The mystery website claiming to belong to an Irish Muslim-only party that made international news

Stephen McDermott

WHEN IS A political party not a political party?

Earlier this week, Irish social media users speculated about a new and mysterious group calling itself the Islamic Labour Party of Ireland.

I began seeing references to a ‘new’ Irish party on X and Facebook on Monday, as rumours went viral across far-right and anti-immigrant social media channels in posts that said things like “we’re heading down a very dangerous road here in Ireland”.

By Wednesday, the story had reached The Jerusalem Post, which described this party as having “launched” in Ireland.

The paper reported that some social media users were speculating about a possible Sharia takeover, and confirmed the party had not registered with the Electoral Commission.

The website is so basic that I immediately suspected it was a hoax, a kind of digital false flag that was set up as ragebait to galvanise anti-Muslim support.

It’s poorly designed with multiple links to pages that are simply blank.

Among the pages that do feature content are a constitution written in Arabic and English that restricts party membership to adult Muslims with a recommendation from a mosque or Islamic centre, and says the group’s leader must be a Muslim man with Irish citizenship and extensive knowledge of Sharia, or Islamic jurisprudence.

It also has an ‘about’ section that says the group aims to represent Muslims in Ireland, defend their rights and pursue economic and social reform guided by Islamic values.

Curiously, the website included links for sharing its pages on Russian social media platforms VKontakte (also known as VK) and Odnoklassniki, alongside similar buttons to share links to Facebook and X.

I wasn’t the only one who thought the whole thing might be faked.

It’s easy to imagine someone putting up a website like this in the hope of starting a party but not getting further.

It’s also easy to imagine someone making a website like this, with sections in Arabic and references to a “shadow government” and extreme positions, to bait people into being outraged.

Those discussing it online broadly fell into two camps. Some people questioned who was behind the site, believing it to be a hoax. Others pointed to it as a Great Replacement-type warning about how Muslims were secretly trying to undermine Irish democracy.

At one stage, someone on X shared a video of a man talking in Arabic with translated subtitles: it suggested that he was speaking on behalf of the Islamic Party in Ireland and that he was criticising everything from the far-right, to assaults on Muslims and Conor McGregor.

The man didn’t say who he was and it wasn’t possible to verify where the video came from, but a speech-to-text translation using ChatGPT suggested the subtitles were broadly accurate.

My first instinct was that it might be a hoax, but I genuinely didn’t know.

As a journalist, I wanted to follow both possibilities. Was there a new political force taking shape in Ireland, or had someone put up a website to mislead people and stir up anger?

I started digging around, open to either option, to find out more.

Unanswered connections

Initially, there was almost no evidence of the supposed ‘party’ beyond its online presence: it only had a website and an account with 22 followers on X, which was locked so I couldn’t see its posts or who those followers were.

One of the first things I could establish was that, despite only coming to attention last weekend, the domain predates the recent attention by more than a year.

The domain, islamicparty.ie, was registered on 2 October 2025, more than a year before people began discussing it on social media.

I tried to search for digital clues by examining its source code – essentially the building blocks behind the front end of a website – the same way I had done to unearth a Dutch-based network of scam ads targeting Irish Facebook users last year.

It seemed to be a dead end: I found two test posts from October last year whose author was oddly listed as “Paddy Ireland”, while most of the other material on the site was uploaded by a person who was only listed as “user 5”.

There was an odd detail in the code accompanying those posts that confused me even more.

Advertisement

The publisher metadata named the Islamic Labour Party of Ireland and listed its location as “Russia” and supplied the telephone number “+7 (000) 000-000-00” – clearly a placeholder but one that began with Russia’s calling code.

They couldn’t prove a verifiable Russian connection any more than the name “Paddy Ireland” could establish the author of those posts had an Irish identity, but they added to the mystery of who might be behind the website, though they may just be leftovers from an older template.

It was hard to figure out what was a bluff and what wasn’t.

Then I happened upon a YouTube channel using a similar name.

The channel had only two short videos uploaded in June 2025, both of which outlined a proposal to build a sea tunnel between Ireland and the United Kingdom.

The description under one of the YouTube videos said the tunnel proposal came from the Irish Islamic Chamber of Commerce (IICC) and was backed by a group it called the “Islamic Party to Reform Ireland”.

Neither contained any reference to a political project or an Islamic Party of Ireland, but they did feature the name of a company called Irish Sea Tunnel Limited.

When I searched company records for Irish Sea Tunnel Limited, I found two directors with Muslim names.

Similar websites

That still didn’t establish firmly whether either of these men was behind the Islamic Labour Party of Ireland website, but it did give me a significant lead.

One of the company’s directors, Mohamed Hafez, was involved in other groups in Ireland and chairman of the Irish Islamic Chamber of Commerce, a group that promotes trade, investment, and economic cooperation between Ireland and countries belonging to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

Hafez was also chair of a group under the umbrella of the IICC called AWQAF Ireland, an initiative to manage and administer what are known as Islamic religious endowments – dedications of wealth for Sharia-compliant charitable or religious purposes – in Ireland.

It turned out that the website of AWQAF Ireland looked extremely similar to the Islamic Labour Party of Ireland: they shared the same Wordpress theme and layout, with links to share to the two Russian social media sites at the bottom of the page.

And buried in the source code of the website were two familiar names: “Paddy Ireland” and someone called “user 5”.

The Awqaf Ireland WordPress author profile for user 5 named Muhammad Hafez and listed islamicparty.ie in its website field.

A chairman’s message on the website attributed to the same profile was signed Muhammad Hafez.

Attitudes to Muslims exposed

What particularly interested me was how little we knew about the party or who was behind it, compared to how much people were prepared to claim about what its existence means.

The website claims to speak for Muslims in Ireland, and many people sharing a link to it were extremely willing to accept that, especially when it helped them to portray Muslims as a threat.

But there is little evidence that the group has the backing of any Muslim organisation in Ireland.

The man in the video did not reference basic facts like how many people belong to the group, what organisation exists beyond its online presence, and on what basis it claims to represent Muslims in Ireland.

By the time I’d finished searching for information, I had a name linked to the party’s website, and there were signs that someone had made a genuine attempt, at some point, to get a political project off the ground.

It could have been an exercise in kite-flying, or there could be a fledgling party with a “shadow government” taking shape in the background.

The group says it speaks for Muslims in Ireland, but I still wanted to know who was involved, how much support it had and how seriously its organisers intended to pursue it.

I emailed an address on the party website and an email linked to Hafez’s companies to put these questions to him, but received no response by the time of publication.