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In previous articles I have written about the challenge posed by Islamism in Europe, not as a matter of theological dispute, but as a question of public order, democratic confidence and national security. That distinction matters. Islam, as a faith lived peacefully by millions of European citizens, is not the subject here. Islamism is different. It is a political ideology that seeks to reorder public life around a supremacist religious programme, and in its most violent forms it has repeatedly supplied the justification for murder.
Ireland has often approached this subject as if it belonged to other countries. France, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Austria and Spain were treated as the obvious front line; Ireland was seen as peripheral, protected by geography, neutrality, small scale and good fortune. That view was always too comfortable. The first Annual Report from Ireland’s Independent Examiner of Security Legislation should put it finally to rest.
George Birmingham, the former President of the Court of Appeal and Ireland’s first Independent Examiner of Security Legislation, is not given to theatrical language. That is why the foreword to his 2025 report is so important. He states plainly that Islamist terrorism is now a “significant cause of concern” for Ireland, both because attacks may occur within this jurisdiction and because an attack elsewhere may be planned or launched from the State. He also points to the threat from so-called lone actors, hostile state activity, dissident republicanism, extreme right-wing terrorism, extreme left-wing terrorism and single-issue terrorism. In other words, the report does not ask Ireland to panic. It asks Ireland to grow up.
The change is substantial. For much of the State’s history, Irish security policy was shaped by republican violence and the long shadow of the Troubles. That threat has not disappeared. But the security landscape has widened. Ireland is now part of the same digital, financial and migratory environment as the rest of Europe. A country can be small and still be useful to extremists. It can be neutral and still be targeted. It can have no recent history of jihadist mass-casualty attacks and still produce, host or enable a violent actor.
The attack on Father Paul Murphy at Renmore Barracks in Galway on 15 August 2024 showed what this looks like in practice. A teenage boy, radicalised online by Islamist extremist material, repeatedly stabbed the Defence Forces chaplain outside the barracks. The court heard that the boy had been exposed to content supportive of ISIS. In April 2025 he was sentenced to eight years’ detention for attempted murder. Father Murphy’s conduct afterwards, including his forgiveness of his attacker, was deeply moving. But his personal mercy should not be confused with a public-policy answer. The State still has to ask how a vulnerable young person in Ireland could be drawn so far into extremist propaganda that he sought to kill a representative of the Defence Forces.
That case also illustrates why the older image of terrorism no longer works. The threat is not confined to a cell meeting in a back room, a foreign training camp or a courier carrying instructions across a border. Those still matter, but the modern ecosystem is looser and faster. A teenager with a phone can be exposed to propaganda, grievance narratives, battlefield imagery, religiously framed revenge fantasies and tactical material without ever joining a formal organisation. The path from isolation to violence can be short. It may look, from the outside, less like a conspiracy and more like a private collapse. But the ideological content is not incidental. It gives direction to rage.
Europol’s more recent EU TE-SAT 2025 summary reinforces this point. Across the EU in 2024, member states reported 58 terrorist attacks, including completed, failed and foiled attacks. The largest number were attributed to jihadist terrorism, followed by left-wing and anarchist terrorism. Jihadist terrorism was also the most lethal category, with five people killed and eighteen injured. Europol recorded 449 terrorism-related arrests across 20 member states, most of them related to jihadist terrorism. It also warned about the growing involvement of minors and young people, online networking, social isolation, digital dependency and the hybridisation of extremist subcultures.
That should sound uncomfortably familiar in Ireland after the Renmore attack. The point is not that every isolated teenager is a terrorist risk. The point is that online radicalisation has made distance less protective than it once was. Ireland’s English-language environment, its open society, its position within the Common Travel Area and its proximity to Britain all create obvious security considerations. If an extremist network cannot easily strike in one country, it may look to another for logistics, money, communications, travel documents, recruitment or planning. Security policy has to think in networks because extremists do.
This is where the ECR Group’s work on non-violent Islamism remains relevant. The 2021 report Network of Networks: The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, by Dr Paul Stott and Dr Tommaso Virgili, argued that Europe has too often treated Islamist-linked civil society organisations as ordinary representative bodies while failing to examine their ideological roots, overseas affiliations and political objectives. The central concern is not only terrorism in the narrow operational sense. It is the wider ecosystem in which separatist identities are cultivated, liberal democracy is portrayed as morally illegitimate, and community representation is captured by the loudest and most organised ideological actors.
Critics sometimes dismiss this argument as alarmist. That is a mistake. It is entirely possible to defend Muslim citizens from discrimination while also scrutinising Islamist political networks. Indeed, a serious democracy must do both. Many European Muslims are the first victims of Islamist intimidation, social pressure and communal gatekeeping. They have the strongest interest in ensuring that public authorities do not outsource “community engagement” to groups whose values are not representative of ordinary Muslim families who want to live freely, work, worship, disagree and raise their children without ideological supervision.
The question of public funding is especially sensitive. If taxpayer money is given to organisations involved in integration, anti-discrimination work, youth projects or overseas aid, those organisations must be subject to proper due diligence. The ECR has repeatedly called for tougher vetting and, where necessary, a moratorium on funding for bodies credibly linked to Islamist networks until their governance, associations and public positions are properly examined. That is not persecution. It is basic stewardship. European institutions would not knowingly fund organisations linked to neo-fascist or revolutionary Marxist networks and then excuse themselves by saying those bodies also run social programmes. The same standard should apply to Islamist organisations.
Ireland should draw three lessons from the Independent Examiner’s report. First, security legislation has to match the communications environment in which threats now develop. Birmingham’s report recommends a stronger legislative basis for interception and access to modern digital communications, with safeguards. That balance is essential. Intrusive powers must be lawful, proportionate and independently overseen. But a legal framework built for another technological age cannot be expected to meet today’s threat.
Second, counter-terrorism must address ideology as well as capability. It is not enough to monitor weapons, money and travel if public institutions refuse to name the doctrines that justify violence or separatism. Deradicalisation work that avoids theology, ideology and grievance narratives will fail. So will integration policy that rewards the most sectarian voices with access, status and funding.
Third, Ireland needs a more confident civic language. The State should be able to say that liberal democracy, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, free speech, pluralism and the rights of women and minorities are not optional local customs. They are the terms on which public life is organised. Anyone is free to practise religion. No one is free to build parallel systems of coercive authority under religious cover.
The Independent Examiner’s report is therefore not merely another document for specialists. It is a marker. Ireland’s security debate has moved from denial to recognition. The task now is to ensure that recognition becomes policy: better intelligence cooperation, updated surveillance law, serious oversight, stronger border and travel awareness, credible deradicalisation programmes, and a hard look at public funding for organisations that claim representative status.
There is no virtue in hysteria, but there is danger in politeness when politeness becomes evasion. Ireland does not need to import the worst habits of continental security politics, nor should it pretend that every problem elsewhere is already present here in the same form. But it must stop treating Islamist extremism as an abstraction. The Galway attack, the European data and the Independent Examiner’s own words all point in the same direction. The threat is real, it is evolving, and it requires a democratic response that is clear-eyed, lawful and unembarrassed.