Stephen McDermott

IT’S THE MOST wonderful time of the year.

You officially have permission to start counting the weeks until Christmas: the annual row over Dublin City Council’s Winter Lights Festival has begun.

The festival, which usually takes place in December, is a series of installations that wash buildings across the capital with lighting displays of winter-themed images and colour.

It’s a perfectly inoffensive thing that gives the city a bit of colour at night during some of the darkest months of the year.

Not that you’d know it from Facebook, X and Instagram, where users assembled for their annual Two Minutes Hate.

They said things like “they should be called Christmas Lights”, and accused the council of sidelining Christianity by egregiously appeasing immigrants and non-white people.

These largely anonymous accounts reminded nobody in particular that Ireland is a Catholic country; they asked questions like “Who is electing the communist scum in DCC?”; and they warned that “Ramadan lights” would follow in February.

I can’t tell how much of this is sincerely believed and how much is manufactured for an online audience, but the claim that Christmas is being erased barely survives a walk through Dublin.

The council still garlands shopping streets with lights that say Nollaig Shona Duit; it still blocks footpaths with 50-foot Christmas trees; and it has even faced down calls by pesky animal rights activists to end the live crib at the Mansion House on Dawson Street.

I have literally never heard a single person in the wild complain about Winter Lights or claim that it’s taken over Christmas.

It’s an argument that makes my phone feel like a telescope into an alternate version of Dublin, where everyone is furious about something nobody mentions as soon as I put it away.

Nevertheless, Dublin City Council seems to have taken the annual online backlash on board.

This year, the council has moved Winter Lights from December to January in an apparent bid to avoid any confusion that the festival has usurped Christmas in the hearts and minds of Dubliners.

On Thursday, it unveiled a second programme of events that will take place in December, in a press release that carefully emphasised how Christmas has not, in fact, been cancelled.

“Dubliners love Christmas, Dublin City Centre is synonymous with Christmas time and Dublin City Council is committed to bring Christmas themed activity throughout the whole festive season,” it said.

Unfortunately, no media relations office in the world can satisfy the haters once they’ve started fulminating; never doubt the power of rage to keep people from seeing the facts when they’ve launched into their annual jeremiad.

Far-right Dublin City councillor Gavin Pepper joined the chorus after the first announcement, taking to X to say that Winter Lights should happen in December because “they are Christmas lights – they belong at Christmas”.

“We don’t accept the argument that this display has somehow got nothing to do with Christmas,” he said.

When the second December programme was outlined on Thursday, he called it a “reasonable response” – though it was not really a response.

Yet there was no capitulation: Winter Lights is still going ahead, there have always been Christmas lights in Dublin, and the council said in its first announcement on Tuesday that it would be announcing a December programme of events.

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What’s striking about this victory lap is how the underlying facts didn’t change for people to claim a win: they announced a threat that didn’t exist, objected to it, then claimed credit when something that was already in the works happened anyway.

The irony about those who complain that the council has fallen under the malign influence of multiculturalism is that they’re the ones importing their grievances from abroad.

Birmingham’s Winterval festival was the target of the exact same criticisms as Winter Lights in 1997, with claims that organisers had cancelled Christmas because the 42-day festival attempted to celebrate multiple religious occasions in a diverse city.

Almost 20 years later, Donald Trump led calls for a boycott of Starbucks after the coffee giant left snowflakes, reindeer and other seasonal motifs off its red Christmas cups.

Easter has also become a target in the UK, where there have been complaints about the removal of the festival’s name from the description of egg hunts and on the packaging of chocolate eggs; it feels inevitable this will soon be imported across the Irish Sea.

What is conspicuously absent from each of these controversies is a shred of evidence that city councils or big brands are making changes to accommodate multiculturalism – or that minority groups are calling for changes they’re being blamed for.

Nobody demanded that Dublin’s Christmas lights should be called Winter Lights, or that the festival should move to January, because they were offended.

Dublin City Council’s explanations for the existence of the festival and its move to January are pretty reasonable: it wants to bring people into the capital, in what is usually the quietest stretch of the year for businesses, between Christmas and Patrick’s Day.

When you see the reaction online, it’s understandable why the council wanted to take steps to address it this year, as much as it feels like officials are always going to be fighting a losing battle.

Like the rest of us, they may be counting down the days until this is over for another year.