Rundale

Alan O’Gorman

In conversation with Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, in September 2024, Black Canadian writer Dionne Brand said that the phrase human animals “struck a familiar note for many people around the world… because that is always a designation that has been given to oppressed people”. She was referring to the famous instance on October 9, 2023 when Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, to justify “putting a complete siege on Gaza… no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”, said: “We are fighting human animals and are acting accordingly”. Oppressed people, Brand said, “knew where this was going… we have lived those genocides already, and understood them deeply”.

Irish Human Animals

Irish people ought to understand the language of dehumanisation and what it seeks to cover. As the first British colony, Ireland and its people were subject to some of the Empire’s earliest dehumanising narratives. During the Norman Invasion of the twelfth century, Gerald of Wales wrote that the Irish “are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture… They are a wild and inhospitable people… and live like beasts”. As a member of the prominent Cambro-Norman de Barry family, who seized substantial amounts of land in Munster, Gerald had an incentive to dehumanise the Irish – he had a powerful audience too. His pseudo-topography was dedicated to King Henry II and read to crowds at Oxford University.

Gerald’s account of Ireland was still an influence on British colonial attitudes four hundred years later when a new propagandist-conquistador, Edmund Spenser, landed in Cork. When he wasn’t writing sonnets on his stolen land, “the poet’s poet of the Elizabethan era” was active in suppressing rebellions during the Munster Plantation, and was even present at the Smerwick massacre. 

Spenser is sanitised by English academia and cultural institutions, who prefer not to talk about his incredibly violent work A View of the Present State of Ireland, which could have been written today by someone like Gallant. In this pamphlet, an English settler named Irenius slowly makes the case for a policy of enforced famine and scorched earth against the whole population of Munster. He tells us that after this “most rich and plentiful country full of corn and cattle was brought to such wretchedness”, the people came creeping “out of every corner of the wood and glens… upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them”. They “flocked as to a feast for the first time” to eat carrion, watercress and shamrock. Crucially, these were conditions that the people “themselves had wrought”.

Narratives dehumanising the Irish were popular well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Punch magazine’s Irish cartoons are the most notorious, where the Irish were often placed somewhere on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder alongside Black Africans and apes. As Aimé Césaire says, “the colonizer… in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal”.

Fanon says that the native “knows that he is not an animal” and indeed, as the Irish song laments: “Mr Punch with his literature, he treats us rather badly / Whenever he paints our caricature he depicts us rather sadly / With crooked limbs and villainous face, he thus depicts the Irish race”. Per Fanon: “it is precisely at the moment [the native] realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory”. 

A Familiar Note 

What happens to the so-called human animal, then, once they have secured this victory? With white Irish people now mostly safe in their human status, do they remember their historic designation? If so, does it make them sympathetic to those now experiencing dehumanisation?

If sympathy with the Palestinian people can be taken as an indicator, there is evidence that a vast number of Irish people identify with the oppressed (at least in this situation). Numerous articles in international media ask “Why Ireland is the most pro-Palestinian nation in Europe”, or even “the world”. These articles often come to the same conclusion: a “shared colonial experience”. 

Indeed, Irish people living in the six counties, who have a much more visceral experience of their recent dehumanisation, have particularly strong solidarity ties with groups in Black America, South Africa, Palestine and beyond. When Palestinian photojournalist Eman Mohammed visited Derry in November 2024, she described the city as a place “to feel human again, to be understood in our struggle, to be met with love while carrying the weight of collective grief. Because when you are Palestinian, Lebanese, Irish, African American, Indigenous, or Bangladeshi, your entire existence becomes defined by colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the constant fight for survival”.

New Targets: Dehumanisation within Ireland

Yet, a sizable movement directly opposed to this form of Irish solidarity is emerging in the twenty-six counties. The Irish far right is more interested in fostering relationships with the types of white supremacist groups in Britain and the United States who once vilified the Irish. They’ve even gone so far as to march with loyalists in Belfast, at least one of whom was sentenced for the sectarian murder of an Irish Catholic. While this alliance has caused much amusement and confoundment, it is not without a historical precedent – Oswald Mosley’s Ulster Fascists sought to unite loyalists and nationalists under an all-island fascist banner. If the shared target then was Jews, it has now shifted to Muslims and Arabs, but also encompasses immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, non-white, queer and trans people.

It is often said about Irish racists that, if only they knew their history, they wouldn’t behave this way. As if knowing how Irish people were dehumanised would make them empathetic with other marginalised peoples. Yet many are acutely aware of their historical status. As one elected councillor said at an anti-asylum seeker gathering in Knock, Mayo in January 2025: “these scammers coming to Ireland are fleeing nothing. They’re coming here with their designer clothes… our people were eating grass… grass was coming outta the sides of their mouths”.

