Paul Hosford: Attacks on Indian people come from the normalisation of racism

Irish Examiner

a day ago

Last week, an embassy of India issued a stark warning.
"There has been an increase in the instances of physical attacks reported against Indian citizens recently. The Embassy is in touch with the authorities concerned in this regard. At the same time, all Indian citizens are advised to take reasonable precautions for their personal security and avoid deserted areas, especially in odd hours."
Embassies often make warnings about security situations or perceived dangers posed to their citizens, that is not new.
But this warning was made about Ireland. In 2025. Does it make you feel a little bit ashamed?
A rise in attacks on the Indian community which includes an assault on a man in his 40s in Kilnamanagh in south-west Dublin in which he was attacked viciously by a group of young men, stripped of his pants and underwear and baselessly accused of inappropriate behaviour towards children.
A rise in attacks on the Indian community which includes an attack on Santosh Yadav at a train station in Clondalkin. He suffered a broken cheekbone after a group of teenagers on e-scooters attacked him.
A rise in attacks on the Indian community which includes an attack on taxi driver Lakhvir Singh by two of his passengers. He told The Irish Times: "My children are so scared, they have asked me to promise them that I will never drive a taxi again". Mr Singh had been on a drop-off to Poppintree with two men, one of whom willingly paid the €50 fare upfront, though one did not want to take a taxi with a 'black' driver.
"The customer sitting in the front ran out and around to my door,' he said.
'He tried opening it but I held it firmly shut and the second man ran around to help his friend open the door. When they couldn't get it open, one of the men ran back around to the passenger side, picked up a broken bottle from the ground and struck me twice across the forehead. He was shouting 'Go back to your country' at me."
A rise in attacks on the Indian community which includes a group of boys telling six-year-old Nia Naveen to "go back to India" as they hit her. Six years old and attacked by a group of teens shouting racist abuse.
Racist attacks in Ireland are not a new phenomenon, just ask anyone who isn't white and doesn't speak with an Irish accent. But the latest spate of attacks on Indian people is simply the outworking of a renormalisation of racism within our public discourse. It starts with "legitimate concerns" about "unvetted men" and becomes marches demanding the country "get them out". In these instances, the "them" is never defined, handing those who try to sneak their racism in through the backdoor the plausible deniability when something like the above happens. You see, they were talking about "them", not "them". The joy of creating the other is that you never have to take responsibility when your ugly caricature is imposed on a different other.
But the racist narrative that has found itself more comfortable in the homes, minds, and conversations of Irish people in recent years is a direct facsimile of every racist playbook ever, and those who meekly allow its passage should be embarrassed to be hoodwinked by it
It starts with public meetings where lies about immigrants go unchecked, then becomes protests at IPAS centres, standoffs with gardaí and abuse roared at women and children fleeing from war. But all of these are justifiable, right? The community has fears, services are stretched, and the town doesn't want to lose a facility. The ends justify the means, surely?
And while that front door is being hammered and attacked, the insidious message is smuggled through as "legitimate concerns" become dogwhistling photos of queues for new-build homes featuring large numbers of Indian people. And that turns into questions about whether non-native Irish people should be allowed to buy homes at all in a housing crisis, or demands that they prove they are here to stay.
I do not suppose to speak for the immigrant communities of Ireland, but this moving of the goalposts is constant when people claim they're not racist, but... First, it's that people who come here should integrate and speak the language. But just this week, a video of a black man singing Oró, Sé Do Bheatha 'Bhaile was labelled "disgusting" by some of the worst people on the internet. A follow-up response by a black Irishman living in London pointing out that on his London-based GAA team he is the only one Irish-born and Irish-speaking member drew the same predictable and tiresome rhetoric from the emboldened and increasingly unhinged anonymous fringe.
This is why there is no point in attempting to discuss issues of immigration with those whose starting position is blind hatred.
You cannot reason with them because their end goal is mass deportation, racial segregation and a version of Ireland that neither existed nor is possible
When they say Make Ireland Great Again, I don't know which version of a great Ireland was achieved without immigration being a part of Irish life. The two greatest periods of Irish prosperity have occurred in the last 30 years and have been made possible in part by the contribution of those who came from beyond our shores.
There are an estimated 90,000 Indian people in Ireland, and they are crucial in our health and tech industries. However, even if they weren't, if they came here and worked and lived peacefully and contributed to their communities, they would deserve to do so unmolested. There can be no narrative of good immigrants versus bad immigrants, as if there is a bar beyond contribution and decency for any of us. An attack on one group among us is an attack on us all.
It is easy to play off these incidents as youthful aggression, the kind of things that bored boys do. But these cases are more insidious, more complex and definitely more vicious. And they are the direct outworking of a conversation that was never wanted in good faith and was always designed to get to this point, where people who are good and decent and welcome in our communities are writing open letters because they no longer want to remain in a country where their community does not feel safe.
We must meet these narratives head-on. We can have a discussion about immigration if a conversation is genuinely being sought — because if the current system was working, there wouldn't be people sleeping in tents. But that conversation cannot be a cover for violence against our neighbours, violence against each other. And it is incumbent on all of us to speak out when the wolves arrive in sheep's clothing or when their dangerous narratives are repeated back to us at the dinner table or in the pub, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.
Because the reality for those of us who don't conform to a narrow version of Irishness is a lot more uncomfortable.