The Far Right in Ireland: Rise, Activities and International Links

At a time of heightened visibility of far-right agitation, Yasmin Ahmed’s edited The Far Right in Ireland: Rise, Activities and International Links is a timely publication and necessary contribution to Irish political scholarship. This edited volume brings together ten authors to dissect the contours of this phenomenon, presenting a multidisciplinary lens on its causes and manifestations in Irish civil society. It maps ideologies, networks and complex events with clarity and precision. The book does not seek to offer a full chronological review; each contribution addresses a distinct aspect of far-right activity in Ireland. This decision keeps the volume accessible to a broad audience and may be particularly relevant for practitioners in the community and voluntary sector. The trade-off is that some developments inevitably fall outside the frame. The volume’s focus on the 2018–2024 period, while valuable for its immediacy, necessarily limits its ability to situate recent far-right activity within deeper historical, political, and economic contexts. Although the book briefly notes the involvement of far-right organizations in the Save the 8th campaign (p. 26), it does not explore the continuity of far-right activism from the abortion debates of the 1980s to today’s anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ movements, nor does it trace the long-term dynamics enabling the far right’s resurgence. Given recent books that analyse contemporary events (such as the Dublin Riots in 2023) within a wider historical account of far-right movements in Ireland (Ó Ruairc 2025), it would benefit from signposting the 2018–2024 period in the title.