A VIDEO OF an altercation in Tuam, Co Galway has been shared online alongside claims that there was a “media blackout” on reporting a stabbing related to the incident.
TheLiberal.ie published the video on X.com, formerly Twitter, saying: “Ireland is NOT safe. The first video of 2024 is migrants sucker punching Irish youngsters and pulling a knife out to attack them in Tuam, Galway on New Year’s Eve #IrelandisFull”.
The post has been shared more than 450 times.
TheLiberal.ie is a website that has been factchecked numerous times by The Journal, often for false claims about migrants.
“Media blackout: Irish youngsters punched and attacked with knives by migrants in Galway on New Year’s Eve night and no media reported it,” read a headline which later appeared on its website.
However, there was no blackout and the incident was reported by some media at the time.
A media blackout refers to the censorship of news related to a certain topic by news organisations.
They are rarely used in Ireland, where they are almost exclusively put in place for security reasons on foot of requests from gardaí, usually when they are responding to hostage situations or other situations where individuals are armed.
The government has not issued a request for a media blackout in the decade that TheJournal.ie has been operating; further, it is not certain that media outlets would comply with such a request if it did happen.
Irish media outlets have their own internal processes for deciding which stories are covered each day and which ones aren’t.
Galway Beo published a story on the story including screenshots from the video. Their story appeared on Christmas Day – before TheLiberal.ie covered it, and before they allege that it even happened.
The incident did not occur on New Years’ Eve, as TheLiberal.ie claims, but in the early hours of Christmas Eve.
The Garda press office confirmed to The Journal that there were no reports of a matching incident in the area on 31 December or 1 January, but they were aware of a clash on 24 December.
“Gardaí on patrol in Tuam, Co. Galway encountered a gathering of individuals on Shop Street in the early hours of Sunday 24 December 2023,” the press office said in an email.
“No offences were reported at the time and the individuals dispersed following instruction received.
“Enquiries are ongoing into all the circumstances of an alleged public order incident that is said to have occurred prior to arrival of Gardaí.”
There is no evidence that a stabbing had occurred or that foreigners were involved.
The footage does, however, appear to show a man being stuck and, later, objects being wielded threateningly as weapons. The faces or ethnicities of the pair that appear to be brandishing weapons are not clear in the footage.
On social media, the incident was blamed, widely and without evidence, on foreigners, often in posts that mistake the date.
A video posted by the fringe far-right party “Irish Freedom Party”, describes the video as showing a “stabby Arab” on New Year’s Eve.
At the time of writing, that video was shared more than a hundred times on Facebook. On X.com, the party’s leader, Hermann Kelly, posted the same video. It has been viewed more than 11,000 times.
“Breaking! African’s [sic] Stab Irish Youth in Tuam, Co. Galway! Please Share!” a post reads by Niall McConnell, who fronts a tiny ultra-Catholic group called Síol na hEireann, or ‘the Irish Patriots’. He describes the incident as occurring on 1 January.
That post has more than 10,000 views on X.com.
Other posts on X.com describe the video as showing “welfare immigrants”, “immigrants”, “foreigners,” or “imported black knife crime”. These posts have collectively garnered well over a million views as of the time of writing.
However, many of these posts also describe the incident as occurring around New Year’s Eve, making it difficult for viewers to find the original reporting by Galway Beo, in contradiction of TheLiberal.ie’s claim that the story was being suppressed by a media blackout.
An analysis of misinformation in Ireland, by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a counter-extremism think-tank found that TheLiberal.ie was one of the most cited media organisations cited by Irish fringe groups.
The Journal FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say