The night they burned Dublin

A primer on Thursday's social unrest and rage of the Irish Deplorables

For such a tiny country, the island of Ireland is a complex place, full of nuance and contradiction, and it has a hold on the collective imagination that is far bigger than its size or historical power. 

I have spent a large portion of my life on this island, north and south, and I can safely say that Thursday’s events in Dublin were utterly unprecedented. 

Dublin has long had a problem with crime, I experienced it personally as a resident on more than one occasion. Intra-family violence and drug gangs have plagued quite a few Dublin neighbourhoods and harmed many Irish children and young people. But the thought of a man stabbing a random group of kindergarteners on a Dublin street in broad daylight is so deeply, deeply anathema to all sections of Irish society that it truly beggars belief. Irish people love children, they understand childhood and they raise their kids well. Irish people have a very down-to-earth approach to children that is vastly superior to the overwrought middle class derangement parenting that is now the norm in the US and much of the UK. 

Violent attacks on children have become so common in other countries that, as demonic and upsetting as they are, they are no longer shocking. Not here. Not in Ireland. So I was truly bowled over when I read the news coming out of Dublin on Thursday. When it transpired that the attacker was Algerian who had been living in Ireland for 20 years, I also had a sinking feeling that people’s reactions to the stabbings would be furious and out-of-control. 

Ireland is no stranger to violence. It has been burdened for centuries with uniquely terrible deprivation and many of its coping mechanisms have exacerbated its problems. What I have been surprised by, given the vibrant cultural authenticity that has made it such a popular country, is just how easily it has fallen to its newest colonial overlords: the Neo-liberal techno-capitalist globalists at the top, and below them the middle class progressive NGO shock troops laying the groundwork (trans-ing kids, encouraging mass migration, etc). In their downtime, the NGO shock troops are very pleasant people who enjoy decent restaurants, support shops that sell linen tea towels and bags made out of repurposed sea trash, listen to cool indie bands and DJ’s, drink craft beers and swim in the cold Irish Sea. 

The downside? The expansion of the professional managerial and culture-producing class in Ireland has resulted in a wider distance between the steps on the socio-economic ladder than previously existed here, a nation where it was often said that no one was more than a generation or two removed from the field. Of course class differences have always existed. The poor have always been poor and the bourgeoisie have always judged them for it, but culturally speaking, now, they are separated by an ocean of misunderstanding that is made more bitter by the bourgeoisie’s professed political and moral virtue for every downtrodden group except their own compatriots.

 If Ireland hadn’t destroyed its working class, perhaps the Neo-libs would not have had such an easy time of it. Suckered in by the promise of education and social mobility — as the lower middle and working classes of the UK and the US also were — the traumatised-by-poverty Irish gratefully sent their children to good schools where, a generation or two later, their children were being transformed into gender-fluid libtards who believe everything Greta Thunberg says and hate Jews. And so the NGO shock troop class perpetuates itself. Not only do they retain their grip over government policy and the media’s coverage of the government, they also steadfastly refuse to engage honestly with the more traditional — dare I say indigenous — sections of Irish society: the farmers, the Catholics, the inner city Dubs, who have been growing more and more upset, alienated and harmed by the progressive minority. Instead of listening to their fellow Irishmen — the people who grow their food, pave their roads, and drive their taxis — the tremulous, oat milk latte progressives dismissed them as “far-right”, and kept going. 

I’m suspicious of riots in general, especially post-George Floyd and the resultant manufactured dissent. The phenomenon of rent-a-riot is real. But to the extent that they were organic, the riots that came after the stabbing on Thursday were 100 percent class-based. Over the last few years, the ordinary working man and woman has made very clear in peaceful protest after peaceful protest across Ireland that the influx of migrants — many of them young single men — was harming communities already under pressure from a service economy rendered insane by tax-dodging tech companies whose presence turned Dublin into a mini-San Francisco: a place where its almost impossible for the thousands of low-wage service workers to find a place to live because the high-paid tech bros have gobbled up all the real estate. Here are some truly bonkers numbers: according to the Guardian, “Ireland’s demography has been transformed in recent decades as a booming economy reversed the historical flow of emigration. A fifth of the 5 million people now living in Ireland were born elsewhere. A recent increase in refugees from Ukraine and other countries fuelled a backlash amid concern over a housing shortage and straining public services. The number housed by the state jumped from 7,500 in 2021 to 73,000 in 2022.”

