Fact check: Image of protest in Dublin is from April 2025

A social media post shared on September 19 showed an image of a large crowd with many Irish flags.

The image said: “More Than 100,000 Irish Patriots March Through Dublin in One of the Biggest Protests Ireland Has Ever Seen.”

The post’s caption added: “They packed the streets against mass immigration, the EU migration pact, and the loss of their country.”

Evaluation

The image appears to be an AI-edited version of an image first shared online in April 2025. The editing appears to have been intended to improve the quality of the picture and has not materially changed the image itself.

Media coverage of a protest in Dublin in April 2025 suggest there were “thousands” at the protest, rather than more than 100,000 as the post claims.

The facts

The widely shared post does not say when the protest took place or provide a source for the attached image.

The image is not pixelated, but details appear blurred and blended together. This can be seen when taking a closer look at faces of people in the crowd, some flags, and the building’s canopy.

A tool from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said it had discovered the company’s own watermarks in the image, heavily indicating it was made or edited with OpenAI software.

The building appears to be the Gate Theatre in Parnell Square East in Dublin city centre, which has a glass canopy over its entrance below a row of columns.

A reverse image search shows a similar image was shared online on April 26 2025, however, it is pixelated and zoomed out. The picture shows the Gate Theatre as well as the Abbey Presbyterian Church further up the road in Parnell Square North.

Flags are seen across the crowd in similar places in both images. People also seem to be standing in the same spots, including a person wearing green to the left of a pole visible in both pictures and a person wearing yellow standing in front of a fence on the right side of the images.

Another reverse image search surfaced a video which was shared in late April 2025 with a similar angle of a crowd. Its caption says “tens of thousands flood Dublin’s streets opposing the government’s mass-immigration program”.

The man in green can be seen in a similar position towards the end of the video.

Media coverage shows an anti-immigration protest took place in Dublin on April 2025, with news sites reporting “thousands” and “more than 5,000” people took part. Reporting states the protest began at the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square – which is between the Gate theatre and Abbey Presbyterian Church – before moving down O’Connell Street.