How the far-right lied about George Nkencho
By Sami El-Sayed
The tragic shooting of George Nkencho at the end of 2020 was incredibly shocking. We offer our deepest condolences to his family and community who are grieving his loss, and we add our voices to the many calling for answers.
What people are also likely to have heard, are the torrent of lies and misinformation about the shooting, predominantly sourced in far right propaganda campaigns. So, cutting through the campaign of misinformation, what actually happened on the day of the shooting?
Dean Van Nguyen sums up the facts succinctly:
“So goes the tragic chronicle: at around midday on December 30, Nkencho entered the Eurospar in Hartstown where he reportedly punched a store manager, breaking his nose, before producing a kitchen knife from his pocket. Unarmed Gardaí had arrived on the scene by the time Nkencho exited the building. He then made his way home to his family home at Manorfields Drive, Dublin 15, refusing appeals to drop his weapon. The ASU were deployed. Having heard George’s knock on the door, Gloria Nkencho says she came out of the house and informed Gardaí that her brother had mental health issues but was ushered back inside. The door was closed over but not shut. With the use of tasers and pepper spray proving ineffective, five shots [we now know this to be six shots] were fired after Nkencho appeared to lunge forward, two of which entered the hall of the house through a window, where his three brothers and sisters had gathered.”
Those are the facts of the case. Let us be clear: Anybody asserting “alternative facts” without hard evidence is selling you misinformation - do not buy it.
Many of us will be familiar with friends and family sharing claims such as George Nkencho having 32 prior criminal convictions, that he attacked a shop worker with a knife, that he beat up his girlfriend with a hammer etc. These are all complete lies.
Sharing misinformation when genuinely believing it to be true is not some great crime. And it does not make those people, who thought they were sharing the truth, racist. But these actions also have consequences and are not victimless acts - the spreading of this misinformation has been deeply harmful both to the Nkencho family, but also to the conversation we as a society need to have about Garda violence. Nonetheless, the facts remain the facts.
So, knowing this, some key questions arise. Why did the Gardaí shoot George on that day? And why was there such a widespread (and effective) campaign of misinformation carried out?
Far-right Agenda
Immediately after the shooting occurred, the far right were organising on social media platforms such as Telegram and 4chan in order to conjure up ways to utilise George's death for propaganda (See: ‘Be as callous as possible’: How the Irish far right mobilised after gardaí killed George Nkencho). They coordinated attacks on left wing figures and activists on other social media platforms - such as Twitter and Facebook - in order to delegitimise the concerns that were being raised about the use of lethal force. This is not to speak of the genuinely disgusting and explicitly racist and threatening abuse that is being targeted at the grieving Nkencho family. Regardless of where anybody stands on whether the actions of the Gardaí were justified on the day, we should be able to agree that any attempts by the fascist movement to manipulate the conversations our society needs to have must be opposed down to the hilt.
The far right do not engage in this lying and manipulation without a strategy or a plan. The death of George Nkencho provided them with what they saw as the perfect opportunity to bring their racist ideas into the public conversation, and to emulate their white supremacist friends and fellow far-right groups in the United States and UK who have plied their trade on the “culture war”. And very often this is a literal trade for the far right - they make a great deal of money from foreign backing and selling merchandise to those who fall into their spiral of disinformation.
Campaigns of disinformation are not a new tactic for the Irish far right movement - it regularly engages in disinformation campaigns about “migrants” or “African gangs” being involved in accidents or crimes, and create myths about “no-go areas”. They do this in order to create an air of fear and hysteria, and to ratchet up racial tensions. They also often tie these racist lies to concerns about drug dealers or criminal gangs in order to exploit the genuine fears that exist in working class communities.
In the case of George Nkencho's death, the far right also attempted to pose itself as an ally of the Gardaí, protecting them from the devious attacks of the far left. By doing so, they again seek to take advantage of working class people who see the Gardaí as a force protecting us from drug gangs and anti-social behaviour. Forgetting for a moment that the Gardaí clearly do not see it that way, the fascist movement has simultaneously engaged in vicious campaigns of targeted harassment against Gardaí and their families. In one case, they have persistently harassed the grieving family of the dead Garda Detective Adrian Donohoe, and in another have driven one Garda to suicide as a result of a targeted far right harassment campaign occurring just in the past few months. The far right are friends to nobody but themselves.
Again, the far right do not engage in this behaviour idly. They seek to use the issue of race to build their organisations, which aim to roll back social progress (LGBTQ+ and women’s rights) and threaten the gains of working class people. They prey on working class anger at the political establishment and aim that anger and frustration at migrants and black people, claiming that they are why we don’t have good jobs and housing.
In effect, this acts to drive a wedge between working class people, and weaken us to the point that our class is unable to see their overall agenda and resist it. That agenda is nothing other than the violent and undemocratic seizure of power (as we saw with the fascist storming of the Capitol in the US earlier this month), the purging of society of “undesirables” - those who disagree with them or look different to them - and the heavy suppression of those who resist them: civil society, the trade union movement, and the left. We have seen their likes before in the Hitlers and Mussolinis of the world and, in our own nation's history, the Blueshirts. Their vision for society is one that is a threat to every single one of us, regardless of our race, religion or creed. Do not give them a single inch.
Was the shooting racist?
It is unfortunate that the far right have so thoroughly poisoned the conversation with their lies, because there is an extremely essential discussion that needs to be had about the role of the Gradaí and their use of force.
A focal point of the debate around the shooting is the issue of race. What factor did race play in the gardai deciding to shoot George? The honest answer to that is that we may never know what was going through the minds of the Gardaí when they decided to pull the trigger. Right now, we cannot make the determination that the Gardaí at the scene were, consciously or unconsciously, motivated by race when they shot George Nkencho. But we have more than that to go on here, and we can examine trends within the Gardaí as a whole to see if there are systemic issues at play.
