The rising violence of Irish rebellion A volatile politics is taking to the streets

Fearing a riot, the Irish authorities yesterday evening shut down the Luas tram line from central Dublin to the suburban village of Saggart, southwest of the city centre. It didn’t work. Many hundreds — perhaps a thousand — angry protestors had gathered outside the gates of the Citywest IPAS (asylum) centre, hurling missiles and abuse at the Gardai public order unit blocking them from forcing their way up the long and wooded drive to the hotel.

The day before, an African asylum seeker had been charged with the sexual assault of a 10-year old Irish girl on the grounds of the Citywest centre, a 2,500-bed hotel recently acquired at vast expense by the Irish government, against fierce local opposition in the 4,500-strong community. The suspect, who needed an Arabic translator, was issued with a deportation order this spring and hadn’t yet been removed; the victim, in the care of Ireland’s scandal-hit Tusla child protection agency, found her chaotic personal circumstances publicised by the state in a manner many on social media saw as tantamount to victim-blaming. Outside the IPAS centre, the toxic combination had fired up both locals and protestors from across the country, who now had very little time for Ireland’s main political parties, or the police forces standing between them and the hotel they wished to storm.

Within five minutes of reaching the protest, I was blasted directly in the face with pepper spray by charging riot police. Having now witnessed anti-migrant riots on both sides of the border, the Gardaí, perhaps for lack of experience in what was until very recently a famously orderly and pacific country, stand out for their markedly aggressive attitude to crowd control, at least compared with the much-maligned Police Service of Northern Ireland. “These are traitor bastards,” said a woman, dribbling water from a bottle into my eyes, as I spluttered at the kerb.

“The Black and Tans are back, the bastards,” other women shouted, “You scum, you dirty fucking traitors.” Unlike Northern Ireland, where violence has a certain ritual, formalised quality, police and protesters in Dublin were uneasily testing the rules of engagement, following an entirely new pattern of confrontation between ordinary Irish people and their state. At one entrance to the hotel, protestors smashed in and then burned a curiously abandoned Garda van, whooping in the firelight as it went up in a ball of flame. A workman’s van appeared, and rakes and spades were lifted out for weapons: youths smashed bricks against the pavement to produce a more ergonomic supply of missiles. Flickering green lasers aimed at the police, and the searchlight of a circling Garda helicopter hung like a son et lumière show in the thick smoke.

 

After early sporadic showers of bottles and rocks at the Gardaí Public Order Units, the protestors attempted different tactics to break police lines. Young lads in balaclavas – some pre-teen children – threw bricks and bottles in volleys at the police lines, in an attempt to break the shield wall and rush the IPAS centre. “If we don’t push, they’re going to push, so lets fucking go boys,” shouted one man, “There’s 20 of us for every one of them little faggots.” Hold the line, a police officer shouted as their ranks wavered for a moment. “Hold the line? I’ll break your fucking jawline, you cunt,” a man shouted back. Women, young and old, cheered them on. “Get their legs,” they shouted, “hit them on the head”. Whenever the missiles hit home, the crowd roared in support. One young woman, who claimed to be coming home from work to her three-year old child, was pepper sprayed in the face by police as she attempted to negotiate her way beyond their line. “He’s after spraying me, the fucking knacker,” she spluttered in outrage: “I was just standing there, you fucking traitor.”

“We just want to make our country better,” one 15-year old girl, who declined to give her name, told me, to the tinkling of glass shattering on police helmets, “We need to get them all out.” Another older woman, with a megaphone, taunted the police as youths showered missiles on them: “They won’t protect the women and children of Saggart, but they’ll protect the economic migrants, the fake-ugees as we call them in Saggart. They’re protecting rapists, murderers, child groomers, we’ve had enough of this shite in Ireland,” she roared, “We have 100% [Irish] DNA, this is our Ireland, our land.” The rocks and bottles bounced off the police shields, and occasionally heads, as she drove the furious menfolk on. A younger woman, all blonde highlights and white fleece, took the megaphone from her: “I will not allow a child to be hurt again, none of us will,” she shouted. “This is our country, this is our estate, our community, and we won’t stand for it any more.”

