An Open Letter To Garron Noone

After a week of talking about the things we're supposedly not allowed to talk about, Garron returned in a new video intended to put an end to that conversation, but we're nowhere near done.

Dear Garron,

I was just landing in Stockholm when my daughter WhatsApped me to tell me you were back on TikTok, and the first thing I felt was an overwhelming sense of relief.

@garron_music @garron_music ♬ original sound - Garron Noone

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Albeit on a much smaller level, I’ve been at the centre of similar social media storms before, and having previously heard you speak about mental health, I can only imagine how difficult it was for you to handle the tsunami of stuff, good and bad, coming at you.

When you took down your accounts I feared the worst for you, your health and your career, so I was delighted to see you back; that said, there’s a lot in the video that needs to be unpacked, and I’m torn between two things - your need to move on, and the risk of an unfinished conversation continuing to poison the public debate.

In the beginning of the new video you say that this is the last time you will speak on the subject, but later on you say that we have to be able to have conversations about these things. I know this is difficult and perhaps even painful for you, but I think we need to go with the conversation for the time being as, for reasons which will become clear, none of us can walk away just yet.

Let’s take a look at the new video and the issues it raises, shall we?

You begin by explaining where you’ve been and then say that there may be a lot of pauses because “goodness knows, it can go very wrong if you’re not very specific about what you say,” and that sets the tone for much of what is to come. Further on, you speak of people misinterpreting and “misappropriating” what you said, and this would suggest to me that you either don’t believe what you said was problematic, or you can’t see why many others view what you said is problematic.

The problem with the original video is not a lack of specificity - it’s the exact opposite. You said:

“There absolutely is an immigration issue in Ireland - that doesn’t mean that people feel like we shouldn’t take the refugees that we’re able to take. It doesn’t mean that people feel like people shouldn’t be able to come here for better opportunities.

But the systems that we have in place are being taken advantage of and that is plain to see, and the government continually does not allow people to express their concerns about that.”

I have deliberately highlighted parts of the quote above to illustrate a point - forget absolutely everything else, those parts are what the far right heard, and amplified ad nauseum.

Nowhere did they repeat the bit about it being OK for people to come to Ireland - just the bits about there being an “immigration issue”, systems “are being taken advantage of”, and the government not allowing “people to express their concerns”.

In a way, I’m surprised that someone as intelligent and online as yourself doesn’t immediately recognise that, in the liar’s poker that is online far-right discourse, this trio of arguments represents the basis of a fairly strong hand, and you were the one who dealt it to them.

You also said:

“Our towns and especially our cities are becoming much less safe … now that’s not just because of immigration …”

I find it hard to see any way you could have been more specific. Recast that sentence a little bit and it becomes “immigration is one factor in making our towns and especially our cities much less safe” - you’ll never guess who else has been making that argument recently …

So when you say in Monday’s video “I never said that I was anti-immigration, I honestly don’t even know where people got that”, I reckon looking at those two quotes above again might give you an answer.

The problem was not you being vague - the problem was that you selected arguments that have been precisely developed to sound reasonable and where the people othered are nameless and faceless and thereby stripped of their humanity, and nameless systems and towns and “the government” get to carry the can.

During the nine-minute video posted on Monday, there’s also a lot of mention of misinterpretation and misappropriation, as if in this case, it was somehow up to the audience to draw different conclusions from the quotes above.

It isn’t.

Communication is not what is said, but what is heard, and it would seem in the case of the original video that pretty much everyone heard exactly the same thing (racist dog-whistles), and reacted according to their own beliefs and values. The racists celebrated that such a big celebrity as yourself would back their cause, while anti-racists recoiled in horror.

That’s not misinterpretation or misappropriation on their part - it’s miscommunication on yours.

You mention that you became a “far-right poster boy, and I think that was really overblown” - but they literally made posters of you:

Now given that you were taking some time out over the weekend you may not have noticed this, but it doesn’t reduce the size of the problem - the worst people on earth took what you said and made you their spokesperson, and a nine-minute video explaining the whole thing is not going to stop them, and the media has already decided how they’re going to frame it.

