Minister of State Robert Troy has told RTÉ that he reached out to gardaí regarding what he described as “extreme” and “vile” messages aimed at him and members of his staff.
The messages came after he shared a video update online concerning a cemetery in Mullingar, reports RTE.
“There were some very nasty messages left on my office number, and one in particular that really upset the people who work in my office,” he said, reports RTE.
The video update posted by Minister Troy was meant to provide reassurance to members of the Muslim community in the Midlands following the tragic death of four-year-old Abdur Rehman. The child was struck and killed close to his home in Mullingar and was later buried in Dublin, reports RTE.
Instead, it sparked a wave of abusive messages, online clips, and phone calls.
“I went in one morning and [staff] were saying it was the worst they’ve ever heard,” Mr Troy told RTÉ, reports RTE.
Gardaí confirmed to RTÉ that they had been alerted to “alleged public order offences” that took place on 30 January. “Gardaí attended the scene and investigations are ongoing.”
The reaction highlights how information can be reshaped on social media, often stripped of context or nuance, in order to generate engagement, reports RTE.
Last year, four-year-old Abdur Rehman was knocked down and killed near his home in Mullingar.
“That family was a member of the Muslim community, and that young boy was buried in Dublin,” Mr Troy told RTÉ, reports RTE.
After Abdur’s funeral, which Mr Troy attended, he said that representatives of the Muslim community spoke with him.
“They said to me they would like to have members of their community buried in the community that they live and work and contribute to,” he said, reports RTE.
Following this, Mr Troy arranged a meeting between members of the Muslim community and Westmeath County Council on 20 January.
“There was no need to actually make a case to have members of Muslim community accommodated in Ballyglass, because at the meeting the senior officials present just reinforced what was already happening,” he said, reports RTE.
“That [the cemetery] was municipal. It had in the past and continues to offer burial grounds for people of all faiths and none.”
Westmeath County Council confirmed to RTÉ that Ballyglass is a “municipal cemetery owned and managed by Westmeath County Council”, reports RTE.
“It is, and has always been, a non-denominational burial ground, open to all members of the community regardless of faith or denomination,” the council said, reports RTE.
Mr Troy explained that due to Islamic burial customs, Muslims “have to face to the east” and “as a consequence of that, the location of the grave within Ballyglass was something that was spoken about, and the council said that that could be accommodated” in future, reports RTE.
After the discussion, Mr Troy uploaded a video to Instagram to inform the Muslim community that burials could take place at their local cemetery.
For several days, the clip attracted little attention, drawing fewer than 2,000 views and no notable backlash, reports RTE.
Nine days later, on 29 January, a well-known anti-migrant account shared the video on X with the caption: “Truly disturbing. Minister of State at the Department of Finance Robert Troy, announces a plot of land at an Irish cemetery will be handed over to Muslims. We’re watching Catholic Ireland disappear before our eyes.”
Since then, the video has amassed more than 500,000 views, alongside over a thousand comments and 4,000 reposts, according to X’s own figures, reports RTE.
An examination by RTÉ using a social media monitoring tool found that between 20 January and 11 February, references to Robert Troy surged from virtually none before the video was reposted to more than 5,000 between 29 and 31 January.
As the post spread across multiple platforms, there was no reference to the fact that Ballyglass is a municipal cemetery that has always permitted burials regardless of faith or religion, reports RTE.
Online commentators reframed the issue, suggesting that the cemetery was “consecrated ground” where “only Catholics can be buried”.
On YouTube, some Irish users described Mr Troy as a “cockroach”, a “hostage”, and accused him of handing over an “ancestral, Christian, Catholic graveyard.” One post on X labelled Mr Troy a “traitor”, alleging that he and the Government were enabling an “Islamic takeover”, reports RTE.
From there, the narrative continued to circulate widely across social media, building increasing momentum.
In certain instances, the messages were boosted by accounts based outside Ireland that frequently share comparable anti-migrant material, reports RTE.
On Instagram, an account named Raging Europeans, which shares content relating to migration issues across Europe, reposted the clip to its audience of more than 500,000 followers, incorrectly stating that “politicians like Robert Troy are handing over sections of our consecrated cemeteries to Muslim groups for burials”.
It also called on people to act: “Enough is enough. Time to stand up, reclaim our identity, and stop this quiet replacement.”, reports RTE.
That video has been viewed more than 160,000 times. According to Meta’s transparency data, the account is based in Sweden.
Sohan Dsouza, a London-based consultant specialising in open-source intelligence and computational social science, said the account’s branding, language and cross-posting behaviour connect it to a broader network of linked Instagram profiles, reports RTE.
Together, these accounts have amassed well over one million followers on Instagram.
Mr Dsouza said this network forms part of an expanding ecosystem of pages that employ similar styles and tactics to fuel engagement and outrage, reports RTE.
Beyond pornography and the growing presence of AI-generated low-quality content, posting anti-migrant material “is one of the most lucrative engagement patterns in terms of the themes we have seen, accounts basically explode in popularity based on this”.
“You don’t need to really do much by way of dark money or anything like that to get something going like this. You just have to align the incentives to make the promotion of rage-bait and unnuanced media as profitable as can be,” Mr Dsouza said, reports RTE.
“Once they get into that whole ecosystem, then they really explode in engagement and the engagement is what drives the monetisation.”
Ciarán O’Connor of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue described what happened to Robert Troy as a “textbook case study of how misleading information circulated online can cause a surge in hatred or hostility against public officials”.
“This public figure was labelled a traitor in numerous posts I’ve reviewed. Personal details about them were posted online, and in some instances, explicit conspiracy theories targeting the Muslim community were shared also,” he said, reports RTE.
He noted that other posts referenced the “Great Replacement Theory”, which he described as “a conspiracy theory that posits that white majority populations and countries are being systematically or sinisterly replaced by national governments or international organisations”.
In this instance, he said, “a hyper local example” was reframed as proof of the “great replacement of Catholic Ireland.”, reports RTE.
Across social media platforms, publicly available contact information for Mr Troy’s constituency office was also circulated.
Mr Troy said: “[It was] quite surprising, really, some of the vileness that was directed at me. I suppose I’m a grown man. I can take it, mightn’t like it, but towards members of the community who do nothing wrong, it wasn’t nice,” reports RTE.
As a result, Robert Troy and his team issued a clarification on Instagram on 2 February, “in light of a number of vile and abusive messages”.
“I put a clarifying statement up then on my own Facebook because I felt maybe people misunderstood what was after happening, that this was not Catholic graveyard, that this was something that was happening already,” he told RTÉ, reports RTE.
That clarification attracted approximately 3,000 comments, most of which Mr Troy said were negative.
Responding to claims that Catholic Ireland was being replaced, Mr Troy said: “As somebody who is a believer myself, a frequent mass attender, I don’t believe that supporting and acknowledging other people’s faith, customs, diminishes their own.”
He added that it was vital to “assure the people who have legitimate fears, those fears are addressed, and that those people are not left open for exploitation by people in the minority who do want to use this as a method of sowing division and for racism.”, reports RTE.
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