Exponents of the Great Replacement Theory in Ireland utilise our colonial past to serve their agenda. They frequently refer to a new “Plantation of Ireland” in which the asylum seeker and refugee, rather than the armed British settler and soldier, are “invading” the country. Far-right groups may be painted as fringe, but some of their views are mainstream. A poll in May 2024 showed that 63% of voters in the twenty-six counties favoured a stricter asylum policy and increased deportations. (Interestingly, in the six counties, Irish nationalists are six times less likely than unionists to think that immigration rates are too high.) These sentiments reach their most extreme in outbreaks of violence such as the Dublin riots and the alarming number of arson attacks on asylum seeker accommodation centres since 2018.

The truth is, there has always been those who see in their own people’s oppression – be it ongoing or in the past – a kinship with others suffering the same fate, and some who strive to put distance between themselves and those they consider inferior. For every Roger Casement, who saw firsthand the Belgian genocide in the Congo and “realized that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race – of a people once hunted themselves”, there’s the pro-Slavery John Mitchel and antisemite Arthur Griffith, who sought to portray the Irish as a higher caste than their fellow human animals.

State-sponsored Dehumanisation 

The Irish government is quite adept at playing all sides. They pay lip service to the pro-Palestine movement while allowing US warplanes to use Shannon Airport and reneging on their election commitment to pass the Occupied Territories Bill. They tap into our historical oppression while squirming up to consecutive genocidal American presidents.

The government – and the opposition – has also contributed to the dehumanisation of asylum seekers and refugees, taking on far-right policies when they see it as politically useful. Rather than abolish the inhumane direct provision system as promised, they have only further degraded asylum conditions.

Many people seeking asylum in Ireland, often fleeing conditions similar to Irish emigrants of the 1840s, are sleeping on the street. This includes Palestinians. In March 2024, 100+ tents sat on the pavement right outside the International Protection Office in Dublin. The people sleeping within were given these tents by the IPO and told to fend for themselves. A young man from Afghanistan, whose sleeping bag was wet with snow, said: “Sometimes I am asking, ‘Am I human?’ When I was coming from Afghanistan it was so difficult. People looking at us like animals.”

The Space We Occupy

This is a time of global social upheaval, and militarisation is rapidly rising. It has coincided with an increase in international attention on Ireland. While many in the Global South view Irish people as sympathetic outliers in an otherwise callous Europe, a whole other set of people has fixated on Ireland as some sort of pastoral paradigm of undiluted white purity.

Then there is the pressure from the powerbrokers in Berlin, London, Brussels and Washington, who wish to drag us, kicking and screaming, into NATO. This call is gleefully taken up by lobby groups for the arms industry and a significant segment of the liberal media establishment, who seem hysterically bent on abandoning Irish neutrality – one of our only long-standing policies with a solid anti-colonial origin. These people are desperate to put distance between us and the Global South, hoping we may finally secure our human status when we push the red button on a two-thousand-pound bomb to be dropped on a school or a hospital.

Irish culture is also having a big moment. Some Irish artists follow in the footsteps of Sinéad O’Connor, speaking truth to power on an international stage. Others, many of whom have huge platforms, express in private their Palestinian sympathies but remain publicly silent, or equivocate when it matters most – this is also a form of dehumanisation.

White Irish people occupy a privileged position in the post/colonial world. They are presented with a choice available to few colonised peoples: where would you like to align yourself? Will you seek to be accepted as a modern, civilised Western European, with the assumed silence and complicity that requires? Will you attempt to simply pass your dehumanised status onto a new human animal, with the violence that implies? Or will you reject the hierarchies, both explicit and implicit, that continue to be used to justify mass death for certain people.

Those of the latter persuasion must not shy away from our privileged position. This is equally important for Irish people at home as it is abroad, especially those of us who live, travel and work in the Global North. It is one thing marching in Dublin or Cork, it is another to bring that energy to the countries where it matters most – Germany (where the Irish and Arabic languages have been banned at demonstrations), the US, England. Activist groups like Irish Bloc Berlin are already doing this. They show us how to confront severe colonial and racist repression with humanity and true solidarity, putting their bodies, careers and legal statuses on the line.

We must not defang ourselves to appease genocide supporters. We must remember that we were once human animals. In doing so, we must not seek out someone new to subjugate, but rather reject the designation for everyone.