Post by Papa C. on Feb 28, 2006 14:01:13 GMT
A political analysis of the Dublin riots and why nobody saw them coming
Burning Lump of Rubble on Waste-Strewn O Connell Street
I, like almost everybody I know, didn't predict the events of Saturday. In fact the only person I know who did predict a major riot was a friend of mine who happens to hail from the wee North - in retrospect I should have realised that he had his finger on the pulse, for not only does he have much more experience of sectarian marches, but through his job he knows many of the people who were involved and has an unusual insight and sympathy for those people who most Dubliners write off as 'scumbags' and 'knackers'. This article is an analysis of what happened and why almost everybody got it so wrong. This article is a companion piece to the photo essay which I published yesterday.
A 13 minute video of the rioting in Dublin is now available on the global indymedia video site. You can download it by clicking here or by visiting the global indymedia website at video.indymedia.org. The file is made with the xvid codec and mp3 audio. It is approximately 100 MB in size, you will require a broadband connection to view it.
Policing
I have a lot of experience of protesting and policing, having attended many of the most hyped and heavily policed events that Dublin has seen in the last decade as well as some of the biggest and most volatile international protests that have occurred around the world, both as a participant and a cameraman. From this it is obvious to me that the police were similarly completely surprised by the events of Saturday February 25th in central Dublin.
I also know that the Gardai are more than capable of policing contentious and potentially volatile protests in what would be regarded as a way that is in line with international policing norms. I was there on the Navan road when 3,000 anti-capitalist protestors made the march to Farmleigh on Mayday 2004. On that day there were thousands of police deployed and although the protestors managed to get much closer to the location of the summit than the police would have liked, the state was never in any danger of losing control of the situation. They had deployed thousands of police in riot gear, backed up by water cannon and a massive deployment of surveillance technology and they successfully contained the protestors much as their international colleagues routinely do. Therefore, I do not think that it is conceivable that the complete under-preparedness of the gardai could possibly be a result of incompetence in terms of their ability to police events - they have proved very successful at containing much bigger protests in the past....
There have been some suggestions that our power-crazed minister for justice or other sinister forces within the 26 country state may have deliberately failed to prepare adequately to police this event in order to further some security or anti-republican agenda. While I'm sure the minister for justice would love to have the power to do this, I'm also certain that he doesn't and that this theory is entirely implausible. Gardai are generally not happy to be sent out under prepared to face rioters and if there had been any inkling that a riot was likely to ensue, the guards would have been extremely unwilling - to say the least - to be used as target practice in such a scheme, pawns in the minister's power game. As it is the gardai on the ground were extremely angry and remain so that they were sent out to police a situation without anything like the resources that they would have needed to contain the situation. Furthermore, I talked to the Superintendent who appeared to be in charge of operations on the day and several ordinary gardai and they all expressed the same opinion - that they had anticipated some 'trouble' but nothing like the rioting that happened and while it is a foolish person who believes anything just because the Gardai say it is so (I remember the stream of lies and smears that the Garda press office came out with in the run up to Mayday 2004) - these reactions seemed genuine and unscripted.
Therefore, I think it is clear that the guards were genuinely taken completely by surprise by the events of the day and I think that the reasons for them being surprised were exactly the same as the reasons that I and almost all of the other political activists whom I know were similarly taken by surprise.
Essentially, our mistake was to assume that political protests need to be organised by somebody. In general this is true and I don't know of any other event that has taken place in Dublin in the last 20 years which happened without being organised or planned by some organisation or other. The riots of central Dublin were an exception to this rule, no organisation planned them and almost nobody saw them coming.
