A PROMOTIONAL CLIP for the Niall Boylan podcast contained a clip showing drone footage of a rally outside the Custom House in Dublin.
In the clip, Boylan claimed that the footage showed an anti-immigration demonstration in the city this week.
The footage is actually almost a year old and shows scenes from an #IrelandForAll rally in support of refugees last February.
Boylan’s post was removed before The Journal reached out for comment.
Boylan told The Journal the wrong video had been played and the incident was “nothing more than human error by a member of our team, as we would not intentionally use the wrong video”.
He also said that the video was quickly removed after a member of the team spotted the mistake.
Initially, the clip promoting Boylan’s podcast said that the drone footage showed anti-immigration protesters in Dublin on Monday, at which 11 arrests were made for public order offences.
Members of the National Party and the Irish Freedom Party, as well as prominent figures in Ireland’s far-right movement, had attended that protest.
“According to one media report I read this morning – and I’m looking at that crowd there – there was a couple of hundred people,” Boylan says while drone footage of a large gathering outside the Custom House plays.
“I worked in nightclubs for many years and was a good judge of how many people would be in a nightclub on a busy night. And I can tell you now: there isn’t a couple of hundred people there. I would imagine, I’m guessing, four thousand.”
He also interviewed one of the protest’s organisers who said that between four and five thousand people had attended.
No official figure for the number of attendees has been reported.
However, the drone clip that Boylan initially used to judge the crowd size did not show the anti-immigration protest on Saturday. Instead, it showed an anti-racism and pro-refugee rally almost a year before.
A longer and higher-quality clip of the drone footage was posted last year to the Twitter account of @IrishIranians, along with the message: “thousands of people included Irish Iranian Community at an anti-racism march in Dublin have been told they are standing up against ‘hatred and disinformation being spewed out by extremists’.”
On Saturday, 18th of February, thousands of people included Irish Iranian Community at an anti-racism march in Dublin have been told they are standing up against “hatred and disinformation being spewed out by extremists”. 💚🇮🇪☘️#IrelandForAll #SolidaityForever #WomanLifeFreedom pic.twitter.com/GWLHk4ysQP
— Irish Iranians (@IrishIranians) February 20, 2023
That clip shows groups holding the Iranian flag, before the drone zooms away, showing large crowds, some holding a banners that reads #RefugeesWelcome, gathered in front of the Custom House.
Thousands of people had attended that rally in February 2023, which saw a performance by musician Christy Moore, as well as a speech warning that far-right activists were “playing on people’s fears” to demonise refugees.
Boylan told The Journal that, despite the wrong clip being used, he still believed that thousands of people had attended the anti-immigration protest on Saturday, based on other footage and photographs.
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