(Dublin) The city of Dublin was under heavy police surveillance on Friday evening, with some rare incidents following far-right riots which broke out after a stabbing attack and brought “shame to Ireland”, according to its first minister.
A handful of people were arrested in the city center of the Irish capital early in the evening, noted an AFP journalist, to whom the police indicated that they did not expect “serious incidents”.
“The center of Dublin is open normally” she wanted to reassure on X (ex-Twitter) earlier in the afternoon, with a “reinforced law enforcement plan” and the deployment of two water cannons as a precaution.
For several hours Thursday evening, nearly 500 rioters burned vehicles, looted and vandalized businesses and clashed with police, in a neighborhood in central Dublin where many immigrants live.
This violence broke out after a man armed with a knife attacked several people early in the afternoon near a school in Dublin, leaving four injured, a teacher and three children.
A five-year-old girl was “in critical condition” Friday. The teacher is in “serious condition”, according to the police.
Also injured, the attacker was subdued and arrested on the spot, thanks in particular to the intervention of a Brazilian delivery man and a 17-year-old Frenchman. It would be, according to the daily Irish Timesof a man having been naturalized and living in Ireland for 20 years.
The police blamed this “extraordinary explosion of violence” on the far right, citing rumors spread on social networks about the origins of the attacker, in a context of growing anti- -immigration.
Unpublished scenes
The rioters “claim to defend Irish nationals”, but “they shame Dublin, shame Ireland”, lambasted the Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, adding that the damage caused to public infrastructure would cost “tens of millions of dollars”. ‘euros’.
The Irish police, who spoke of scenes not seen “for decades”, announced that they had arrested 34 people. A curfew was imposed on some of them, according to Irish media.
PHOTO PETER MURPHY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
After initially saying they were “convinced that there was no terrorist link”, the police were more cautious about the motivations of the attacker, aged around fifty.
On Friday evening, Justice Minister Helen McEntee said the officers had “a defined line of inquiry”, without specifying its nature, and that no one else was being sought at this stage.
She also announced that a bill on video surveillance, which should notably allow police officers to use pedestrian cameras, would be subject to accelerated examination.
Given what she called “catastrophic operational failures”, the leader of the main opposition party Sinn Fein, Mary Lou McDonald, on Friday called for the resignation of the Minister of Justice as well as the head of the Irish police , but Helen McEntee refused.
Rumors on the networks
In the hours following the attack on Thursday, several anti-immigration accounts circulated on X the rumor that the attacker was an “illegal immigrant” or an “Algerian national”, with hashtags like #Irelandisfull (“The Ireland is full”) and #IrelandBelongsToTheIrish (“Ireland belongs to the Irish”).
“As soon as news of the attack broke, the far right organized itself” on social networks, and “calls to gather in the city center were launched – notably on Telegram and Twitter – by known figures,” underlined Aoife Gallagher, of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London.
Fueled by a housing crisis, an anti-immigration discourse has developed in recent years in Ireland. In recent months, several demonstrations have taken place against accommodation projects for asylum seekers.
According to official figures, asylum applications have increased more than fivefold in 2022 compared to 2021 in Ireland.
“The majority of Irish people welcome immigrants […] but over the past two or three years, a far-right movement has emerged that uses social media to spread disinformation and fear about them,” Anne Holohan, associate professor at Trinity College Dublin, told AFP.
The anti-racism association INAR castigated “manipulators and opportunists” who “take advantage of this difficult period” to “sow chaos”.