When Suad Mooge was announced as the 2026 Dublin Rose in May, the reaction from within the Rose of Tralee community was warm. The reaction across parts of the internet, not its underbelly, but its hoard of public social media profiles with faces and names, was not.
Mooge, a 25-year-old medical scientist born in Sligo, raised in Tallaght, was chosen from a cohort of 38 women to hold the title of Dublin Rose at this year’s festival. Within days, she faced a wave of online abuse questioning her Irishness, much of the vitriol focused on her skin tone, her religion, and her Somali heritage. She was unsurprised but had not expected quite so much abuse.
Suad Mooge is clear — she feels no need to justify her identity to people driving the racism towards her. Speaking to the Irish Times, Mooge said “I don’t have to prove to anybody how Irish I am”, pointing out that entrants do not need Irish heritage to compete, and that her life story makes plain she was born and raised in the country. Her performance of a fusion of Somali and Irish dancing at the final demonstrated her embrace of both her ancestral heritage and her Irish identity.
The response from the festival was swift and unequivocal. Anthony O’Gara, CEO of the Rose of Tralee International Festival, issued a statement saying the organisers “unequivocally condemn the racism and abuse directed at Suad”, and that there was no place for that behaviour, online or otherwise. He praised the dignity she has shown throughout, and said the festival exists to celebrate Irish women from every background, culture, and community.
That statement sits alongside an uncomfortable truth: Mooge’s experience is not an exception. It exists as a data point in a wider well-documented trend.
According to figures published within a press release from An Garda Síochána this month, a record 780 hate crimes and hate-related incidents were reported in 2025, a rise of 15 per cent on the previous year and the highest total since the force began collating the figures in 2021. Anti-race bias remained the single largest motivating factor behind those incidents, accounting for 40 per cent of all recorded cases, up from 39 per cent the year prior. Almost half of all hate-related incidents recorded last year occurred within the Dublin Metropolitan region. Gardaí have acknowledged that the true figure is likely considerably higher, given how commonly hate crime goes unreported.
Mooge is not alone in facing anti-black and anti-immigrant hate in recent months. Helen Ogbu, the Labour candidate in the Galway-West by-election, was subjected to a hauntingly similar wave of racist abuse earlier this year, a pattern that has drawn criticism of politicians who declined to directly condemn it.
Researchers at The Soufan Centre and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, tracking the Irish far-right movement, describe this phenomenon as having grown considerably more organised and online over the past two years. What began as an online fringe has, by several accounts, translated to real-world actions, including arson attacks on proposed accommodation for asylum seekers and a wave of anti-immigration protests that first spread nationwide in late 2022. Analysts point to bot-driven amplification, viral social media stunts, and the increasing willingness of public figures to lend the sentiment credibility as key factors behind its growth.
Politicians and public figures have not been immune from feeding that current either. Former mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor pursued a short-lived bid for the presidency last year, appearing alongside United States President Donald Trump to claim Ireland was “on the cusp of losing its Irishness” because of immigration. His campaign collapsed under Irish election rules requiring the backing of sitting representatives, but commentators have pointed to it, and to remarks from other candidates in recent by-elections, as evidence that rhetoric once confined to the fringes is increasingly finding a mainstream platform.
The State’s own response has been to legislate. The Criminal Justice (Hate Offences) Act, which came into force at the end of 2024, allows for higher sentences where an assault or an act of criminal damage is proven to have been motivated by hatred. Convictions under the new hate aggravation provisions remain rare so far, and campaigners argue that legislation alone cannot address abuse that plays out largely online and rarely rises to the level of a prosecutable offence. Most of what happens to women like Mooge and Ogbu takes the form of comments, not crimes, which places it beyond the reach of Gardaí.
Nobody has watched that shift more closely than Kirsten Mate Maher, who in 2018 became the first Rose of Tralee winner of African-Irish heritage. Her win, representing Waterford, was celebrated at the time as a marker of a more diverse Ireland. Days later, she was verbally abused by two men in a Kilkenny takeaway, an incident gardáí subsequently investigated.
Eight years on, Mate Maher, now known as Kirsten Butler, told the Irish Examiner she was not surprised by the scale of abuse directed at Mooge. She went further, telling reporters she does not believe she would have entered the competition at all if she were 20 years old today, given the volume of racist commentary now openly posted online. She has also pointed to a less visible cost: prospective Roses from minority backgrounds may simply opt out before they ever put themselves forward, deterred by the scrutiny that comes with public visibility. If organisers genuinely want a more diverse range of entrants, they need to make that process feel safe, not merely say it is.
Mooge, for her part, insists the abuse has not deterred her. She told the Irish Times there were roughly 4,000 posts about her win on X in the days following her selection, most of them hostile, though she is not on that platform herself. She has since turned off her TikTok notifications rather than engage with the comments directly, while noting that plenty of people online have also been vocal in her defence.
Since her win, Mooge has described the abuse as horrible, but said she is choosing to focus on the positive rather than dwell on it. She credited the wider Rose of Tralee community, who she said rallied around her from the moment the abuse began, with drowning out the negativity.
The pattern researchers describe is a familiar one. An individual moment of visibility, whether a competition win, a political candidacy, or an interview, becomes a flashpoint for a much larger current of anti-immigrant sentiment that has been building in Ireland for several years. What appears to have changed is less the underlying sentiment itself than its visibility and its organisation. Online spaces have become considerably more efficient at translating individual grievances into coordinated pile-ons, and considerably more willing to target people who, by any reasonable measure, have simply been recognised by their own communities.
For Mooge, the festival itself remains, by her own account, a safe and welcoming space, insulated from what happens once contestants step outside it. Whether that safety can be extended further, to protect the next generation of Roses from backgrounds like hers before they even consider putting themselves forward, is the question the 2018 Rose believes Ireland, watching from home, still has not answered.
