Are There Men Among You?’: The Irish Far-Right, Ideological World-Building and Performing Masculinity on Telegram

This paper examines how contemporary Irish far-right groups mobilise culture and gendered narratives to extremist politics within everyday nationalist imaginaries. Rather than treating the far right as an external or marginal phenomenon, the paper conceptualises Irish far-right mobilisation as a form of everyday extremism embedded in historically resonant cultural repertoires. Drawing on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity and scholarship on militarised masculinities, it analyses how gender operates as a central organising logic of far-right identity formation and political legitimacy. Empirically, the paper draws on netnographic and visual analysis of Telegram channels associated with Irish far-right organisations. The analysis demonstrates how these actors' appropriate Irish republican history, rebel iconography, and physical culture to frame opposition to mass migration as both a performance of authentic manhood and a moral duty for Ireland. Through militarised aesthetics, invocations of discipline, and appeals to national sacrifice, these groups construct a gendered politics that fuses masculinity, nationalism, and exclusion.