Abstract Attitudes to language and attitudes to ethnic groups have long been shown to be related to one another. In recent history, significant events have also been shown to negatively affect attitudes to specific groups who are deemed to be responsible. The current paper looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has emboldened those who hold far right attitudes to migrants in an Irish context. Through a Twitter scraping exercise, conducted in August 2020, we show that far right framings of migrants as (a) contagion or disease, (b) criminals, and (c) favoured or elites are clearly evident and considerably on the rise in these Irish data. This would seem to run contrary to a concurrent study in Germany. Thus, we then pair this quantitative Twitter data with qualitative observations of anti-mask protests as indicative of a broadening of the allure of far right political groups, with COVID-19 as the “leading edge”. Taken together, these data seem to run contrary to European Social Survey and comparative data, leading us to question how attitudes are elicited, measured, and reported.