ABSTRACT This article explores the deployment of political fear by the Irish government and supporters during the Irish Anti Water Charges Campaign (2014–2016), with a focus on the use of the framing of working-class activists as ‘sinister’. Drawing on the works of John Gaventa and Fiona Jefferies, this article challenges the notion of political fear as a reflection of a wider, cultural malaise that is passively absorbed by targeted communities. Instead, this article contends that political fear was strategically aimed at creating the conditions for quiescence by framing the public discourse around the protest as a violent and dangerous spectacle. A second key argument offered challenges an increasingly common discourse that seeks to link working class activism with violent, hateful populism by demonstrating how deviance framing of protestors ensured that they were to be viewed as both the subject and object of fear, in the latter case, through threats of criminalisation.