Siobhan Kearney, who witnessed the stabbing, said the scene was “absolutely bedlam.”
“Without thinking, I just took across the road to help out,” she told Irish national broadcaster RTE. “We got another young man, disarmed [the attacker] with the knife, another man took the knife and put it away for the [police] to find it.”
Kearney said a group of people restrained the suspect on the ground, as some of those injured were taken back inside the school. One Irish woman and one American woman stood in front of the suspect to stop people from beating him. A photo at the scene shows the middle-aged suspect with blood in his mouth lying on the ground…
The fact that a man attacked a school run through the Irish, or Gaelic, language helped fuel an outpouring of rage that saw anti-immigrant riots, lootings and arson in the hours that followed. Police struggled to contain the crowds, who attacked them on the street, and burned a hotel housing asylum seekers as well as a tram, a double decker bus and a police car.
My cousin last night over Thanksgiving dinner reported the news. He was on business in the US. He comes from Dublin but is out of Waterford. For the life of him last night he had no clue what was going on.
The group has 32% public support particularly among the young. Our family does not support them. We worry about them. The violence is how they operate against everyone.
This article from February indicates more than Sinn Fein.
Ireland has an immigration problem. Almost a year after refugees started to arrive from Ukraine, leaving state capacity buckled and local communities unnerved, two very different expressions of civic disorder have emerged. In one, migrants are housed in cubicle dorms in office buildings or, even worse, in tents.
In the other, grassroots anti-migrant protests are sweeping across the country, rallying around the slogan “Ireland is Full”. There were 307 anti-migrant protests in 2022, while 2023 has already seen 64. At the latest demonstration in Dublin, on Tuesday, more than 2,000 protestors took to the streets…
In any other European country, such a scenario would be ripe for a Right-wing populist party to make electoral headway…anti-establishment angst had channelled itself into support for the rising Sinn Féin party…Unless, that is, the anti-migrant protests overshadow Sinn Féin’s rising star.
These working-class protesters are the same demographic as Sinn Féin’s reliable voter base…This anti-immigrant sentiment contrasts starkly with the Sinn Féin party leadership, which perhaps explains the three-point drop from its all-time high last June.
Something like 20% of the people in Eire were not born there. It’s 15% in the UK with a net figure of three quarters of a million coming in the last year.
Such large movements of people are causing economic and social tensions in both countries.
In the Uk The Reform Party is gaining ground, attracting votes from both Labour and The Conservatives:
Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK has called the net migration figures “a complete betrayal of what everybody who voted Conservative for Brexit wanted”.
We have a general election next year so things should get interesting.
Your source is shaky. It is true people are upset but the Irish public is a community. For Sinn Fein’s support to erode is very possible. People sway each other more easily. Sinn Fein is a nasty business. The party would attack its own which would turn people off.
He proposed a tax cut for low income people, raise the threshold from 12,500 to 20,000/year? Clearly a Commie, by Shiny measure. When the Gov of Michigan changed taxes, he did the shiny thing: paid for a tax cut for “JCs” by raising taxes on retirees and the working poor. Then he goes off on a “culture war” tangent. Who decides what is “our culture” and what is foreign? Should Shiny-land outlaw pizza, or only tacos?
The hate crime was just the incidence that touched off the rioting about immigration. A proximate cause, as they say. Remember when Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri?
There is a lot of unrest in Europe over immigration. Killings, riots, gangs. It is affecting elections. If a right coalition can be put together in the Netherlands it could change their climate policies.
“We are shocked,” Extinction Rebellion Netherlands says. “This outcome will likely mean a rollback of climate measures, new fossil investments, exclusion of marginalized groups, and more.”
The big problem here is that the Irish police haven’t released the identity of the attacker. That allowed the right-wing elements to fill the information void with every form of hateful conspiracies. You can never go wrong with transparency.
I was talking with one of my cousins in Ireland a few weeks ago and he said there are 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in Ireland. You can’t even find a hotel room when you go on vacation. (By comparison in population, that would be like letting 10 million Ukrainian refugees into the US.) Imagine the response in some of the less-enlightened places like Texas or Florida under those conditions.
Immigration from both war and climate change is a large macroeconomic factor.
The narrative, in Shiny-land, wrt random attacks, for years, was that, if the perp was a Muslim, he was always “Isis inspired” or “AQ connected”, and part of the huge, global, monolithic, Islamic boogyman. If a white man did the exact same thing, the media wrote him off as a “disturbed individual”. That became a lot harder when Dylann Roof gunned down a flock of black people, after leaving a long trail of white supremacist hate.
The Irish analog would be if an immigrant does it, he is part of the monolithic horde of violent, disease carrying, criminal, immigrants, not a “disturbed individual”.
Just saw this. Apparently a Brazilian immigrant clubbed the Dublin school stabber with his motorcycle helmet. A grateful Irish public has collected $300,000 for his benefit.
True. Immigration is a symptom of two greater diseases. Imagine what might be if we’d concentrate on treating the diseases, rather than complaining about the symptoms.
Yep. There’s a really fun museum in Dublin that’s devoted to the Irish diaspora. It’s fairly new and, when we visited it on our trip there last summer, not a single Irish person we mentioned it to…taxi drivers, staff at our hotel etc…knew of its existence.