Four Years After Mahsa: A Reflection from Dublin
Two protests shared the streets of Dublin that afternoon. One showed the ordinary freedom to demand a better life; the other remembered thousands of Iranians who demanded the same and never came home.
After several exhausting weeks, we returned to the streets of Dublin to mark the fourth anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini, the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman whose arrest by Iran’s morality police over her hijab and subsequent death in custody ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. Four years later, her name does not belong to history, because the system that took her life is still there, and Iranians are still being imprisoned and executed for demanding freedoms that people living in democracies hardly have to think about.
It was cold but sunny outside the GPO on O’Connell Street. There were no journalists waiting for us, no professional photographers and no organization financing the gathering. There were simply a few ordinary Iranians paying for what was needed ourselves, preparing placards, bringing flags, speaking, playing music, taking photographs and videos, and later writing about the protest for those who could not attend. We become the organizers, photographers, speakers and writers because, if we do not record these moments, sometimes nobody else will.
Fewer people came than we had hoped, but those who did stood there trying once again to make Iran visible.
O’Connell Street was crowded. Some people stopped, asked questions or raised a thumb in solidarity. Others passed us saying, go back to your own country. Ireland has changed enormously during the decades many of us have lived here, and we can understand that some older people may feel that the country they remember has changed beyond recognition. But immigrants have also helped build the Ireland that exists today, just as generations of Irish people built lives in Britain, America, Canada and Australia while continuing to call Ireland home.
One elderly Irish woman approached our protesters and said she did not understand our cause or support Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. That was her right. But she then said she did not want foreigners in Ireland and wished we would all disappear. She was not interested in discussing it and walked away.
Soon afterwards, a familiar Turkish man appeared carrying the flag of the Islamic Republic. Iranian protesters knew him from previous demonstrations, where he had repeatedly appeared in support of the regime. He shouted obscenities and abuse, including words in Persian, until Gardaí eventually escorted him away.
His repeated presence has troubled many of us. We cannot say who supports him or whether anybody pays him, because we have no evidence of that. But Iranians know that the Islamic Republic’s influence does not stop at Iran’s borders. Through the IRGC-Quds Force, it has financed, armed or supported foreign networks and militias, including Hezbollah and Iraqi groups, while Afghan Fatemiyoun and Pakistani Zaynabiyoun fighters were recruited for the Syrian war. During the January 2026 uprising, there were also reports, difficult to verify during the communications blackout, that Iran-backed foreign fighters had entered Iran to help suppress protesters. For Iranians, therefore, seeing a foreign national repeatedly appear carrying the Islamic Republic’s flag does not feel like an entirely abstract political disagreement.
After Gardaí removed the Turkish man from our gathering, we watched him move towards another demonstration passing through Dublin, this one over housing and the rising cost of living. Some of the Irish protesters appeared to welcome him. Perhaps they did not know what had just happened or understand what his flag represented to the Iranians standing only meters away.
The irony was difficult to miss.
Only months earlier, Iranians had gone onto their own streets over many of the same pressures. The protests that began on 28 December 2025 emerged from economic despair: a collapsing currency, inflation, struggling businesses, unemployment and young people unable to imagine a future. They quickly became a broader rejection of the political system.
Then, on 8 January, Iran was plunged into an internet blackout. It was almost as though someone had switched off the lights just before the violence began. Families lost contact. Videos struggled to reach the outside world. Journalists and human-rights organizations could not properly document events.
Behind that darkness, security forces opened fire. Evidence later gathered by human-rights organizations showed the IRGC, Basij and police firing rifles and shotguns at protesters, including from streets and rooftops. Hospitals and morgues filled as families searched for missing relatives. The blackout made a reliable final death toll extraordinarily difficult to establish, but the deaths reached into the thousands.
Eight months later, Irish people could walk peacefully through Dublin protesting the rising cost of living. They could criticize their government, photograph their demonstration and expect to return home afterwards. Gardaí were there to maintain public safety while they exercised that right.
