Echoing the Trump administration, some Dublin politicians push campaign against Somali immigrants

They tried to laugh about it, said Abdi Farhan Hassan, recently.

“But to be honest, it is really disappointing,” he said, sitting at a city centre café wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

It was kind of funny that they couldn’t come up with a new charge and had to borrow Trump’s against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, said Hassan. “You know, they’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.”

Hassan was talking about reactions on a WhatsApp group he shares with lots of other Somali immigrants to recent posts ricocheting on social media about a dead dog in Ballymun.

On 4 July, a video of charred animal remains began popping up on anti-immigrant accounts.

The video is of the aftermath, but a man’s voice off camera says, “I believe that [Somalis] cooked a dog up here, three of them,”.

“Dirty bastards,” he says at another point in the video.

A day later, Turning Point UK – the British version of Trump-aligned Turning Point USA – shared it with a false claim that Somali immigrants were “caught cooking a dog”.

So far, no evidence linking Somali immigrants to the incident has emerged. Gardaí has said it’s investigating it.

Hassan had wondered maybe, because some Somali immigrants don’t normally pet dogs because that’s not a part of the culture they grew up with, they’re being accused of abusing them.

But “it’s not in our culture to hurt dogs”, he said.

The smear didn’t come out of nowhere, though. In recent weeks, efforts to demonise Somali immigrants in Finglas and Ballymun have ramped up.

Those include rhetoric opposing homeless Somali immigrants getting housed in the neighbourhood.

Hassan said the hatred is definitely palpable and has people bobbing and weaving around others to avoid trouble. That they’re being singled out like this is bewildering and it sucks, he said.

“We’re kind of confused as a community. And we’re feeling it, we’re feeling it,” said Hassan.

Anti-immigration politicians in Dublin, like anti-immigration politicians in the US, have decided to specifically target Somali people.

The reason? There's been an uptick lately in the number of people coming from Somalia – which as of late has seen an increase in political violence – and claiming asylum in Ireland, said independent Councillor Gavin Pepper.

The 2022 census found that about 2,400 (about 0.05 percent) of the 5.15 million people living in Ireland had been born in Somalia. That number has increased since then but is very likely still below 0.15 percent of the country's population.

Somebody’s watching me

On Sunday afternoon, some torn and tattered tricolours still danced on some lampposts in Ballymun.

From what he’d seen, at least some of the rhetoric against Somali immigrants in the area came from Stephen Redmond, a National Party rep in Finglas, said Diarmuid “Dougie” Mac Dubhghlais, a local anti-racist activist.

“[He] stood outside a house here, literally only down the road from me. He said he saw it was being given to Somalis,” he said.

Redmond posted a video of that on 30 June. On Saturday, it was still pinned to his X account.

In it, Redmond seems to be salty that a family from Somalia is going to live in that home, and says that it should go to people on the housing list who are Irish.

He says he has this information because someone stopped the family on the street and lobbed questions at them. “Somebody walking past happened to ask them, ‘Oh, how’s it going? Who are you? Are you moving into this house?”

The family had been open, he said, saying yes, they’re moving into the home, and that they’d been homeless. “These people aren’t homeless. They’re homeless in Ireland, and the best way to solve that is to send them back home,” said Redmond.

He names both the street the house stands on and the homeless shelter where the family allegedly stayed.

Hassan, the Somali man, said that was not the end of it.

A week later, a clutch of people turned up on the street to protest, he said. “This family doesn’t want to be in the media. But it’s been reported to the guards to keep them safe,” said Hassan.

Redmond posted footage from that protest on his social media, too.

The bureaucracy of getting housed

In a post about the protest, Redmond also said it was prompted by the “known fact that Somalians [sic], Nigerians, Pakistanis and all other people from outside of Ireland are skipping housing queues and are fast tracked into housing,”.

This is not true, but Redmond was not the first person to complain about some Somalis getting housed ahead of White Irish people.

Before Redmond posted his first video, on 27 June, Pepper, the independent councillor for Ballymun-Finglas, mentioned Somali people at a rally.

“People from Somalia, and these countries that come over here, after a few years in international protection centres, they put themselves on the homeless band list, and they get housed ahead of people that are on the list,” he hollered into a microphone.

A few people in the audience wore green hats with “Make Ireland Great Again” on the front and a tricolour stitched on the back.

Former asylum seekers granted some type of status to stay can navigate the same system as Irish and European citizens.

That means joining the struggle to find somewhere to live in a country with an affordable housing crisis. If their income makes them eligible, they can then apply – like others – for social housing.

In the Dublin City Council area, the council triages applicants based on the time they have been waiting and their housing need, using its housing allocations scheme.

In December 2014, after the death of Jonathan Corrie, who was sleeping rough near the Dáil, then-Minister for Housing Alan Kelly, a Labour TD, ordered that 50 percent of social housing placements should be reserved for homeless people.

But in 2016, his successor, Fine Gael's Simon Coveney, ended that policy, amid reports that some people were making themselves homeless to get social housing faster, skipping to the front of the queue ahead of people who'd been waiting longer.

