dominant force in spreading news of the protests over the proposed centre.
This includes the anti-immigrant news organisation Voice of Europe; the Irish “free speech” news site The Liberal; the Irish Freedom Party; and Grand Torino, an Irish YouTuber. Across Facebook, videos related to Oughterard were shared to pro-Brexit groups and groups associated with the German far-right political party Alternative for Germany.
On Twitter, seven of the top 10 most engaged tweets relating to Oughterard since September 1 came from individuals and accounts associated with the spread of far-right ideologies, including UK-based agitator Katie Hopkins; the Polish-nationalist account BasedPoland; and O’Doherty.
At the September 11 meeting attended by about 850 people, Grealish claimed African “economic refugees” were coming to “sponge off” the Irish system. At the same event, Marian Flaherty Earl, a retired special-needs assistant, read out a letter from Marek Wojdala, a Polish man, who said his experience of living in Bergen in Norway was that asylum seekers had an overwhelmingly negative effect.
Wojdala’s letter claimed the presence of asylum seekers led to increased crime, a drop in property prices, and gangs of young men targeting women, who then had to dye their hair black to avoid unwanted attention. The 30-year-old, who spent 14 months working in Bergen from October 2015, said that his experiences related to the Ytre Arna asylum centre in Bergen.
Wojdala said much of his information was anecdotal, based on “not reported” incidents that he heard from friends during his time working with Greenpeace and as a bartender. The Pole said he stood by his claims, and in his opinion “the whole concept of packing people into one place is wrong”.
The Norwegian Directorate of Immigration described the relationship between the local population and the asylum seekers at Ytre Arna, which opened in 1987, as “calm and harmonious”, and said its feedback from police was that there was very little crime associated with refugee residents in Norway.
“A big lie” is how Bergen’s Labour Party leader Geir Dale described Wojdala’s claims. “In all the time we have had asylum reception in Ytre Arna, we can count on one hand the incidents that have taken place,” said Dale, pointing out that he was born there and has neighbours who were asylum seekers.
He said the refugees included people from Kosovo, Bosnia, Serbia and more recently from Palestine, Somalia, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Syria.
Ytre Arna asylum centre director Frank Stiby also said he had never heard of young women being targeted. He said claims made in Oughterard about Norway had “no root in reality”.
Curran said he believed “attempts were made to infiltrate our community by both far right and far left”, and “we have blocked them now on social media”, with closed access to the Facebook page.
Rory Clancy, a protest spokesman, played down the influence of social media on the community, stating that he was far too busy running a business and rearing a young family to be on social media. The publican added that he did not condone the delivery of large boulders which are now blocking access to the Connemara Gateway hotel’s main entrance and service entrance.
Curran said a picket on the home of John Nolan, the hotel’s former owner, and his daughter, Michelle Doherty, had now been lifted. Doherty told The Sunday Times she was traumatised by the 24-hour picket, involving several hundred people on a rota basis, and the impact it had on her 15-year-old daughter.
The Department of Justice said the direct provision system reached capacity last September. The total spend on asylum seeker accommodation is expected to hit €120m for 2019, up from €78m last year.