There are numerous reports documenting Garda mistreatment of ethnic minorities in Ireland - including failure to properly handle cases where the victim was from a minority background, failure to seriously investigate violent hate crimes, and direct racial abuse including the use of racial slurs such as the “n-word”. The United Nations has identified racial profiling (assuming that people of a particular background are criminals) as a common feature of Garda policing practice, an assessment which is confirmed by the experiences of many people from ethnic minority backgrounds in working class communities. One survey of Gardaí found that all frontline Garda had negative views of the Travelling community, and that Gardaí as a whole were found to have negative views of other ethnic minorities. This is an issue that goes back decades.
For those who believe that the Gardaí are a force to protect ourselves and our communities without bias or prejudice, these facts should be concerning. Racism is on the rise in Irish society. 2019 saw the highest number of racist incidents in Ireland on record, with dozens of reported racist assaults and hundreds of other reported racist incidents, including persistent repeat harassment, death threats, workplace discrimination and targeted hate speech. Only about 30% of race-motivated crimes get reported to the Gardaí due to the bad experiences of minority communities with policing and a general belief that their complaints are not taken seriously.
In that context, it is not unreasonable in the slightest for the black Irish community, who experience discrimination, abuse, and even violence all too often, and for activists to raise the question of race in the context of George Nkencho's tragic death and the increased awareness of racist policing after the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests.
Gardaí assist masked thugs in a violent illegal eviction in Frederick St., Dublin in 2018, that hospitalised occupants
The Real Role of the Gardai
And it must not be forgotten that even outside the issue of race, there should be real concerns about how the Gardaí conduct themselves. Let's be clear here - this is an organisation that is up to its eyeballs in everything from embezzlement, to framing people for crimes they did not commit, to spying on political opposition to the government.
It regularly brutalises protesters and engages in disproportionate and heavy handed policing - as veterans of the water charges movement can attest to. Armed Gardaí being deployed to water meter installations in order to intimidate protesters was a common feature, and Garda chiefs would engage in political interference such as when they prevented the Anti-Austerity Alliance from fundraising in Tallaght because the funds would go to “unlawful activity” (read: anti-water charges protests). This is the same Gardaí that tried to stitch up over a dozen anti-water charges activists with up to a life sentence for sitting in front of Joan Burton's car (See: Jobstown - A Protest on Trial). The Gardaí on that day too, were heavy handed, aggressive, escalating the situation and created a circumstance where working class people were forced into direct physical confrontations with them.
For those who have the illusion that the “bad apples” in the Gardaí can simply be rooted out with time, they would do well to remember the vicious witch hunt against Maurice McCabe (and others) and, even now, the ongoing efforts to illegally fire Garda whistleblowers. We are in a world where the Garda Commissioner is implicated in the covering up of over 100 loyalist sectarian murders in the North.
But it is about more than just a few bad apples - the Gardaí as an institution exist to preserve and protect the interests of the ruling capitalist elite, big business and their property rights, by policing and controlling working class communities. It is not a coincidence that it is the Gardaí who get called to picket lines when workers are on strike. It is the Gardai who “assist” landlords with evictions. It is the Gardaí who harass working class young people who don’t “follow the rules” while the super rich get away with crashing our economy.
Demand justice and accountability
It is abundantly clear that we need an independent inquiry now, but in advance of that there are a number of facts that points towards foul play, or at the very least clear recklessness on the part of the Gardaí.
The latest revelation that George Nkencho was, in fact, shot twice in the back, should be deeply concerning to everyone. The fact that the state post-mortem did not report this raises more questions - why didn’t it? Why did it take an independent post-mortem to uncover these facts? In reality, this points to a cover-up of misconduct.
Adding to that, that two bullets entered into the house as a result of over-penetration (the bullet going through the body completely) and nearly hit family members shows that the Gardaí at the scene were not concerned with public safety when they pulled the trigger. One of the first rules of firearms safety is to never point your gun at something unless you intend to destroy it - incidentally that includes completely defenceless bystanders behind whatever you're trying to shoot.
The claims made by right wing pundits, politicians and supporters that Garda behaviour was beyond reproach are now no longer credible. They viciously attacked anyone who raised questions about their conduct and argued that there would be a GSOC investigation into the shooting and that we needed to wait for the results of that investigation before we commented on it. Forgetting for a moment that these same people would deem the case closed and oppose any discussion once an investigation is completed, it has to be acknowledged that GSOC is simply not fit for purpose. Early in the process, the Nkencho family raised concerns about how it was being handled, and they are now being backed up by civil liberties organisations in the face of the fact that GSOC still have not even interviewed the family, let alone begun to verify their version of events.
But even if they were sincere, GSOC is an essentially toothless body. When GSOC began an investigation into Garda spying operations conducted against them, the Gardaí - with support of the extreme right-wing Fine Gael then-Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter - forced the head of GSOC to resign, and he subsequently left the country.
Simply put, GSOC as a body clearly has no power or authority over those who they are meant to keep in check - the Gardaí as an institution. In addition to that, being under the Department of Justice compromises its independence. If we want to get the clear facts on the shooting of George Nkencho, and get the justice his family so desperately deserves, we need a genuinely independent, public, empowered inquiry- free of Garda intimidation and involving civil liberties, anti-racist, community and victims' rights organisations.
We Demand:
Suspension of Gardaí involved until the investigation is finished
A public independent inquiry involving anti-racist, civil liberties, community and victims' rights organisations
Invest in mental health assistance response units
Build a powerful united front against the growth of the far right in our communities