Ciarán O’Connor’s Iranian Bots: Time for Irish Media to Register ISD as Foreign Agents

The Irish Times op-ed pages have long enjoyed the rare distinction of irritating both left and right, largely through its habit of quietly importing the anxieties of British securocrats and repackaging them as native concerns. 

From ritualised scoldings about Ireland’s allegedly scandalous reluctance to fund a navy for imaginary armadas, to the perennial hysteria over subsea cables and the moral instruction manual on Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Old Lady of D’Olier Street has become less a paper of record than a laundromat for imported security narratives even for the tankies at the Phoenix.

Into this well-tilled soil steps Institute for Strategic Dialogue “analyst” Ciarán O’Connor, who gamely attempts to attribute recent Irish haulier unrest to that most improbable of puppet-masters: Tehran. The Irish “far right,” perennially cast variously as the sock puppets of American capitalism, McQuaid-era Catholic reaction, Ulster loyalism, Brexit Britain, the Kremlin, and Elon Musk, can now apparently add the ayatollahs to their crowded list of imaginary employers. 

One almost admires the cosmopolitanism of it.

The evidentiary payload from O’Connor for this geopolitical revelation is, however, somewhat less impressive. On the ISD website proper we are presented with a handful of AI-generated accounts, posing as Irish Muslim converts, posting boilerplate grievances about Israel (ISD was is the brainchild of arch-Zionist Lord George Weidenfeld incidentally)

For ballast, the piece gestures vaguely toward possible Chinese and Russian information operations. Good Lord. 

None of this is to deny that Russia, China, or Iran might take an interest in Irish discontent; great powers, like bored cats, will paw at anything that moves. But the more pressing curiosity is the unexamined role of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue itself presented, with a straight face, as a neutral referee in the global struggle against “misinformation,” despite its clear origins within the Anglo-American security ecosystem, funding from Biden-era State Department nevermind its founder’s cheerleading role for Zionism.

Thus we arrive at the central absurdity: four anonymous accounts, each with the conversational warmth of a damp sock and the audience reach of a parish newsletter, are elevated to the rank of geopolitical puppet-masters. One is asked to believe that Irish protests messy, local, and deeply rooted in fact organised over trucker WhatsApp and boomer Facebook groups were in fact awaiting instructions from Tehran.

If this is espionage, it is espionage conducted with all the subtlety of matching socks from the same drawer: technically coordinated, faintly embarrassing, and ultimately of no consequence to anyone not already staring at their own feet.

More seriously, there is a genuine moral inconsistency in decrying hypothetical foreign interference while normalising the routine insertion of London-based think-tank perspectives into Irish public debate. 

If sovereignty in discourse is to mean anything, it cannot be selectively invoked against distant adversaries while quietly waived for closer, more familiar actors. A healthier standard would demand transparency and proportion in all such claims, rather than amplifying the flimsiest evidence when it flatters prevailing narratives. Until then, one might gently suggest that Ciarán O’Connor consider pre-emptively signing whatever foreign agents register, if only to save time when the next damp sock is promoted to mastermind.

درود بر جمهوری اسلامی ایران و متحدان ایرلندی‌شان