‘Ireland is full’: Populist grievance, microfascist desire and transnational whiteness in Irish anti-immigration discourse online

This study explores how populist binaries, microfascist normalisations and whiteness-based mobilisations converge in contemporary digital anti-immigration discourse, and, crucially, how Irishness is recoded as a node within transnational whiteness projects. Critically analysing posts on X (November 2023–January 2024) related to the 23 November 2023 Dublin riots, we demonstrate how populist framing portrays migrants as existential threats betrayed by ‘cosmopolitan elites’, strategically exploiting Ireland’s post-crisis economic anxieties and colonial memory. At a microfascist level, routine digital interactions normalise authoritarian attitudes, using dehumanising language, endorsing vigilante justice and urging defiance of immigration laws. Our central claim is that the scalability of Irishness in far-right ecosystems hinges less on local recruitment than on symbolic circulation. Interoperable hashtags, memes and portable frames (e.g. #IrelandForTheIrish, #IrelandIsFull, #GreatReplacement, ‘Save Europe’) allow Irish events to be absorbed and repurposed across US-UK-EU white nationalist imaginaries. In this process, whiteness functions as an infrastructure for belonging, transforming Ireland from a locally situated case into a circulating emblem of civilisational defence. Platform affordances amplify this portability, while affective cues ( fear, outrage, moral panic ) bind grievance to desires for protection , competent control , recognition and social repair , making exclusion appear to be common sense. The contribution is twofold: empirically, we map how Ireland’s national identity is strategically remediated into transnational whiteness networks; theoretically we propose a model of small-nation recoding that traces travelling frame templates, indexical tags and libidinal investments as mechanisms of symbolic scaling. In doing so, we clarify how online populist rhetoric works affectively to normalise microfascist worldviews and reposition Ireland within broader transnational logics of whiteness, authoritarianism and imagined civilisational purity.