A new candidate for Cork North Central has defended his party’s use of the word ‘rapefugee’ to describe certain refugees coming from war-torn countries to Europe.
Peter O’Loughlin is the founder of Identity Ireland, a party which is running on an anti-EU, anti-immigration platform.
The party’s official social media accounts regularly share news stories on what they say are problems caused by mass-immigration and asylum seekers, and have adopted the term ‘rapefugee’ in the wake of a number of incidents in Germany last month.
Mr O’Loughlin said that he stands over this type of language.
“It’s a phrase that makes sense. People look at it and think that it’s base or it’s trying to stir up outrage. It’s a way of separating people,” he said.
He said that he used the word to separate the people committing crimes from real refugees: “It mightn’t be the most highbrow word, but it represents something. It’s a good way to separate people,” he said.
Mr O’Loughlin warned that the same incidents seen in Germany would make their way to Ireland, in time.
“The reason that they happened is because of the insane open border policy. Everything that happens in Europe eventually comes to Ireland,” he said.
This weekend he will lead a demonstration in Dublin against the “Islamic invasion” of Ireland.
The demonstration is organised by Pegida, a pan-European anti-immigration group, whose Irish branch Mr O’Loughlin launched in Dublin last week.
However, he accepted that there will likely be more people demonstrating against Pegida than demonstrating against Islam.
A number of anti-racism and left-wing groups are planning a counter demonstration. A bus from Cork has been organised for the counter demonstration.
“No matter how matter where you bring up these issues there is always someone trying to attack you.
“There will always be people trying to shut us down because they don’t want their views to be shown up as nonsense,” he said.
This is Mr O’Loughlin’s third election, having picked up 6,561 votes in the 2014 European Election for Ireland South, and 930 votes in the Carlow-Killkenny By-election last year — less than 1.5% of the vote each time.
He is originally from Carlowtown, but has lived on Cork’s southside for a number of years. He is trained as a primary teacher. He opted to run in Cork North Central due to the presence in South Central of independent candidate Elizabeth Hourihane, who is running on a similar platform. He said that he did not want to split their message, but spread it wider across the city.