These days, at least 21 percent of social housing allocations are “directed to households who are in emergency accommodation”, said a spokesperson for Dublin City Council on Tuesday.

Last week, echoing that previous debate about people assessed as homeless jumping to the front of the social housing queue, because of the way applications are triaged, Pepper said that former asylum seekers who are assessed as homeless and go on “the homeless band which has priority over the other bands” squeeze out “Irish” people on the regular social housing list who’ve been waiting for years.

Asked if he agrees that they navigate the bureaucracy meant for those accepted as homeless because that’s their situation, and whether he thinks they shouldn’t qualify for social housing aid at all, Pepper asked if it’s an “irrelevant coincidence that they all happen to end up in the same situation”.

Searching for shelter

It's true that it's not a coincidence that former asylum seekers can often grapple with homelessness.

For long, people trying to move out of asylum centres and move on with their lives have said it’s really hard to find private landlords willing to accept them as first-time tenants.

As the Department of Justice and, before that, the Department of Children, ramped up efforts to free up space in their asylum centres, many with status still searching for a rental faced two options: accepting a transfer to a faraway, unfamiliar town or turning to their local council for homelessness aid where they work, go to college or send their kids to school.

Some of them who have an illness or a disability try to convince the Department of Justice’s International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) not to move them out of Dublin and away from their support networks — though at that point IPAS has no legal obligation to accommodate them at all.

A recent letter from an HSE worker, written on behalf of a man with refugee status, who is told to leave his asylum centre in Dublin city or accept a transfer to Castlebar in County Mayo, says he needs to stay in Dublin because he has Type 1 diabetes, is partially blind and needs to continue his treatment at Mater Hospital.

“Such a move would be very detrimental to his health,” the letter says.

People in that situation reach out to their local council, and if they overcome the bureaucracy and language barriers, they might be assessed as homeless, get a bed at a homeless shelter through the council, and, at some point, access social housing.

They’re particularly vulnerable, said Conor Reddy, People Before Profit councillor for Ballymun-Finglas.

“It’s people who go through very serious hardship,” he said by phone last week.

Nobody is skipping any queues. If people with an immigrant or asylum background are more likely to become homeless, “it’s because they face the most precarity. Like, we know this,” said Reddy.

They’re also more likely to be low-wage workers and “probably are less socially integrated”, he said.

People born in Somalia didn’t create a shortage of affordable housing, Reddy said.

“These things require a solution to the housing crisis; it requires people from all backgrounds coming together and putting pressure on the government and landlords, the architects of housing policy and housing failure,” he said.

Why Somalis?

By WhatsApp, last week, Pepper said he singled out Somalis because “they are representatives of asylum seekers in general simply because they make up by far the biggest cohort of new arrivals”.

Up until recently, Pepper said, it was taboo to point out a specific group, “and some in the media still see things that way, but the public have moved on and are ready to discuss immigration”.

It’s true that Somali citizens featured at the top of asylum-seeking statistics tables, but only for the period between November 2025 and May 2026 – the last period for which data is publicly available.

In that window, between 183 and 277 people per month were applying for asylum in Ireland.

Throughout 2024 and for most of 2025, Somali citizens were not filing the highest number of asylum applications, although they were among the top 10.

Then, in 2025, Al-Shabab’s – the militant group in Somalia – attacks “using improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide bombings, and shelling, as well as targeted assassinations, resulted in the highest numbers of civilian casualties,” according to a country report for the year from Human Rights Watch.

And “repeated cycles of clan conflict, notably in Luuq district of the Gedo region and Hiraan region, killed and displaced civilians,” it said.

Pepper sent some statistics he’d gotten from the council’s chief executive at the 6 July monthly meeting of the council.

It shows the number of families – which included single parents – and lone adults who’d lived in asylum centres and then “accessed emergency accommodation in the last two years”. Between 2024 and 2025, about 680 single adults and 56 families, it shows.

But the data isn’t broken down by nationality, so there's no way to tell how many of them were citizens of Somalia.

###Everything is American

Both Hassan – the Somali man in Dublin – and Reddy said they believe targeting Somalis is also partly just repeating Trumpy talking points.

“It’s straight out of Trump’s playbook, isn’t it?” said Reddy, who said he isn’t aware of many Somali people living in Finglas and Ballymun.

Just like in Trump’s first term, the current administration has cranked up its demonisation of Somali immigrants, especially in Minnesota, in recent months.

In November 2025, Trump posted on X that “Somalian [sic] gangs are roving the streets looking for 'prey' as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

More recently, on 6 July, he stoked hurt and anger among the Somali community in Minnesota when he shared on Truth Social a video of small girls – who turned out to be from a Somali background – singing on their kindergarten graduation day, wearing blue gowns and caps with white hijabs.

He then re-shared the video with a quote post from an account named “End Wokeness”, which identified their kindergarten as located in St Paul and criticised the little girls’ hijabs.

Hassan, the Somali man in Dublin, said people like him are a perfect target for some because Somali people are both Black and Muslim.

That they’re being characterised as uncivilised and unworthy serves a purpose, though, he said.

“They claim you’re a savage to normalise you being attacked,” said Hassan.