What the elderly woman who wished we would disappear did not know was that thousands of Iranians had walked onto their own streets worried about prices, unemployment and survival and never returned home. Families searched hospitals and morgues, and some were reportedly made to pay for the bullets that killed their loved ones before bodies were released. Executions have continued in the months since, while independent journalists inside Iran remain severely restricted. That is one reason ordinary Iranians abroad continue trying to tell these stories ourselves.
Later, another Irish woman approached me and asked whom we supported. I explained that we supported Iranians trying to reclaim their country from the Islamic Republic. She noticed photographs of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and immediately replied:
“No. Not his son. His father was a dictator.”
It is a sentence many of us have heard before. I explained that this is not how many Iranians remember Mohammad Reza Shah. When we remember that period, we also remember schools, universities, hospitals, roads, railways, airports, expanding education, industry and women increasingly entering universities and professional life. We remember a country attempting enormous modernization within a remarkably short period.
There is also a historical difference that can easily become lost when discussing monarchy in Ireland. An Irish person may naturally understand the word monarchy through Ireland’s difficult historical relationship with the British Crown. Iran’s history is different. The Pahlavis were Iranian. For those Iranians who value their legacy, they are associated with building and modernizing Iran, not with a foreign monarchy ruling another people.
Indeed, many Iranians today see the comparison differently. Iran existed for thousands of years before the Islamic Republic, with its Persian language, poetry, celebrations and cultural identity surviving centuries of invasion and political upheaval. Iranians preserved their language and traditions through those centuries. For many of us, it is the Islamic Republic’s attempt to place its ideological interpretation of Islam above that older Iranian identity that feels alien to the Iran we recognize.
The woman spoke about the Shah’s wealth and compared him with Irish politicians. We spoke about Iran’s oil. The Shah believed Iran should receive a fair return for its principal natural resource, and declassified American diplomatic records show that the United States wanted oil prices reduced and regarded his resistance as an obstacle. That does not answer every question about what happened in 1979, but it gives Iranians every reason to ask harder questions about the history subsequently presented to the world.
What troubles many of us is how confidently people who have never lived in Iran sometimes tell Iranians what our own history means.
Younger Iranians have no personal memory of Mohammad Reza Shah, yet many are rediscovering that period through their parents, grandparents and information now available digitally. Many have come to see a country that was developing rapidly and a monarch who wanted Iran to become educated, modern and internationally respected. Iran’s history belongs to Iranians, and it should not have to be rewritten to make it more comfortable for Western readers.
We also explained why many of us support Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi today. We see him as a transitional figure able to speak internationally for Iranians who cannot safely speak for themselves. While representatives of the Islamic Republic continue to receive international political platforms, the Crown Prince has travelled from country to country meeting political leaders and trying to bring the voices of Iranians opposed to the regime into rooms they cannot safely enter themselves.
That does not mean anyone outside Iran, or those of us standing on O’Connell Street, should dictate the country’s permanent political system. If Iran becomes free, Iranians must decide their leaders and system of government at the ballot box.
To my surprise, the woman hugged me and thanked me for explaining the situation. She still did not support monarchy, and that was fine. They had disagreed, but they had also listened to one another, and perhaps that was one of the most important differences we witnessed that afternoon. In Dublin, people could disagree with their government, disagree with us and disagree with each other, and still walk away freely. Iranians are asking for that same ordinary privilege: the freedom to disagree, to protest, to choose their own leaders and to decide for themselves what kind of country they want to live in.
And when someone tells us, “Go back to your own country,” there is an answer they may not expect: we want to. We want an Iran its people no longer need to escape, where young people do not have to leave their homeland simply to imagine a future, and where those scattered around the world can choose to return with everything they have learned and help rebuild the country they never stopped loving.
Four years after Mahsa Jina Amini, that is why a small group of ordinary Iranians was still standing on O’Connell Street on a cold September afternoon.
We were not there because we have forgotten how to live elsewhere, or because we do not appreciate the countries that gave many of us safety and a second home. We were there because freedom in another country has never made us forget those who are still fighting for it in ours.
We were there because, after everything that has happened, we have not forgotten Iran, and we still want to return home.
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