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LAST JANUARY, A side-by-side image containing two wildly conflicting newspaper headlines about Dublin, written two decades apart, began popping up on social media.
The left side of the image featured an article from April 2003 titled “Dublin one of the safest cities in the world”; next to it was a screenshot from a January 2024 piece from another newspaper that said “Dublin ranks among the top ten most dangerous major cities in Europe”.
Keith Woods, a prominent figure in Ireland’s far-right movement with a large following on X, posted the contrasting headlines together on social media with a suggestion that immigration by non-white people was to blame.
“Dublin went from one of the safest cities in Europe to one of the most dangerous. What changed?” he asked in a post on X, sharing another image of Census findings about a decline in ‘White Irish’ people living in Dublin city between 2002 and 2022.
The post prompted a wave of similar claims that echoed the well-known Great Replacement conspiracy theory, blaming Muslims and multiculturalism for an apparent decline in living standards in the West.
But the article claiming that Dublin had become more dangerous did not mention a demographic shift – and was based on unscientific methodology.
To those who see the two headlines, the claim that Dublin has become more unsafe has added currency because the two stories come from legitimate news outlets.
The headline describing Dublin as safe is taken from an online version of a piece first published by the Irish Examiner newspaper on 15 April 2003, while the headline about Dublin being dangerous was published online by the Sunday World on 9 January 2024.
Woods’ post, which has been seen more than 100,000 times on X to date, inspired copycat posts among an eclectic collection of groups and personalities on social media.
Analysis by The Journal has found dozens of versions of the side-by-side headlines posted online alongside claims that suggest non-white people, immigrants and Muslims are behind the apparent trend, which have collectively been seen millions of times.
Conor McGregor shared the two headlines on X on 26 February in a post seen over 2 million times.
The claim appears to have informed the former UFC fighter’s talking points during his US visit this week when, in near-identical wording to Woods’ post, he claimed Dublin had “gone from one of the most safest cities in Europe to one of the most dangerous”.
But McGregor’s musings (which included a doubling down after the BBC reported that Gardaí had rejected his comments this week) were only the latest instance of the claim going global.
Over the course of the last year, it found its way to internet meme pages and the social media site Gab, a platform popular with neo-Nazis and far-right groups.
In the late summer, the image was shared in pro-Brexit Facebook groups by former UKIP election candidate Stan Robinson and made it as far as Australia, where a conspiracy-focused Instagram page shared it with the caption “multiculturalism destroys Europe”.
The claim also broke through to non-English speaking accounts on X, which re-posted the two headlines alongside French and Arabic captions, and a Russian-language Telegram channel that sought to capitalise on its lure among certain corners of the internet by emblazoning its handle on a version of the image as a method of self-promotion.
It was even picked up by more far-flung accounts, which deployed it to spread anti-Muslim rhetoric more specific to their own political causes.
A Facebook account that regularly shares content critical of Arabs and Palestinians posted the two headlines on multiple pro-Israel pages, with a caption blaming “African and Muslim illegal aliens” for Dublin’s apparent decline.
Another Facebook page belonging to Bharath Reddy Ravula, a vocal Indian supporter of Narendera Modi’s ruling party – which has campaigned against Islam - likewise shared the image to his 576,000 followers with the caption “Before Muslims/After Muslims”.
Amid all the posts showing the two articles, there were few, if any, explanations that went beyond the headlines.
The posts provided a simplified narrative about Dublin, which gave no information about what the articles entailed, and masked the flimsy evidence and source that the Sunday World relied on for its piece about Dublin becoming one of the most unsafe cities in Europe.
This research, which was also published by the Irish Mirror and Dublin Live, was taken from a ‘study’ by online gambling company Online Betting Guide which claimed “to reveal the safest and unsafest major destinations in Europe”.
It has become a trend in recent years for companies to put together survey results in the hopes of getting media coverage. In this case, the gambling company said that it was compiling the figures because ‘it’s important to stay safe when partying in another country’.