There was a sense in the immediate wake of the crime, at least on social media, that this might be a turning point for Ireland. Coming in the middle of a disastrous presidential contest, where the Fianna Fáil half of the government coalition had been humiliated by its top-down insistence on a weak candidate it was forced to withdraw, and the Fine Gael half of the coalition is stuck with an uninspiring candidate of its own, there is a mood that Irish politics is at an impasse. Even Sinn Féin, clawing back a poll lead from the coalition’s current turmoil, felt compelled to issue statements of alarm and concern at the state’s evident, multiple failures in the assault case.

The old order looks increasingly exhausted, but its heavy hand on state media, in a country whose cosy political relationship with the press makes the BBC look like anti-establishment mavericks, has helped suppress the populist upsurge currently reshaping the rest of the Western world. The position of the predicted winner of the election, the Republican socialist Catherine Connolly, is that Ireland’s borders are nowhere near open enough. Marginalised electorally (not least due to its own propensity towards crankish internal feuding), and effectively banned from the airwaves, Ireland’s anti-immigration Right is politically a non-entity. The result is that the country’s only current outlet for anti-immigration politics is the street.

 

And so, on the leafy lanes of Saggart, Irish men and women hurled rocks, bottles and fireworks at the uniformed emissaries of their state, which answered them with a level of force strikingly beyond British and Northern Irish norms. Unlike the inchoate Dublin riot of November 2023, where protestors took over a large chunk of the city centre, this riot was a relatively novel fusion of the peaceful, flag-waving anti-immigration protest movement of recent months, and the trip-switch propensity to violence of Dublin’s poorer element, who have not shared in the country’s spreadsheet prosperity. The ski-masked youngfellas riding ponies through police lines, and throwing bricks at the Gardaí, are not to be seen at the mass city-centre protests that now define Ireland’s anti-immigration movement. On the other hand, the livestreamers and provincial news aggregators who dominate the Irish protest movement seemed newly appreciative of the disorderly muscle that Dublin’s underclass, when roused, can bring to bear. This is a relatively new dynamic, and not to be underestimated as Ireland’s self-inflicted woes escalate.

Eventually, the Gardaí wheeled out their newly-purchased water cannon — a novelty in the country, acquired solely to suppress anti-migration protests — and used pepper spray and baton charges to break up the crowd. I spoke to one young father, who gave his name as Jack, cradling his wide-eyed five-year-old daughter while his wife, brandishing the Irish tricolour, looked on with contempt at the police, advancing beetle-like in their armour. “They’re scumbags, just instruments of the state,” he said of them, “protecting two and half thousand illegal immigrants behind these walls, protected by the strong arm of the state out here, pushing back the people of this country. They should go back tonight and hang their heads in shame, protecting rapists.”

“Obviously the situation is getting a little out of hand,” Patrick Quinlan, a councillor for the Gaelic-Identitarian National Party, making inroads among the suburban Dublin working class, told me, as balaclava’d men waving tricolours attempted to form new defensive lines against the police, “but people are extremely frustrated at government policies.” The National Party’s position, he added, was the “complete reform of the criminal justice system, up to and including the restoration of capital punishment for such heinous crimes”.

 

Ultimately — and unlike Northern Ireland — the Irish government retains the advantage in any street clashes. After a couple of hours of violence, the riot was quashed and Ireland’s political class released statements condemning the disorder. While voters here en masse may be repelled by violence against the state – and for all their grumblings against the main parties, they remain loyal to them at elections— those in Saggart last night had no such qualms. Ireland remains a political oddity in Europe for its absence of a viable, electoral Right-wing party squarely focussed against mass migration. Through the anti-immigration movement’s own amateurishness, and the coalition government’s grave mishandling of the issue, it seems the Irish political system is doing everything in its power to summon up a far more volatile alternative.

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