The Garda intelligence reports in advance of the march would have told them that Sinn Fein were trying as hard as they could to keep their members away from the protest - I believe that they announced that anybody who was seen in the city centre on the day would be banned from their functions for 6 months and this largely worked, I only saw a single shinner in the city throughout the day and he was obviously there as a sanctioned observer and remained behind police lines (where I also inadvertently found myself). Similarly, the Gardai know that the 32CSM had called off their protest and were not interested in provoking a confrontation. While Republican Sinn Fein did organise a counter protest, the gardai pretty much know what their membership has for breakfast and are well aware that they are a tiny organisation based around a small number of traditional republican families who are completely incapable of mobilising more than a few dozen die-hards. The 4th significant Republican group, the IRSP, are virtually non-existant in the south and are incapable of organising anything. Besides the Gardai were well aware of the fact that the march was intended as a provocation, a trap for republicans to fall into and that the various republican groups were intelligent enough to recognise this and avoid falling into it.
The other political current that regularly causes the Gardai security worries in Dublin is the anarchists and the Gardai would have been well aware that the anarchist organisations were not at all interested in stoking the flames of sectarianism. The Gardai read indymedia for their intelligence like the rest of us and they would have been aware that the anarchists were not planning trouble for this march - being more interested in taking the piss out of the bigots than getting into a ruck with them. They knew that neither the WSM nor Organise! the two formal anarchist organisations in the country were simply not going to get involved in organising a protest that would be seen as nationalist and sectarian. Thus the Gardai came to the same assesment that I did - no political organisations who were capable of causing trouble were mobilising to oppose the loyalist march and they were right. From the long years that I have spent attending and covering protests I recognise a lot of faces from these various groups and they simply weren't involved in the confrontation - those whom I saw were bemusedly observing the whole thing from the sidelines. The people who are claiming that the events were orchestrated by this or that political group are simply liars who are pursuing various agendas and cynically using the riot to attack their political opponents. From the fantasist pathological liars of the Sunday Independent to the PDs, every reactionary in the country will use any such event as this to smear their opponents and they can be safely ignored by anybody who is seeking to understand these events.
So, if it wasn't organised by political groups, how did it happen?
The people who took part in the rioting were largely drawn from the urban poor, mostly disenfranchised young men from impoverished estates around Dublin, people who normally have no political voice whatsoever, people who rarely vote, who are disorganised, who live in communities that have been ravaged by poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, people who many of those who live lives of privilege and relative comfort write off as 'scumbags' or whom the Marxists describe as 'lumpen'. Although these people are generally seen as apolitical and disinterested in politics, this is not entirely true. Many of them have a deep and abiding sense of identity which is derived from their nationalism or patriotism. As my friend said to me, he is constantly amazed at the number of young men from impoverished communities who sport tricolour or pro-IRA tattoos, despite the fact that they have no political involvement in any of the Republican or Nationalist organizations.
This sense of identity is expressed in various ways in addition to the tattoos - from the houses and flats decked out in green bunting during the world cup, to the well known 'bar stool republicanism' and popularity of nationalist songs in the bars where the poor drink, to the widespread and passionate support for Glasgow Celtic Football Club among the poor and disenfranchised. An instinctive nationalism and a strong sense of identity for their own community is the real political expression of the urban poor in Dublin. The idea that the loyalist paramilitaries could come and march through their city, by the GPO - ground zero of Irish republicanism - was sufficiently provocative to enrage these people on a much deeper level than any of the habitual attacks on their living conditions or economic lives could possibly do. They are used to being at the bottom, to being shat upon by the rest of society, but their nationalism and sense of community identity is one thing that gives them pride in themselves - allowing the loyalists to march through their city and to disrespect their identity would be a full frontal assault on their pride and pride is all they have.
Therefore, despite the lack of mobilisation by any of the political groups and in some cases (as with Sinn Fein) the active efforts to stop their supporters attending, groups of youth from all over the city headed into town to oppose the loyalist march. Many of them obviously prepared themselves with projectiles and fireworks, presumably intending to hurl them at the loyalists. From my position behind the police lines I witnessed several golf balls and ball bearings (one of which struck me on the leg) being thrown over the lines of the riot police and bangers and rockets continuously exploded on the ranks of the riot police. Therefore, I think it is clear that a fair number of those who took part in the riots were prepared to throw projectiles at the loyalist march. However, it is also clear that none of this was coordinated, it didn't have to be. It doesn't take any coordination or organisation for a bunch of mates to head into town together with a few projectiles and since the anti-loyalist sentiment is widespread, it doesn't take any great leap of imagination to picture groups of youths from all over the city arriving at the idea independently and that's what happened.
