Analysis in Decay: Burn Them Out!: A History of Fascism and the Far Right in Ireland by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Clare-based historian Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc has published a new book titled Burn Them Out!: A History of Fascism and the Far Right in Ireland (2025). This is a hot-button topic and certainly one of interest to readers of the Burkean. In other countries, there have been serious and scholarly studies of the radical right. Alas, this book does not fall within this category.

Non-nationalised Irish Fascism

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc is a dilettante historian of the Irish Right. Despite apparently holding a PhD, he dispenses with basic methodology or research principles that have served other scholars well when examining the phenomenon of the radical right – almost all of whom, I should add, have no sympathy with the subject they’re investigating. Yet these scholars (e.g., Graham Macklin, Benjamin Teitelbaum, etc.) have largely succeeded where Ó Ruairc failed.

The author, from the onset, does not even try to define “fascism” (Irish or otherwise) or engage with the literature on it, despite the title and alleged focus of the book. It is divided into seven narrative chapters, which aim to tie together disparate groups and personalities to shape the author’s overall two theses: 

1. That the far-right in Ireland has a specific political pedigree and continuity, and 

2. That it is a British conspiracy.

The medley of groups surveyed include the “British Fascisti”, a unionist organisation mostly based in Britain with a few “expat” English and Irish Unionist supporters in Ireland. 

Even attempting to tie this group in with Irish fascism ignores the very basis of fascism: that it is fundamentally a nationalist ideology. The view adopted by Ó Ruairc is that all “fascisms” must be on the same side. This is naïve and simplistic. For most of the 1930s, Mussolini and Hitler had a strained and cantankerous relationship – not least because of disputed territories in South Tyrol. They were both strong nationalists and fascists but of different nations with conflicting objectives.

It should be understood that “Irish fascism” must germinate from the nationalist culture and politics of Ireland. By definition, this is a separate national identity and culture to that of Britain. If this axiom isn’t accepted, then an understanding of Irish fascism is being built on sand.

He builds on weak foundations not due to ignorance, but deliberately. His aim is to establish that “fascism” in Ireland is in fact de-nationalised. It is little more than pathology – this perhaps explains why, throughout the book, he makes caustic references to various individuals having had sexual assault allegations made against them.

In other countries, fascists are considered to be the nec plus ultra of native nationalism. They are often the most committed revanchists, the most ardent purists, and the most extreme patriots. But in Ireland, Ó Ruairc tries to show that “Irish fascists” are the weakest strand of Irish nationalists. 

They are, in his view, either pro-Treaty at best or pro-unionist at worst. They are uninterested in the Irish language, preferring to speak the King’s English. They are least concerned with the independence and unity of Ireland. This implicitly puts “Irish fascism”, in Ó Ruaric’s caricature, outside any conventional understanding of fascism.

Bring on the Dancing Blueshirts

It’s perfectly natural for a historian of fascism in Ireland to examine the Blueshirts, but let’s not pretend that the only people interested in fascism in the 1930s were pro-Treaty sorts. There were plenty of anti-Treaty people – including those who remained opposed to the Free State even under Fianna Fáil – who had plenty of positive words for Mussolini’s fascism. And of course the IRA’s relationship with the Nazis during WW2 surely contradicts the narrative of Irish pro-fascist nationalists as coming from the pro-Treaty genepool.

However, Ó Ruairc’s selectivity is key to establishing his “continuity” thesis. Whilst in the Ukraine today you can find incidents of Ukrainian nationalists celebrating the Nazi collaborator Bandera which could be used to make the case for a “historical continuity” argument, there is nothing comparable happening in Ireland. 

But in Ó Ruairc’s estimation, the ordinary people protesting outside Crown Paints in 2025 must have a false consciousness and cannot realise they’re part of the same historical continuity that wore blue shirts and protested against the price of beef exports in 1934. Historical fascism has cast long shadows, and it does indeed inflect some movements today – but in Ireland, the groups which Ó Ruairc highlights as the forerunners of the modern Irish Right (the Blueshirts, chiefly) are completely irrelevant to the causes and campaigns of the modern anti-immigration movement.

The chapter on the Second World War makes some mention of IRA chief-of-staff Seán Russell’s links with Nazi Germany, but they’re explained away as him being a “blind militarist”. This is rather patronising to Russell! The fact that the most significant pro-fascist activity of the entire period came from the IRA itself is brushed under the carpet. Instead, the chapter largely focuses on unrepresentative and fringe groups hardly worth examining outside of anorak micro-history.

The non-nationalised fascism discursively described in chapters 1-6 offers nothing new or original. There’s no attempt at an analysis of their ideology or worldview. It’s all very slapdash. Furthermore, it was shoehorned into an overarching narrative of “fascism” in Ireland as something seedy and underground but not worthy of serious analysis. If one wants to say that the Irish Right is not worthy of serious analysis, that’s all well and good – but don’t write a book on it.

For example, the “fascistic” ideas of political figures like Brian O’Higgins (anti-Treaty) or Michael Tierney (pro-Treaty) are unexamined, and the ultra-republican Lia Fáil is curiously absent from the pages.

