On Thursday afternoon, as I was leaving Dublin’s north city centre where I live part of the time, I witnessed the evacuation of one of the children injured in the knife attack on Parnell Square and the arrival of the first garda public order units. I sensed that something terrible had happened and tension was building up as a result. I didn’t, however, expect the combination of far-right violence and coordinated looting that followed in the O’Connell Street area of Dublin on Thursday night.

Yet the scenes were familiar. Before moving to Ireland, I lived in Paris, where rioting is a sadly regular occurrence. This experience gives me some perspective on the night’s events and the authorities’ response.

There is an added challenge in articulating it because the ideologues who instigated the violence directed it at multiple aspects of my own identity. As an Irish citizen, they attacked my country, disrupting the investigation into a serious crime that had just taken place in my neighbourhood, and added to the victims’ trauma by wreaking havoc on the area. They assaulted the emergency responders keeping me safe, destroyed public equipment I use and had paid for, and shut down businesses where I shop. 

As an immigrant, they want me out of this country. Their most violent acts might target visible immigrant presences, such as people of colour or asylum seekers’ accommodation, but it previously took me only a short exchange on social media with a so-called “patriot” to understand that his hatred extended to white Europeans, too.

As a journalist, far-right activists oppose the work I do to inform the public and they were recorded attacking media workers overnight. Their efforts to mobilise others to come out and commit apparently senseless violence rely on the dissemination of a web of lies via social media. This web catches those drifting away from reliable information sources and convinces them that they are under threat from various conspiracies.

But I’ll try not to let this cloud my judgement and draw some lessons from observing successive waves of rioting in Paris and now its emergence in Dublin.

Various groups, various motivations

Those situations are complex because they involve groups of individuals with different motivations. Politicised activists range from peaceful protestors to violent militants intent on causing harm or damage to the people and institutions they hate. In Paris, the gilet jaunes attacked banks as a symbol of the riches they didn’t have. In Dublin, rioters graffitied xenophobic slogans.

Then come the common-law criminals with no political agenda. They piggyback on protests, whether legitimate or not, to commit various offences. Again, motivations vary among them. Some enjoy arson and destruction for sport, and public transport vehicles make for the best pictures of fires on social media. Others have looting targets and join in purely to steal goods for personal use or resale. There is an overlap with organised crime in the latter categories, with drug trafficking networks also used to trade stolen property.

All categories regard police officers as the enemy, whether as guardians of the status quo activists want to disrupt, or as obstacles standing in the way of a productive night of burning and thieving. 

Policing this volatile compound of people and motivations is extremely difficult. It requires early detection of the time and place where ideologues are trying to mobilise crowds, fast deployment of large, well-trained and equipped public order units and graduated intervention to keep the legitimate protestors separate from criminal elements and to nip any violence in the bud before it spreads.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris’s initial public comments on Thursday night did not appear to show a clear understanding of those dynamics. “We have a complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-right ideology, and also then this disruptive tendency engaged in serious violence,” he told reporters as the rioting continued. At that point, his force was still “drafting in resources” to deal with it.

At a press conference the following morning, Harris shared deeper analysis. He first defended the record of his force. “An Garda Síochána responded to this entirely in an extraordinary fashion,” he said, adding: “This is not a failure of personnel.” There is no suggestions that the officers present fell short of what their superiors asked them to do.

The 400 gardaí who tackled the riots came from “public order units from all over Ireland” and arrived “throughout the evening,” he said. He added that Dublin’s Garda command added “resources that were available” during Thursday to monitor far-right social media and did respond to the protestors, but they “were then supplemented with those who were only intent on crime, disorder and the looting of premises”.

“Nobody could have anticipated that.”

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris

Asked about the failure to prevent the violence from spreading, he added: 

“We could not have anticipated that, in response to a terrible crime, the stabbing of schoolchildren and their children, this would be the response – in effect, those filled with hate, and hate directed towards the members of An Garda Síochána, that they would attempt to storm through our cordon and disrupt the crime scene and then engage in violence, looting and disorder including very significant criminal damage. Nobody could have anticipated that.”

As for the action taken to quell the violence after it erupted, Harris said: 

“I now have to look to the tactics that we have for public order. We have not seen a public order situation like this before. This may be behaviour that is apparent in other countries but I think that we’ve seen an element of radicalisation. We have seen a group of people who take literally a thimbleful of facts and make a bathtub of assumptions – hateful assumptions – and then conduct themselves in a way which is riotous and disruptive to our society.”

Harris’s comments show that there is now an understanding among gardaí of the various types of people and motivations involved in the Dublin riots, as well as the rhetoric and tactics participants are importing from countries where divisive ideology and opportunistic vandalism are more common.

As for the response, Harris takes a separate view of intelligence gathering and public order operations.

