The other day, I came across a video on social media of a scene that had recently played out on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal, at Mount Street Bridge. In the video, uploaded online as a live stream, two anti-immigration activists approach a group of male asylum seekers living in tents clustered around the bridge.

At the centre of the group, who are mostly non-white, a white woman is handing out food to the men from a pair of casserole dishes that sit on the narrow wooden arm of the canal lock. The activist filming zeros in on this woman, and immediately begins to question her about why she is giving food to the men.

“What happens when you feed the pigeons?” he asks her. Her only response is to tell him he is being hostile. Undeterred, and clearly pleased with the pest-control framing of his question, he repeats it a number of times. “What happens when you feed the pigeons? They breed more! Look at the f**king amount of them you have down here,” he says.

Absurdly, even as he films – and even as he rants incoherently about the danger of “people getting raped and murdered” by the asylum seekers – the man is helping himself to a selection of chocolates from a large box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray.

As the woman walks away, taking out her phone to call the guards, he follows her along the canal bank, informing her that she is being streamed live on YouTube. His fellow anti-immigration activist, similarly unseen behind the camera, can be heard shouting as she walks away. “Everybody, make this woman famous!” he cries – addressing, presumably, the proud Irish patriots watching the live-stream as it unfolds.........

© The Irish Times