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Earlier this year the Irish Times ran a piece raising serious questions about financial irregularities at a prominent Dublin mosque — opaque funding, potential mismanagement, and ideological connections that nobody in officialdom seemed particularly keen to talk about. A few months later the National followed up with reporting on growing pressure for Ireland to actually do something about the Muslim Brotherhood’s presence in the country, noting that Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia have all designated the group as a terrorist organisation. Ireland has not. Ireland, in fact, has done remarkably little.
But then Ireland’s approach to most things that require a difficult conversation is to set up a citizens’ assembly, commission a report, lose the report, find the report, argue about the report, and then do nothing — so at least the Brotherhood isn’t being singled out for special treatment.
This is not a new problem. It is a problem that has been raised, politely, in parliamentary questions going back over a decade, and met each time with the political equivalent of a shrug. The standard response — we assess threats on a case-by-case basis, we don’t do blanket prohibitions — sounds reasonable until you notice that decade after decade of case-by-case assessment has produced precisely no cases where anything was actually done.
What we’re talking about
The Muslim Brotherhood has had a presence in Ireland since the 1950s, when students from the Middle East and North Africa began arriving for university. What started as student societies evolved over the decades into a network of organisations that now includes the Islamic Foundation of Ireland, the Islamic Cultural Centre in Clonskeagh, the Muslim Association of Ireland, and a European fatwa council that was, until quite recently, chaired by Yusuf al-Qaradawi — a man Ireland actually banned from entering the country in 2011 while simultaneously hosting the organisation he ran from Dublin.
That contradiction tells you most of what you need to know about how Ireland has handled this. Ban the man, leave his institutional infrastructure completely untouched, and hope nobody notices.
The Clonskeagh centre, funded through the Al Maktoum Foundation, functions as a hub for education and community life. Its Secretary General, Hussein Halawa, also sits on the European Council for Fatwa and Research, the body al-Qaradawi founded. The Muslim Association of Ireland connects to the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, which is widely understood to be the Brotherhood’s European umbrella. These aren’t secret connections.
The response has consistently been to acknowledge the information and then do nothing with it.
The pattern that should concern people
The Brotherhood’s playbook, and this is true across Europe not just here, is to build institutional infrastructure that looks like community service – education, youth programmes, halal certification, interfaith dialogue, all the rest of it – while at the same time promoting a worldview that puts loyalty to the global ummah ahead of integration into whatever country you’re actually living in. This isn’t speculation on my part; its the conclusion of the ECR Group’s 2023 report “Unmasking the Muslim Brotherhood,” which looked at exactly this dynamic and flagged Dublin specifically as a strategic base.
The term the report uses is “entryism” – gradually embedding yourself in existing institutions until you’ve got enough influence to shape outcomes. Its an old trick, honestly. The hard left used it for decades in trade unions and Labour parties across Europe, boring from within until they controlled the executive. The Brotherhood has adapted it, and rather effectively too. Get yourself into a relationship with government, become the go-to voice on Muslim affairs, make sure you’re the ones being consulted, and quietly ensure that alternative Muslim perspectives don’t get the same platform or the same access.
And this is where it gets awkward. Because the people who’ve been most susceptible to this approach in Ireland have been, broadly speaking, on the political left. The instinct to be inclusive, to back minority communities, to avoid anything that looks even slightly like discrimination – and, look, I get it. It’s nice to be nice. But that instinct has produced a situation where perfectly legitimate questions about what specific organisations believe and where their money comes from get batted away as Islamophobia. And that is a reflex that serves the Brotherhood very well.
Senator Sharon Keogan raised this in 2025, when she called for investigations into the Brotherhood’s footprint in Irish mosques.
The Irish Examiner, one of Ireland’s national newspapers, ran a piece arguing Ireland needs to confront what it called “very real ideological challenges.”
Even within the Muslim community itself there are sharp divisions – the Irish Muslim Council has publicly criticised the ICCI for exploiting religion for political purposes. Some of the sharpest critique is coming from Muslims who feel that Brotherhood-aligned organisations don’t speak for them and actively hold their community back.
What other countries have done, and what Ireland hasn’t
Britain commissioned a review back in 2014 and decided the Brotherhood poses security risks — though characteristically didn’t do a huge amount about it afterwards. France went further, dissolving Brotherhood-linked organisations under anti-separatism laws. Austria just designated the whole thing a terrorist entity and moved on. Ireland’s position, to the extent it has one, is that our Muslim population is small and our tradition of neutrality means we don’t need to take sides.
That might have been a defensible position twenty years ago. I don’t think it is now. The Brotherhood’s networks are transnational by design — their ideology doesn’t stop at borders any more than their funding does. Ireland’s small Muslim population, around 100,000 people, doesn’t make the country immune to this; if anything it makes institutional capture easier, because theres less competition for who gets to be the representative voice.
The 2014 Oireachtas exchange between Patrick O’Donovan and the Minister for Justice is worth revisiting, not for what was said but for what happened after it, which is essentially nothing. The minister gave a wonderfully careful, measured answer about vigilance, the importance of case-by-case assessment, and so.
It all sounded wonderfully promising. But that was eleven years ago and what cases have been assessed? What was found? What action resulted? If there are answers to those questions they haven’t been shared with the rest of us.
Ireland doesn’t need to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation to take this seriously. What it does need is transparency about where the money comes from and to force through, over the howls of protests from the other NGOs who are funded primarily by entities outside Ireland, proper disclosure requirements for foreign funding of religious and charitable organisations, which honestly shouldn’t be controversial in any functioning democracy. It would help if we could stop treating Brotherhood-affiliated groups as the default voice for the entire Muslim community. They are not, and the Muslims who disagree with them deserve to be heard too. And it needs politicians who’ll engage with these questions straight rather than flinching every time someone accuses them of bigotry for asking.
None of that requires hostility toward Muslims, and anyone who says it does is either confused or being dishonest. It requires distinguishing between a religious community and the political organisations that have appointed themselves its representatives. That distinction is not hard to make. What’s been missing isn’t the ability — its the willingness.