Homelessness is soaring, reaching a new record early this year. The Irish Times last September reported: “11,754 people living in emergency accommodation at the start of this year, according to the most recent monthly figures from the Department of Housing. That includes 1,609 families, with 3,431 children in homelessness. Fifty-five per cent of them are single parent families. Nearly two-thirds are Irish.”

Ireland also had one of the strictest and most punitive COVID responses in the world, far more so than the United Kingdom, which looked downright libertarian by comparison. The Irish establishment fell for restrictive virus measures like a silly school girl falls for a boy band singer, refusing to give up on travel bans, masks and mandatory vaccines despite the evident harms they caused. 

And since the October 7 attacks on Israel, Ireland has seen protest after protest against what many middle class, educated, Irish sincerely believe is an Israeli genocide on Palestinians. At University College Dublin a few weeks ago, a debate about the Israel-Palestine crisis was stopped by a young Muslim man screaming ‘Allahu Akbar” over and over again. (Sidenote: on Saturday news broke of the release of a 9 year old, Irish-Israeli dual national who was kidnapped from a kibbutz after terrorists murdered her step-mother. Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar’s tweet about this referred to her has having been “lost” and then “found.” Proving yet again that the best Jews can hope for from the Irish is ambivalence to the existential threat they live under.)

In the last two years, there have been two other high-profile violent crimes committed by non-Irish men. In 2022, a young Iraqi man, whose family was given asylum in Sligo in 2006, slaughtered two gay men after luring them using a gay hook-up app. One of the men was beheaded. Also last year, a Slovakian dole scrounger randomly stabbed to death a young Irish traditional musician and primary school teacher, in broad daylight, for no apparent reason. 

The day the still unnamed Algerian stabbed the kindergarten kids and their teacher, Varadkar claimed that the Irish government was “very white” and this “very much needs to be changed.”

This is the background to the riots on Thursday. The rage felt by the underclass is real and growing.

Of course, it would also be remiss not to mention the hate crime legislation being championed by Ireland’s justice minister, that Micheal Shellenberger called the worst proposed law he’d ever seen.  Not letting the crisis go to waste, the media-government cartel were quick to blame the riots on “right-wing misinformation” disseminated on social media. The prime minister said the rioters were people “filled with hate” who “love causing pain to others.” He did not speak of the stabber of the children in such harsh terms.

He went on: ”I think it's now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us that our incitement to hatred legislation is just not up to date. It's not up to date for the social media age. And we need that legislation through within a matter of weeks…We’ll modernise our laws against incitement to hatred, and hatred in general. That is more required than ever was before.”

How convenient!

But Varadkar went even further, saying: 

“To all those cowardly champions of Ireland who took to the streets of Dublin last night, let me say one thing. Ask your sisters, ask your friends, ask everyone you know, what they fear most on our streets. They’re afraid of you. They’re afraid of your anger and your rage, your hate, and how you blame others for your problems. As a government, we will be relentless in defending our citizens and protecting our people.”

Except from stabby men from other countries, we can’t do anything about them, sorry.  The absolute contempt for the Irish in Varadkar’s remarks takes my breath away. 

The only heartening thing about this whole dismal episode has been Conor McGregor’s tweets. It appears the loudmouth MMA champ is in his populist leader era, and I’m here for it. It seems his outrage was awakened by the murder of Ashling Murphy (the teacher mentioned above,) and Thursday’s attacks on little children and their teacher brought him definitively into the ring. It was a masterclass in fair, honest-to-goodness, common man communication. He praised as “a working man” the Brazilian Deliveroo driver immigrant who was one of the men who knocked the Algerian stabber to the ground, by offering the Brazilian free food and pints in McGregor’s restaurant in perpetuity. McGregor also shared a video of a spindly Irish Times journalist who rode his bicycle to the scene of the stabbings, in a working class north inner city neighbourhood, only to find the men there deeply hostile to his presence. McGregor called the journalist “the absolute picture of weak and feeble,” much to my delight.

He then went on to share videos from an epic drinking session at his pub in honour of the fight between two Irish women boxers — videos showing young men and woman joyously downing pints and cheering on the boxers. The down-to-earth common sense justice of it all felt healing. I await with enthusiasm comparisons by the pearl-clutching Irish media between McGregor and Donald Trump.