By Conor Lenihan
On Friday night – in the aftermath of Thursday’s big riots, O’Connell Street was anything but calm, whatever spin the media were putting on it.
A young female Garda told me “tonight it’s zero tolerance”. Earlier she had shown exactly what she meant as she clubbed a particularly troublesome lad to the ground. The suspect was quickly handcuffed on the ground and forcibly pushed to a waiting Garda van. Another man, giving cheek to the Guards, was swiftly surrounded and his pockets emptied for inspection. Drugs were found and he too was whisked away to another waiting van.
There were anything from 40 to 80 gardaí in the vicinity of the GPO. They swarmed on groups of, predominantly young men, who were forming into sizeable gangs.
If people gave lip or refused to move on they were brought to the van and their evening was over.
On Friday the street was in the hands of a mixture of plain-clothes operatives, uniformed gardaí and imposing-looking members of the Public Order Unit following trouble-seeking youths down the streets off O’Connell Street.
Media photographers and TV camera people lingered on in the hope of capturing another incident but after 9pm things quietened down.
One garda confessed to me that they hadn’t gone in hard enough or early enough the night before.
It seems to me that the riot in O’Connell Street has hit a raw nerve with the Garda – it’s as if people don’t believe anymore that they’re either willing or able to do the job they are meant to do – maintain public order.
An example of the poor resourcing is that the Garda only got water cannons from the Police Service of Northern Ireland after the riot had already happened. Worse still they had these years ago but someone in authority said it would not be appropriate to use them – wrong signal and all that.
The Garda need what other police forces have to deal with urban riots – tear gas, water cannons and special units that are permanently patrolling like the Public Order Unit. If these are used in trouble spots they are a significant deterrent.
The anarchy, riots and burning of vehicles on O’Connell Street on Thursday are the inevitable result of a profound neglect of the North inner city over many, many years and ignoring the small far-right factions that exploit young urban men.
Symptomatic of this neglect is the existence of a Garda office in a prominent location on the street – but it is rarely occupied. It was put in place years ago in response to crime attacks. Day or night, it is largely empty, with presumably an expensive lease being paid for its fig leaf presence.
There is one Garda stationed there from daytime hours to 11pm at night. Public order and trained Garda members of the riots squad need to be based here. It is also the office of the Irish Tourist Assistance Service.
The O’Connell Street office was an empty gesture by the authorities to suggest a permanent, substantial Garda presence.
It has no deterrent value at this stage unless strengthened in numbers.
The attack led to the US State Department warning American citizens not to visit Dublin. This week’s rioting follows in the wake of a daytime attack on an American tourist in July on nearby Talbot Street – a stone’s throw from Store Street Garda Station. The attack led to the US State Department warning American citizens not to visit Dublin. After Thursday it is easy to see why.
The streets surrounding the capital’s busiest station are one of the most dangerous places to be at night-time.
Far-right activists have proved very adept at harnessing communities against direct provision centres for asylum seekers and perpetrating arson attacks alongside hooligans of one sort or the other.
The Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee TD, took a high-profile walk around the area in the wake of that attack, but there has been no appreciable improvement in policing.
The reality is the North inner city has become both a magnet and a dumping ground for a diverse set of social problems; including drug addiction, homelessness, street begging and people with mental illness with nowhere to go.
Chronic underfunding and lack of appropriate treatment resources for decades have left vulnerable people on the streets as a direct consequence of the failures of government policy.
The dumping of these problems on the country’s main street has brought its own day-to-day havoc as well as the horrific night-time rioting.
Garda morale is at an all-time low. Resignations from the force are running at an all-time high and a lot of momentum was lost with the closure of Templemore during Covid; and indeed with the dubious suspension of the ‘head of human resources and people development’, John Barrett. The morning after the riots, the rank-and-file Garda Representative Association’s Brendan O’Connor was rather reserved, refusing to repeat his membership’s statement of lack of confidence in the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris.
In the circumstances he chose discretion. Nothing further needed to be added.
Karl Ryan, who operates a restaurant on O’Connell Street, describes the country’s main thoroughfare as a “forgotten place”, relative to Grafton Street and the streets around it on the more salubrious Southside of the Liffey.
The myriad of laneways around and adjacent to O’Connell Street are havens for drug addicts shooting up, illicit drinking and people defecating in pavements littered with empty needles. The urban decay is accentuated by the presence of derelict sites hidden from, but close to the main thoroughfares, a problem exacerbated by poor planning.
Back in 2018, Shane Coleman’s morning programme on Newstalk accompanied me around these sites in an effort to highlight the sheer longstanding neglect. That build-up of neglect has been largely ignored. The physical shabbiness is at direct odds with the state of comparable streets in the South inner city. The prevalence of new hotels and the absence of new apartment blocks and social and affordable housing are a scandal in themselves
The warnings issued by myself, local traders and local councillors have fallen on deaf ears. The North Inner City is not just some sort of hub for shoppers, tourists and commuters.
O’Connell Street itself is not just the premier street of our capital but at the centre of bus and rail traffic in and out of the city.
The scenes transmitted all over the world of burning buses via the Internet and TV stations convey a message of lawlessness at the heart of our society and the long overdue need for more rigorous crime prevention and enforcement. If zero tolerance is not achievable in policing terms then we need a level of Garda presence that assures the public and deters malefactors.
According to Harris, the riot on O’Connell Street exploited the horrific stabbing of children by far-right elements that have been active in confronting the level of immigration into the country. These far-right activists have proved very adept at harnessing communities against direct provision centres for asylum seekers and perpetrating arson attacks alongside hooligans of one sort or the other.
The violence seen on Dublin’s streets has been evident across mainland Europe for some time, with far-right politicians using issues around immigration to whip up racist and aggressive crowds that descends into rioting.
These scenes of criminality are stoked by anti-immigration elements and the presence of urban social decay. If allowed to perpetuate, these far-right voices will grow stronger and stronger until they become a bigger presence at the ballot box, something mainland Europe has also experienced.
This is a prospect Ireland must avoid. Our government must take a stronger interest in the far-right elements who seek to exploit immigration issues to perpetuate wider societal disaffection.
The problem is twofold: the stoking of a small right-wing and the evolution of an undervalued, now malignant, youth that feels alienated from our consumerist society.
The riot scenes in O’Connell Street have been beamed all over the world and inflicted huge damage on the country. Worse, the integrity of our polity is at stake
There is nothing wrong with the rank and file gardaí if they are motivated and allowed to do the job they’re meant to do. Somebody in authority has to give the lead and unfortunately, to date, neither the Minister Helen McEntee nor Commissioner Drew Harris have given that lead. Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin believes both should go. Taoiseach Varadkar has full confidence in both of these individuals. Still.
We have a very short time to shut this thing down. Ireland has become lawless and un-policed because of a huge jump in the population, the exploitation of immigration by a small but increasingly visible hard right, and social neglect, all coinciding with a complacent belief that our liberal-tolerant policing model is the right one; and that it can function under-resourced, badly managed and without necessary numbers. Well, I’m sorry I much prefer the policing model that was briefly on display on Friday on O’Connell Street even if it was a day too late.
Conor Lenihan is a former Minister and served for 14 years at Leinster House.