Writings by the aforementioned men, who were diametrically opposed on key issues, are sophisticated and worthy of examination. Yet they aren’t considered or examined. When such figures are even name-checked, it’s just in a perfunctory way to identify them with undefined “fascism”. There is no attempt to seriously answer why an Irish nationalist in the 1930s might have had sympathy for Mussolini’s Italy, corporatism, or fascist ideology in general.

Analysis in Decay 

The final chapter on post-war fascism is the weakest. Even sympathetic reviewers, such as JP O’Malley in the Irish Independent, realised this. O’Malley wrote that the modern day “far-right” only gets a “passing mention” and “this part of the book feels like a writer being rushed to deadline by their editor.”

The post-war part of Ó Ruairc’s book was what promised to be the most original and groundbreaking. It’s probably why most people are even interested in it. 

The cover of the book even uses a photo from the 2023 Dublin Riots, luring readers in with the hope it’ll be timely and fresh. But have mercy on the poor D4 centrist dads who picked up this book hoping to read lurid tales of party building, personality clashes, botched electoral outings, gold heists, and leadership heaves, yet were instead left with a tedious reheating of previous works by historians like Maurice Manning and Mike Cronin.

This chapter is where the book became most shrill and amateur. The author allowed his bias to drip all over the pages. To illustrate this, below is an extract, copied verbatim, from this supposedly “scholarly” study:

“Online video of the protest showed that among the ‘Oirish’ patriots was a man with a distinctly English accent who repeatedly shouted at the Gardaí, telling them they were ‘Blaak-an-Taanz!’ It is worth noting that the far-right protests had forced the closure of the library for the first time since 1920, when it had been destroyed by the real Black and Tans, a precedent seemingly lost on the far-right agitators. After their rally, some of the protesters toured the city’s bookshops in search of ‘obscene’ publications. Failing to find any, the ‘Oirish Paytriots’ decided to drown their sorrows in the most quintessentially English institution they could locate in Cork – a Wetherspoon’s pub, from which they were swiftly ejected by the management and Gardaí for abusing the staff.”

The above reads like a cranky comment on TheJournal.ie. Unpacking it further would be gratuitous. Its shallowness speaks for itself.

How laughable it is for a chapter purporting to analyse the modern-day “far-right” in Ireland to describe (well, paraphrase online newspaper articles) incidents like the “Coolock Says No” banner’s unfortunate appearance at a “cross-community” anti-immigration march in Belfast, yet it doesn’t even mention the name “Hermann Kelly” once! Like him or loathe him, Hermann Kelly and the Irish Freedom Party are part of the history of the Irish Right.

Similarly, the National Party is reduced to a mention of it having contested elections and “failed” (despite winning a councillor in June 2024 under very trying circumstances) and the 2023 “split”, which is of course, not analysed or explained. There is not even a Wikipedia-level precis of the National Party’s foundation and history.

At a bare minimum, I hoped this chapter would offer some sort of analysis of the publicly accessible policies available on the respective parties’ websites. An effort could’ve been made to tease out the policy or philosophy differences between groups like Ireland First, the Irish People, the National Party, and the Irish Freedom Party. But no – this would be too much like hard work for Ó Ruairc. It’s easier to just regurgitate headlines from newspapers reporting on riots, arson, and protests.

What Does a Serious Irish Right History Look Like?

Ó Ruairc’s Burn Them Out is a boilerplate hodge-podge. The historical analysis is so inflected with “presentism” that it’s essentially worthless and contributes nothing new. Meanwhile, the conspiratorial “Brit” message pushed throughout the book reflects his own politics. I take it that writing this book was therapeutic for Ó Ruairc. It was a way to let off steam and have a rant, but for some reason, this cranky screed has been published in paperback by a London-based publisher.

My appeal is: please, let a serious person write a book on the Irish Right next time! Allow me to signpost some sources and leads for a proper study of the Irish Right:

The Irish Right did not fall out of the sky due to Trump/Brexit in 2016. It can rightly be seen as stemming from an opposition to the impact of mass immigration, but its pedigree can also be seen in the pro-life movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the 2000s, several organisations sounded the alarm on immigration, which has resulted in a situation where 1/5 of the people in Ireland are now non-Irish. The Immigration Control Platform was an early group that made Cassandra-esque predictions about mass-immigration. Examine it and its personalities.

A serious writer must recognise that the players involved in a radical political movement aren’t going to be synonymous with the public faces. In other words, for a history of the Irish Right, don’t rely on the newspapers and their profiles to tell you who mattered.

The extent to which the modern-day Irish Right is a product of the internet age I think is a fair question to investigate. But let’s not get sidetracked by obsessing about the “influence” of Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate or Alex Jones. If you want to see these ideas being debated and thrashed out, look at Politics.ie. Read posts by users like Telemachus in the early 2010s to see how the issue of immigration was seen by the “Irish Right” in its infancy.

And, of course, an analyst of the Irish Right must read what the parties, groups, and online journals say about themselves. The Burkean itself offers a backlog of articles that chart the topics and subjects that have mattered on the Irish Right at different points since around 2017. Relying on what the mainstream newspapers reported, like Ó Ruairc, is dramatically inadequate– that approach could’ve been taken by AI! There are many sources out there for a serious and enterprising writer.

An interesting and scholarly book on the Irish Right has yet to be written. I hope it will be written and present an accurate and well-considered portrait of the Irish Right—warts and all.