I talked to several people from different areas of the city who reported groups of youth from impoverished areas of the city travelling into town on buses talking loudly about their plans to pelt the loyalists. It was probably the one political issue in Dublin which was certain to lead to such a decentralised mobilisation. Anybody who is familiar with the patterns of sectarian rioting in the North knows that although the rioting is normally controlled, to a greater or lesser extent, by paramilitary groups, the vast majority of the participants are local youths who are not members of any political organisation - exactly the same section of society as those who rioted in Dublin and indeed the same section of society who are almost always the ones to riot - from Paris to Argentina it is the impoverished youth on the margins of society who riot, having nothing to lose and little fear of authority.
How did the situation escalate?
However, what eventually occurred in central Dublin was much more than a few bunches of youths pelting the marchers with small projectiles and fireworks, it turned into a full scale riot. How did this come about?
The RSF counter demonstration provided a rallying point for all of these disenfranchised people who made their way into Dublin early on Saturday morning. By the time that the march was due to begin at 12.30, the handful of RSF supporters taking part in the demonstration had been joined by a few hundred of these unaffiliated anti-loyalist youth. The Gardai had corralled the RSF demonstration behind barriers in the middle of the road, but this was not a crowd that was going to accept the right of the Gardai to tell them where to stand. As I approached the Parnell monument from Parnell Square shortly after 12.30 with an indymedia videographer and saw the counter-demonstration, it was immediately clear to us that the loyalist march was not going to be able to leave Parnell Square at all. The protestors were utterly enraged. People were screaming at the guards "call yourself fucking Irish, you'll let them march and you won't let us march up to them", "orange bastards" and "free state scum" and other similar epithets.
There were also large numbers of working class youth amassing at the junction of Parnell Street and O'Connell Street and the crowd was growing all the time. O'Connell street is flanked on its East side by a large concentration of impoverished flat complexes and council houses - an area that has housed some of Dublin’s poorest communities for over a century. Many of the people who were arriving at the flash point were locals who may not even have known about the march, but when they learned that the Gardai were cordoning off their communities to allow a loyalist march through, they became similarly enraged and heaped abuse upon the Gardai 'traitors' who were holding back the crowds.
The crowd from the counter demonstration surged through the barriers into the road and the Gardai responded in the standard way that they do when a demonstration breaks through a barrier, they called up the riot squad who launched a baton charge into the crowd to clear the way for the loyalist march. However, they were not dealing with a normal political demonstration, they were dealing with the most disenfranchised sector of society, a group with very different characteristics from your normal political demonstrators, the anti-loyalist demonstration was immediately transformed into an anti-Garda riot that led to the forces of order completely losing control of central Dublin for the next few hours.
In general, people who attend political demonstrations are people who have some type of long-term goal that they are aiming towards. Their political acts are part of some strategy and crucially they have something to lose. Not so with this crowd. These are people whose communities are completely ignored by the Gardai and the state, whose only interactions with the Gardai are to receive beatings and general persecution from them. In this self same community, only a few hundred yards away from the flash-point, a local man by the name of Terrence Wheelock died in highly dubious circumstances while in custody and it is widely believed that he was beaten to death by the Gardai. Indeed beatings in custody have become so common for local youths that they are hardly remarked upon and almost accepted within 'polite society'. These are people who have little or nothing to lose, who take pride in the fact that they have no fear, who are accustomed to being powerless and trodden upon by the state and who have a deep rage about this state of affairs, a rage which is generally expressed in a self-destructive way. Many of them are known to the Gardai. For once they found a large number of people with a similar experience gathered together in the one spot and for once they massively outnumbered the Gardai...