Editorial: ​RTE again seems to play down anti immigrant sentiment in Dublin

​A major anti-immigration protest was held in Dublin this week, yet the Irish national broadcaster reported it barely at all.

The demonstration on the streets of the Irish capital on Monday included chanting of protestors: ‘Sinn Fein are traitors!’

They were criticising a party that has made almost unequivocal support of immigrants a badge of pride, and which has never been slow to imply that racism is a unionist and British thing.

Yet the extraordinary scenes in the Irish capital were largely ignored in state broadcaster RTE’s online coverage, despite having been shared around the world after some major US conservative accounts tweeted about them.

It is the latest in a number of anti-immigrant demonstrations in Dublin this year, and comes amid poll findings that 50% of all southern voters in general want checkpoints on the border to control migration. One survey found that 52% of Sinn Fein voters want border checkpoints against immigration.​

The News Letter asked RTE refused to comment on why it had devoted a mere 129 words in its online coverage to the protest – coverage which made no mention of the anti Sinn Fein chanting.

Last year we reported on how a stabbing in Dublin led to what the media, including RTE, only described as ‘far right’ riots, without so much as mentioning the status of the attacker (an immigrant). It made news confusing, and seemed to confirm to a trend in which salient facts in stories are toned down, out of apparent sensitivity to immigrant groups. But that is not the media or government’s role.

If the public, even the Irish public, is concerned about immigration, while its leaders boast of their generosity in contrast to implied British meanness, then this should be openly reported.