Ireland hasn’t had an organised, significant far-right movement in living memory - and there are some good reasons for that.
When you have a history like ours, you tend to side with the immigrants, the oppressed and displaced, the hard-working and the hard done by.
That’s not to say there wasn’t racism, ignorance and bigotry. But we were also a country that exported people and didn’t see a lot coming the other way.
It’s only relatively recently that we have had to adjust to hearing different languages and seeing different faces around us all of the time.
And with that, and with relative prosperity and opportunity for the most of us (compared at least to the tough times of decades past) come some challenges most European countries had to face decades before Ireland.
You could make the strong argument that we have - mostly - done well.
Yes, there are racists, bigots and ignorant fools in every town in the country.
But I’d argue that most of us respect and welcome those who come here to work hard, give their kids opportunities and make a life for themselves.
And we do it because it’s the right thing to do, because we recognise the value of immigrants and we are - all of us - very familiar with the immigrant story because we all have brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles all over the world.
But the far-right is on the rise in Ireland. And the pandemic has given it a weird boost.
There’s a bizarre coalition of fringe types who are either feeding into or being manipulated by some very dangerous forces.
Take the anti-maskers - or Raving Spanners as they also like to be called.
Yes, you’d have to pity someone who thinks having to wear a bit of cloth on your face for 5 minutes to get a pint of milk is the greatest act of oppression in Ireland since they tied James Connolly to a chair and shot him.
And yes, the kind of people who wrap themselves in the tricolour and stand outside the GPO shouting about Bill Gates wanting to micro-chip you are more to be pitied than to be feared.
But even though they may look like a bunch of eejits, and sound like a bunch of eejits - and are in fact a bunch of eejits - they can also be a bunch of dangerous eejits.
Once enough people start buying into the delusions about 5G phone masts, about measles vaccines being meant to control our minds or about the secret world Government controlled by Beyonce, we start to move towards a dangerous place.
The US and increasingly the UK are there already. It’s a place where 30 percent of people can’t acknowledge basic reality. A place where facts mean nothing, the truth doesn’t count and you can elect a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson.
And it’s a place where we start demonising and blaming “others” - immigrants, the poor, the “elites” or even them lot up in the capital or those cute hoors down the country.
Irish people have always had a low tolerance for this kind of bollix. We’ve known that actual reality is tough enough without having to make stuff up to worry about.
Let’s hope we can hang on to that, having the basic good sense and mental toughness to keep ourselves grounded in reality.