His defence of the monitoring of online activity by the organisers of Thursday night’s disturbances is not tenable. It took far-right leaders most of the afternoon and evening to stoke anger and direct sympathisers towards the scene of the knife attack. My colleague Niall has reported on such posts as early as 3.30pm. 

This was no spontaneous local reaction. I have written before about the generally peaceful atmosphere in the O’Connell Street area and I stand by it. This is not a deprived peripheral area of Paris, where genuinely high crime levels, lack of opportunity and constant confrontation with police often erupts in bouts of surprise violence. More like the gilet jaunes protests that were carefully planned for maximum visibility on the Champs-Elysées.

O’Connell Street is at the core of Dublin’s commercial life and transport network. It is full of people who are on business. Riots like Thursday’s don’t happen here without an amount of organising that is detectable by efficient intelligence agencies. 

Likewise, looters and arsonists likely came from all over the city, passing information on social media. I’m not saying no young man local to the area would steal from the shops where their family and friends are likely to work, but the scale of criminal behaviour indicated coordination across a wider population – again detectable in advance.

The belated deployment of gardaí in response to what was a long time coming online is worrying. No amount of Harris repeating that the force “could not have anticipated it” will make it true, and his refusal to admit failure in this area does not indicate an appetite for improvement.

Monitoring of far-right online activity has been exposed as insufficient, as was already the case in previous attacks on places where immigrants live. The review of intelligence gathering hinted at by Tánaiste Micheál Martin on Friday shows that there is at least an awareness of the problem higher up in government. How Ireland makes use of new powers to regulate social media under the EU’s Digital Services Act will also be crucial. 

Non-confrontational approach

The review of public order tactics planned by Harris is more promising, though this is also the most difficult area, with no right answers. A garda spokeswoman declined to answer my questions on the type of actions and equipment deployed in Dublin on Thursday evening.

Based on the wide selection of online footage I could verify, however, the force gave priority to avoiding confrontation. Only some of the gardaí deployed were wearing adequate protective equipment. The strongest form of force I could see being used was small-scale baton charges. This was only partly successful in avoiding bodily harm, with several officers seriously injured.

However, this approach was at the cost of abandoning control of O’Connell Street and some of its adjacent streets to mobs that caused large-scale damage to property and shut down the country’s largest public transport hub. 

While the destruction and looting was unprecedented in recent Irish memory, it remained small compared to my Paris experience, with one exception: the astonishing 11 garda vehicles Harris said were burned or severely damaged. I don’t think I have ever heard of French police losing so much of their own equipment in a single event. This illustrates both the deliberate targeting of gardaí by rioters and the non-confrontational approach taken by the force.

Yet my experience from Paris is that heavy-handed policing is not the answer. The long history of brutality by French security forces is characterised by the indiscriminate use of teargas at the first sign of trouble, followed by only slightly more targeted firing of baton rounds and stun grenades in the general direction of actively violent individuals. Fast-moving police squads also navigate riots to nab identified troublemakers. 

The resulting escalation in violence, especially since the gilets jaunes protests from late 2018, has left dozens of protestors and bystanders with permanent injuries including eye and limb loss. Rioters, too, have become more violent, arming themselves with increasingly dangerous weapons on the way to meeting points.

There must be a happy medium between the disproportionate use of force routinely seen in Paris and the loose containment tactics applied in Dublin on Thursday. Gardaí would be well inspired to seek inspiration from police forces that have a successful public order track record elsewhere in Europe – just not in France.

The handful of Irish far-right agitators who instigated Thursday’s violence in Dublin were protesting against equality.

There is another major difference between the rioting I have observed in both countries. French far-right activists tend to present themselves as partisans of law and order. While the movement’s violent fringe does commit assaults against immigrants and political adversaries, it generally doesn’t seek confrontation with the police. Far-right political parties are, in fact, very popular among French police officers. Rioting in and around Paris has generally been associated with apolitical or left-wing protests.

This stems in part from the country’s darkest episode in modern history, when fascist violence on Parisian streets in the 1930s paved the way for collaboration with the Nazi invasion of 1940. Even nostalgics of that era don’t regard public displays of uncontrolled hatred as the best way to win over supporters.

The absence of such a historical taboo here leaves far-right ideologues unbridled. From anti-vaccination protests during the pandemic to the September blockage of Leinster House and Thursday’s riot, the slogans on display have shown an increasingly toxic mixture of racism, homophobia, and conspiracy theories lifted directly from US templates – anything that gets the clicks and shares is fair game. 

While rioting in France often starts with anger at inequality, whether in social terms or in treatment by police, the handful of Irish far-right agitators who instigated Thursday’s violence in Dublin were protesting against equality. And with no fascist shame in this State’s memory to hold them back, they have been spreading this poison to an ever-growing audience.