On an ordinary November lunchtime in Dublin, people were going about their daily business. It looked as if it was going to rain, which is not unusual around here. Three schoolchildren under the age of six were leaving school on Parnell Square in the company of their 30-year-old female carer.
And then it happened. A man lunged forward with a knife and stabbed all four of them. Within seconds, there was blood everywhere. Passers-by screamed. It was horrific.
A food-delivery cyclist from Brazil happened to be passing on his bike. His intervention stopped the attack and he managed to apprehend the assailant. One of the girls is still in a hospital in Dublin, in a critical condition.
As the police rushed to the scene, the rumours started on social media that the attacker was an Algerian immigrant. That rumour led to a surge in anger and the result was disaster.
Within no time, hundreds of angry feral youths had congregated on the area around Parnell Square in Dublin, and their first target of attack was the police – the Garda. The mob burned buses, police cars, rail trams and looted shops. Nearby O’Connell Street was soon ablaze.
Ireland is in many ways a modern success story. It has recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, the economy is growing and it has all the benefits of EU membership. And yet there are still people who do not share in this good news story. In Dublin, the mob that burned the shops and the cars was made up of the isolated and marginalised youths who can’t afford to go to university and whose prospects are grim. Owning a house is beyond the reach of most of these young working-class people. They have been squeezed out of the market by rising prices.
And at the centre of their disaffection is the toxic issue of immigration. Ireland needs immigrants to grow its highly successful economy – but the pressure on housing is huge. And among sections of Irish society the sense of grievance has been building towards immigrants. The belief in some quarters is that migrants get preferential treatment when it comes to the housing queue and that they only come here because the benefits system is so generous.
Ireland certainly has an open and welcoming attitude to immigration, much more so than the UK, with its “hostile environment” and its bizarre Rwanda policy. Here, the governing coalition of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party has worked hard to accommodate refugees. So far, just under 100,000 asylum seekers from Ukraine have arrived in Ireland. Ireland’s population has been growing, from 3.9 million in 2002 to 5.2 million in 2022.
And then there have been the high-profile cases in the press. Last month, for example, Jozef Puska from Slovakia was convicted of the murder of Ashling Murphy, a school teacher. An Afghan national named Yousef Palani was convicted of the murder of two gay men in Sligo Town.
In the meantime, the Irish government is 15 months – at the latest – away from an election. It looks as if some tough decisions lie ahead to restore law and order, and keep the restive far right at bay.
