Just a few notes I was writing on facebook on the Anti-mass Migration march of 24th April 2025 in Dublin, and for which i was asked to post them elsewhere as well.
I would definitely be at the high end of those estimates for the Nationalist turnout. I have been at countless protests coming down that street from the corner of Parnell Square to the Gate theatre and while sometimes you can have the crowd wall to wall across the street just at the corner, they are not like that as they pass down the street. For it to be jammed both sides like that makes this a huge crowd, in the 60,000 to 100,000 definitely.
For the record I believe there have been four protests in Dublin of that size in recent memory: Two pro-life marches were of that size actually, c.2018, then the very first anti-mask one in 2020 which met at the Customs House (all the later ones were not nearly as big) then last year, I think thats May or June, one only, of the anti-mass migration ones, was of that huge dimension. And now this one.
Anyway the real story of this is the huge push that the other side made for it. You can see in the attached pic how many large and important organisations threw their weight behind it. That they really did go all out you can see from the recent statement by Cllr Patrick Quinlan that "multiple TDs from West Dublin were spotted" at the counter protest yesterday. And yet by any estimate that anybody's making, they got together from 1/50th to 1/100th of the Nationalist crowd.
The latter meanwhile had the support of no member of the approximately 200 members of the Oireachtas, and only about 3 Councillors of the approx. 1,000 in the Republic of Ireland. It had the support of no organisation as such, apart from some micro Nationalist parties that are in turmoil with internal coup type situations scrapping their leader (
Nationalist Party and
Ireland First), or are about to according to most reports (
Irish Freedom Party). If you were to talk about any coherent and active recent group in that space, which you might suppose would be the organisers, you would say maybe Anthony Casey's
Sinne Na Daoine and Justin Barrett's
Clann na hÉireann. But the former leader asked his group not to attend, and if they insisted on doing so he told them not to wear the party insignia, and the latter group had a separate protest on Saturday, in the Phoenix Park, they are not included in the main Nationalist crowd anyway.
And yet look at the Nationalist crowd that gathered? There is no earthly way that that support corresponds to the borderline one percent tally we got in the recent elections, although it does mimic, very interestingly, the earlier Referenda of about this time last year. The Taoiseach meanwhile parades this clearly corrupt electoral performance as the only rock on which the current Irish State stands, as he was asked yesterday:
"...Irish Nationalists is growing...?"
"Well again, we have just had a General Election. We had a Local Election before that, and I think the ballots boxes is the key metric, the key determinant, sorry, of the organisation of society: who gets elected into government, who gets elected into local councils. And I think it has to be based on ideas and policies We believe we have a stronger set of ideas than perhaps those who articulated yesterday."
This State is in big trouble, and I think they know it!