The second half of Monday’s video then descends into a defence of the previous ones. you talk about towns and cities feeling unsafe, but then dismiss CSO statistics proving the opposite, before making the wild statement that unspecified acts of anti-social behaviour were previously only seen in Dublin.

Add this pair of fear and anti-social behaviour to the trip of far-right arguments from the original video and you’ve got yourself a full house of the kind of fact-free fascist nonsense that has been occupying Telegram channels for years.

But to quote some on those very same channels - “facts don’t care about your feelings”. That people feel a certain way is in itself a reality, but if the facts don’t back up that fear, then the onus is on them, not on others, to resolve that.

What you call “legitimate concerns” are, in many cases, the exact opposite - they are not based in fact; instead, they are often fears weaponised by bad-faith actors to radicalise well-meaning people.

Forget the trope of brown people raping everyone they see - as an emotive an argument as you’ll come across - for a minute, and let’s take another “legitimate concern”, that of refugees moving to an area that lacks the social supports to cater for them.

There are many, many such areas (if I wanted to dog-whistle myself I’d say that it was amazing how IPAS centres are never built near politicians’ homes, but I digress) and if, as is obvious, there is a lack of social services that means that a town or area cannot deal with an influx of people, then that goes for everyone.

As such, it applies to not just those brown people seeking international protection - it applies just as much to Dublin journalists and Mayo comedians and influencers and families from Louth and workers for big tech firms as it does to those fleeing genocide and the ravages of climate change.

(I put that in just to annoy the far-right wankers who have managed to read this far, but I doubt there’ll be too many of them).

When you talk about fear on the streets and “legitimate concerns” in your explanation and say ”those fears are fine to have”, you are effectively opening up for treating every person of a different skin colour or ethnicity out after dark to suspicion, and putting the onus on them to prove a negative (that they are not, in fact, violent rapists or ISIS or whatever today’s preferred flavour of racist discourse is).

In Ireland’s current climate, this is manna from heaven to the self-appointed vigilantes terrorising IPAS centres and libraries and the like - do you see where this leads to?

It was notable that, in the beginning of your video, you thanked those who reached out to you offering you a place to stay if you needed somewhere to clear your head, and that it s a magnificent gesture - it must have been great to feel that love and support when all the comments were coming at you like a fire-hose.

But what I missed in the nine minutes was anything for those your words effectively cast suspicion on - those who have come to Ireland who spent their weekend watching on TikTok and Instagram as people they thought they could trust were rowing in behind you and saying that they might have cheated their way into the country, or that they were responsible for the violence on Irish streets and in towns.

You and I can walk away from this now and go back to doing what we love, but they don’t have that luxury or privilege. Their lives and bodies and histories and possibilities and futures are all political, and they cannot simply walk away from them.

Choosing to dip one’s toe in and out of political discourse is in itself a political choice, as is calling for “difficult conversations” and then not engaging in them when it turns out we were not as right as we thought we were, or that other forces may have manipulated the conclusions that we thought we came to by ourselves.

If we say something online that we later regret, we can lock our accounts, say sorry and move on, but that option is not open to anyone whose identity is as an immigrant in a foreign country - if you have any doubt about that, ask any of your relatives that lived in England in the 70s and 80s.

So I hope this video isn’t your last on the subject; part of me thinks that, having started this very public conversation, you need to keep contributing to it by examining where you get your news and opinions from, and why they came out the way they did, and why you are being championed by people you clearly have no time for.

Because if, as many claim, you’re “only saying what many ordinary people think”, and yet those opinions are based on fear-mongering rather than objective reality, we have a very big problem that you might be able to help solve.

Maybe you working out those knots in a public forum might help people to understand their own fears and deal with them, because, as you probably discovered over the weekend, living with the kind of anxiety it causes is no way to live.

One thing that came across is that you are now acutely aware of the size of your platform and the power that it gives you - I hope you choose to wield it wisely, but that will only be possible if the lessons of the initial video are learned, and as yet it’s unclear that they really have been.

With all love and compassion,

Phil O’Connor

Stockholm, March 25, 2025.