Cianan Brennan: How the far right tried to hijack Carlow shooting
Online information in 2025 moves at speed.
But the tragic events in Carlow on Sunday, where a gunman opened fire in a shopping centre, appear to sum up the perils of unregulated social media discourse, and what State bodies like the gardaí can try to do to mitigate it.
By 12.30pm on Monday, gardaí had put out four statements regarding the shooting incident at the Fairgreen Shopping Centre in Carlow Town.
The second and fourth were most noteworthy.
The second arrived at 9pm on Sunday night and followed a new but increasingly familiar trend – confirming the ethnicity and nationality (white and Irish) of the gunman who was dead at the scene.
This is a calculated risk to take legally, one most recently employed during the incident in Liverpool where a car struck dozens of football fans on the street. The Merseyside Police quickly and publicly identified the driver as being both white and from Liverpool.
It seeks to balance the potential negatives of being so specific so early regarding a suspect's personal details, versus the upside of nipping the misinformation and narratives spreading about the incident online firmly in the bud.
The fourth garda update, at 12.30pm on Monday, was extraordinary.
It set out in detail many of the specifics of what had happened – including the age and ethnicity of the dead man, the fact he had died by his own hand, and that no garda had fired a shot, while the only other injury recorded was a minor leg issue suffered by a young child while running away from what was happening.
Contrast that wealth of corroborated, checked information, delivered just 18 hours after the traumatic incident had occurred, with the reams of misinformation which spread online, particularly on X (formerly Twitter), in the immediate aftermath of shots being fired at the shopping centre.
To list just some of the claims being made: the gardaí had shot a person with a gun, a mass shooting had taken place, seven people had died, nine people had died, a nine-year-old child had been shot, the shooter had explosive objects strapped to his body.
Many of these posts got thousands of views. Absolutely none of what they claimed was true.
Gardaí near the scene at Fairgreen Shopping Centre in Carlow. By 12.30pm on Monday, gardaí had put out four statements regarding the shooting incident. Photo: Niall Carson/PA
Tommy Robinson, the British hard right agitator, was one of those to pass comment. So too our own far-right ideologues and failed political candidates Derek Blighe and Philip Dwyer.
None of them could possibly have known what had happened, because it takes time to sift evidence and be certain about what has transpired in chaotic circumstances. But that didn't stop them.
After gardaí confirmed that the deceased man was white, Blighe even had the gall to claim that "skin colour is only important when it can be used against you" on X. His point being that if the shooter hadn't been white, the gardaí wouldn't have said so.
Meanwhile, his own post stating that 'apparently 7 people including a child have been shot' - posted exactly an hour after the incident, is, of course, still up. It has 332,000 views at the time of writing.
'There is a rush by members of the far right to portray such incidents under their own ideological viewpoint,' said Ciaran O'Connor, senior analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
'In doing so they are knowingly contributing to disinformation around this incident given there is simply no way for first responders to establish what facts are known at a scene in that timeframe, let alone people following viral Whatsapp and social media posts from a distance,' he said.
Emergency services attended the scene at Fairgreen Shopping Centre, Carlow. Photo: Niall Carson/PA
The trouble is that there are simply no consequences for people pushing these false narratives.
The only response is for people to be vigilant and to take everything they see posted online by unverified or untrusted actors with a grain of salt.
Unfortunately, despite the gardaí's unprecedented pushback on this occasion, the information war feels like a battle that is currently being lost, and comprehensively.
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