As those who know me personally know, Curmie has spent about four months in Ireland, mostly in Dublin. I’ve led seven Study Abroad programs there and led walking tours from O’Connell Bridge in the center of the city up to Parnell Square, a kilometer or so to the north. I’ve spent dozens of hours in that area—at the Gate Theatre, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Garden of Remembrance, the (alas, now defunct) Dublin Writers Museum. The last time I was in Dublin, on a whirlwind research visit in 2019, I stayed at a b&b a few blocks east of Parnell Square. It was a long walk to the National Library south of the Liffey, but finances dictated that necessity.
One of the first things I saw on my Facebook feed this
morning was a statement from the Abbey Theatre, which is a couple blocks east
and a block north of O’Connell Bridge.
It said they were “thinking of all of [their] neighbours in Dublin 1,”
but that the evening’s performance of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow
would go on as scheduled. I wondered
what happened in Dublin 1, went to the Google machine, and encountered a
headline in the Irish Times saying that Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo
Varadkar had estimated “tens of millions” of Euro in damages caused by riots
that started in the Parnell Square area and moved south as far as the area around
O’Connell Bridge. “Whaaaaaat?
Riots in Dublin? That hasn’t
happened in decades. Surely there’s some
mistake,” I thought. Alas, no.
In the early afternoon Dublin time Thursday, moments after
the Macy’s parade was starting in New York, four people, including three small
children, were injured in a knife attack outside the Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire,
a primary school across the street from the Garden of Remembrance. As of this writing (Friday evening in the US),
one little girl and the childcare worker (it’s unclear whether she’s a teacher
or other staffer) who launched herself between the attacker and the children
remain in critical condition; the girl is said to be “fighting for her life.” The only good news is that the perpetrator
seems to have been acting alone.
This story is horrible enough. But somehow this attack led to riots, with
bus drivers pulled from their vehicles, petrol bombs thrown at refugee centers,
public transport vehicles set alight, looting of over a dozen stores, and
multiple injuries to gardaí (police).
The facts—or, rather, the closest we can come to facts—enumerated here
are drawn from a variety of sources: the Irish Times, Irish
Independent, Irish Mirror, RTE, ITV, the BBC, the Guardian, and
the Telegraph. I’m not going to
bother to try to link every statement to a specific source: this is a blog
piece, not an academic article. You can,
as they say, do your own research, Gentle Reader.
The principal rioters were young—in their late teens or
twenties—but they seem to have been egged on by folks of an older
generation. Hundreds of people were
involved in the violence. As I write
this, arrests from the riots number in the 30s; “many more” are promised after
the authorities examine CCTV footage.
Curmie is no fan of the level of government surveillance that is common
in Ireland and the UK, but if regular people have to put up with Big Brother,
then at least that technology can be used to arrest and convict every one of
these assholes.
If government sources are correct, the riots were a
coordinated effort by what Garda (Police) Commissioner Drew Harris describes as
a “complete lunatic faction driven by far-right ideology.” Varadkar added,
“These criminals did not do what they did because they love Ireland. They did
not do what they did because they wanted to protect Irish people. They did not
do it out of any sense of patriotism, however warped. They did so because they’re filled with hate,
they love violence, they love chaos and they love causing pain to others.”
Whether or not these characterizations are accurate, and
indeed whether or not this kind of violence was predictable, as opposition pols
have suggested, there does appear to be ample evidence that the riots can be
traced to anti-immigrant animosity.
Posts on social media identified the perpetrator of the
knife attack as an immigrant, and that was enough to enflame the loonies. Trouble is, the assailant was an Irish
citizen, albeit foreign-born. He’d lived
in the country for twenty years. Oops!
You know who really is a migrant? The guy who stopped the knife-wielding
attacker. BIG OOPS! Deliveroo is an Irish equivalent of DoorDash
or Uber Eats. One of their delivery
drivers is a man named Caio Benicio. He’d
been in Ireland for only a year or so, trying to make some money to send home
to Brazil, where his restaurant had burned to the ground.
He was riding his motor scooter past the area, saw the knife
and the threat to children, and went into action. He says he didn’t have time to be afraid; he
just responded to what he saw. He
stopped his bike and ran towards the scene while removing his helmet, with which
he proceeded to clobber the assailant over the head, knocking him to the
ground. Others grabbed the knife and
restrained the perp.
(Side note: there’s a GoFundMe appeal called “Buy Caio
Benicio a Pint.” Folks are encouraged to
donate the cost of a pint of beer at their local pub to Mr. Benicio. At the time of this writing, the pot now
stands at over €300,000, or over $330,000.
It would take a lot of overtime at Deliveroo and some very
generous tips to make that kind of money.
Mr. Benicio doesn’t see himself as a hero, just someone in the right
place at the right time: another reason I don’t begrudge him a penny of that
GoFundMe haul. I just wish the woman who
was seriously injured while protecting her young charges would receive similar
assistance.)
Of course, the riots were spawned by people believing what they on social media, an even riskier proposition than trusting
journalists. The temptation to indulge
in a little confirmation bias borders on the overwhelming. But that’s only part of the problem.
Back in the Dark Ages when I started college as an
undergraduate Government major, one of the distinctions made between
traditional liberalism and traditional conservatism was that the former looked
for trends involving groups of people (sexes, races, religions, etc.) and the
latter centered on the individual. There
are appeals to both points of view: the former stands more explicitly against racism,
sexism, and the like; the latter points out that this particular person of a
“privileged” class isn’t necessarily an oppressor and that particular person from
a “disenfranchised” class isn’t necessarily a victim. (Oprah Winfrey is actually a little less
oppressed than the average white male Walmart employee.)
But I become increasingly convinced of the wisdom of the
horseshoe theory’s suggestion that the far left and the far right share an
interest in authoritarianism that makes them more similar to each other than to
the more libertarian mainstream manifestations of either philosophy. And that means a tendency to stray from the positive
attributes of those political perspectives.
(So says this civil libertarian, at least.) In this case, it appears that the far right disregarded
the individual and classed all “foreigners” as the Other. (Curmie struggles to resist the urge to say “as
usual.”) And, of course, getting the
facts right was of secondary importance, if it mattered at all.
There is plenty of cause for re-evaluating the Irish
government’s policies on immigration.
The same could be said for virtually any country, including our
own. Looting department stores and
setting fires to police cars would seem a rather counter-productive means of
achieving that end, however.
Of course, even if there were a few hundred rioters and even if they were all right-wingers, they still represent a tiny minority of the Dublin population. The left needs to recognize that “not all conservatives” remains as legitimate an argument as “not all immigrants.” Who knows? Maybe they’ll actually understand that. Just don’t bet the rent.
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