The ‘study’ ranked 50 European cities by a ‘safety score’, calculated by using data from a Serbian company called Numbeo, which describes itself as “a crowd-sourced global database of quality of life data”.
Dublin featured ninth from bottom on the list – but Numbeo itself said in a disclaimer that there is nothing to verify the accuracy of the data or the strength of its methodology.
In the disclaimer, the company said none of its data has “necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise” to provide “accurate or reliable information”.
“Use our content at your own risk,” the disclaimer says.
“There is absolutely no assurance that any statement contained on the website is correct or precise.”
It notes that data on crime is “derived from surveys conducted by visitors to our website,” rather than from facts.
By comparison, the Irish Examiner article from 2003 was based on a study carried out by international consultants Mercer, who looked at 39 quality of life indicators including “political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport and other public services”.
Timing may also have played a factor in the Sunday World headline going viral, coming just weeks after the Dublin riot in November 2023.
At the time, there were ongoing discussions about how safe the capital’s streets were, in light of the riot and high-profile attacks on tourists the previous summer.
But whether Dublin has actually become more dangerous over time is difficult to measure.
An analysis of data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) comparing 30 types of violent crime shows that there were around 40,700 crimes recorded by Gardaí in the Dublin Metropolitan Region in 2003, the year the Irish Examiner article was published.
Those crimes included things like murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, rape, assault, robberies, burglaries, possession of weapons, discharging firearms, carjacking, abduction, human trafficking, threats to kill and dangerous driving.
The figure rose to around 42,000 around 2011, but fell again as the decade continued and dropped to 26,436 instances of the same crimes being recorded in 2024.
For a period in between the two headlines being published, the CSO published crime statistics with a caveat: the data, taken from An Garda Siochána’s Pulse system, may have had quality issues between 2014 and 2023 and could not be relied upon to be entirely complete or accurate. This would not have impacted the figures for 2003 or 2024, but may have been an issue for the 2011 numbers.
Cross-country comparisons such as the one in the Sunday World article are more problematic because of the way in which crimes are reported in different countries.
Even Numbeo – whose data was cited by Online Betting Guide for the Sunday World article - explains in its disclaimer that the index “may not be as suitable for cross-country comparisons” because of issues around the gathering of relevant statistics on crime.
The categorisation of laws can vary between countries, such as murders, manslaughters and homicides (a blanket term that is used in the United States), while there may also be straightforward differences in things that are considered criminal (for example, the way in which certain drugs are classified or whether they are illegal at all).
Certain crimes may be under-reported in certain countries due to local factors, like distrust in the justice system, while countries with different criminal justice systems may have different ways of gathering data because of the ways that crime is tracked.
The European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat allows for comparisons between Dublin and around 250 other cities (which it classifies as ‘metropolitan regions’).
Although it shows that the capital ranked in the top 50 for murders, robberies and assaults in 2022, the last year for which data is available, these findings were limited in their use.
Many cities did not have relevant data at all, so they weren’t included, and some much smaller cities and metropolitan regions were included, making comparisons difficult. Two of the cities with the lowest numbers of murders, robberies and assaults in 2022 have populations of under 200,000, one-sixth the size of Dublin.
Dr Eileen Culloty, Deputy Director at the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society, told The Journal that scapegoating migrants like the narrative about Dublin has done “is an old story” because they stand out as an “easy target”.
“Throughout modern history, opponents of immigration have argued that migrants are responsible for an increase in crime,” she said.
But Culloty says that researchers in different countries have ultimately found that the overall contribution of migrants or asylum seekers to crime rates is marginal.
She added that the response to hate-mongers should be to focus on core issues and defuse the scapegoating, rather than relying on statistics.
“It’s understandable that some people feel frustrated with their living standards and have no reason to take comfort in someone spouting statistics and research results at them,” she said.
“If you want to reduce crime socioeconomic factors like reducing poverty and social exclusion matter much more.”
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