Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time main text: 4 mins.)
A man stabs three children and a teacher in Dublin, after which certain elements riot, burn public transport and Garda vehicles and threaten migrants. What is the connection between these events?
The terrible stabbing was carried out and the assumed assailant is under arrest, facing charges and if convicted will certainly lose his freedom. The alleged assailant, it is claimed, was a foreign national1, he was himself injured and is in hospital under arrest.
Yes, but what’s the connection between all that and street riot, burning public transport and police vehicles and threats to migrants?
None whatsoever, to the rational mind. But in far-Right minds and those of their fascist instigators, one migrant assailant condemns all migrants.
How is that logical? If an Irish person carried out an attack in Britain, should all Irish people in Britain be judged culpable and attacked?
SCATTER-GUN BLAMING
In fact that’s exactly what happened many times, perhaps most memorably to the Birmingham Six, Maguire Seven, Guildford Four and Judith Ward. Of course, the real reason behind that was the State terrorising of the Irish community, who were protesting British repression in Ireland.
And, as it happens, there is hidden fascist reasoning here too, because for some time now, fascists and other far-Rightists have been blaming migrants and refugees for the crisis of homelessness in this neo-liberal and neo-colonial Irish state.
Migrants and other minorities, insecure, without strong support networks, often unorganised, are vulnerable and among the first and easiest targets of fascist movements in most parts of the world, dividing the working people and obscuring their real enemies.
In Britain in the 1800s the targets were the Irish; in Germany, Britain, Ireland and other places in the 1930s, those to demonise and attack were Jews and socialists2; in Britain during the latter half of the last century the Irish again but also Afro-Caribbeans, S. Asians, Africans and Muslims.
EXCUSE
And it turns out, interestingly, that two out of three of the men who intervened to save the children were also migrants.
But riots and burning buses? A catharsis of the sub-working class of the inner city, alienated and disregarded for generations, devastated by substance addiction, most recently mobilised by fascists against Covid restrictions and, yes, against refugees and migrants then too.
Out of such material were the Brownshirt stormtroopers formed in 1930s Germany; out of such material too did former Garda Commissioner O’Duffy form his fascist Blueshirt movement that later helped form the Fine Gael party.
The big capitalist ruling classes use fascists to split the working class and suppress its resistance organisations and capability, so that the rate of exploitation can be increased and profit margins be defended or increased. The upper echelons of fascism are duly rewarded with government posts.
In the organising for fascist power, elements among the police and army are often in sympathy with the fascists or actually recruited by them. Or fascists may simply be tolerated, or painted as merely the other side of the threat to society, i.e the Left.
Wounded national pride was a factor in making Germans amenable to the Nazi message. The Irish people certainly have reason for wounded national feeling but these far-Right elements, for all their Tricolour-waving, by and large have no history of activity in the Irish Republican movement.
They may feel that they have lost something but in fact they never had it. Such elements also turn to opportunist looting and in the city centre shops selling shoes, expensive bicycles, alcohol and clothes were broken into and looted.
The disadvantaged and disinherited are ironically mobilised — by the very authors of their woes — against the working people, the only social sector that can change the system to one of equality and a decent living for all. They are deserving of pity certainly but dangerous for all that.
THEY HAVE BEEN ENCOURAGED
And during the Pandemic, the far-Right and fascists have been encouraged to a false feeling of strength, treated extremely tolerantly by the Gardaí, even as the far-Right continually breached laws, attacked anti-fascists and threatened LGBT people and migrants.
Dublin City Centre was much quieter than normal on Saturday, with less stalls than usual open in Moore Street and less shoppers. Thirty far-Right types gathered near the Spire in the City Centre and menaced a group with a banner reading “Grandfathers Against Racism”.
It was remarked that until the arrival of the Public Order Unit, the Gardaí allowed the mobs to collect and gather strength, even setting a patrol car alight. This has led to some calls for the resignation of the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris.
Among those calling for their resignations was Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Féin, the party with most elected TDs (MPs) in Leinster House3, the parliament of the Irish State, who commented that the riot could easily have been predicted, given previous far-Right behaviour.
Harris, of course, is accustomed to “softly softly” managing the largest collection of fascists and far-Right thugs in Ireland, i.e the ‘Ulster’ (sic) or Orange Loyalists. After all, his previous job was Assistant Commissioner of the colonial police force, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.4
But the monster hates his facilitators too and breaks out against them when he can find no easier targets upon which to vent his rage. And in all probability, those who facilitated the monster in the recent past will now repress it to an extent.
But in the course of that, repressing all progressive resistance movements too. Garda violence and the water-cannon borrowed from the colonial police force will certainly be inflicted far more upon progressive movements than on the far-Right.
The monster hates his facilitator and his creator but ends up serving their purpose even as they use him without the slightest regard for him as a living, hurting being.
And the working class, even as they know this, must organise to defend itself against that monster while at the same time reaching beyond it, to pull down the monster’s creator once and for all.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1It is well known that fascists and far-Right agitators lie and ascribe foreign status to the perpetrators of crimes when they are of indigenous background, apart from tarring all migrants with the brush of an individual’s crime. And when the attack is by an indigenous person upon a migrant, of course the fascists remain silent.
2In Nazi Germany, other targeted and murdered minorities included Roma (‘Gypsies’), the mentally ill and disabled.
3But currently in opposition.
4A colonial armed gendarmerie, formerly the sectarian Royal Ulster Constabulary and, prior to 1922, the Royal Irish Constabulary. Their soft approach on Loyalist violence and disorder was and is in direct contradiction to their repression of even non-violent activities of Irish Republicans.
SOURCES
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