'A year has passed since Dublin stared into the abyss - a proud city came perilously close to asphyxiation

It unfolded as a sudden, startling surrender to the dark side, a night when anarchy and depravity, like twin seas rising around a low-lying island, threatened to engulf Dublin and swallow her whole.

A chilling evening when civility was torn apart by seismic waves of nihilism, sinkholes of chaos unzipping the city centre and ingesting entire streets.

Forlorn trams and buses lay scorched and charred by the Liffey walls, Garda vehicles sizzled, a carpet of shattered glass guided looters to a bounty of high street treasures.

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Before a global, stunned TV audience, decency perished. Like a mortally wounded, frightened animal, Dublin lay vulnerable and semi-paralysed, uncertain of her fate. The body heat of the old city ran cold. The beaten streets cowered.

Colin Farrell and his director might have modelled The Penguin’s dystopian Gotham on that night in Dublin, the one where the Visigoths overwhelmed Rome. A perfume of fear was tangible across this ordinarily boisterous metropolis of a thousand watering holes and in excess of a million souls.

An unanticipated blizzard of badness, like a snow shower that somehow sneaked under the Met Office radar, had transformed the weather of daily life.

In Louis MacNeice’s poem “Dublin”, he writes evocatively that “the lights jig in the river/with a concertina movement.”

But on November 23rd, 2023, the winter darkness was illuminated only by a bonfire of flaming vehicles and the savage shine in barbarity’s eye.

A car burns on Parnell Street as members of the Garda Public Order Unit set up cordons on O'Connell Street and Parnell Street during the Dublin Riots on November 23.
(Image: Sam Boal / © RollingNews.ie)

Inexplicably, within hours, the nation’s political, economic and cultural epicentre, Anna Livia’s house, had been ransacked and brought to its knees by a rampaging mob, their destructive dance synchronised by malign social media choreographers.

As midnight loomed, something diabolical haunted the night. The pace and extent of the capitulation screamed organisational dysfunction at the top, with brave, but outnumbered and shamefully ill-equipped gardai impotent to prevent the feral gangs from seizing the keys to the kingdom.

Footage of guards fleeing in desperate acts of self-preservation confirmed that control had been ceded to the frenzied herd. Beneath a pall of acrid smoke, with a helicopter circling above, and the carcasses of double decker buses rotting in the median, O’Connell Steet, the nation’s principal thoroughfare, resembled a beleaguered war zone.

Madness owned the shadows.

Exactly a year has passed since one of the more unconscionable paragraphs in the epic, thousand year-plus story of Ireland’s ancient capital city, an insanity remembered as a stinking scrap of history.

We recall it this morning, from a Leap Year distance of 366 days, as the night the forces of law and order were blindsided, when the uproar that followed an horrendous knife attack near an inner-city school was amplified and turbo-charged by sinister voices.

It arrived like a crude stun-bolt to the city’s skull, instantly disabling the usual ebb and flow, a jolting reminder of how tenuous is the grip of the ordered society we take for granted, how quickly the thin ice sheet of normality can splinter and crack.

Gardai amid the Dublin riots
(Image: Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)

The uncelebrated anniversary catapults the Dublin riots back onto our front pages, news feeds and TV screens. A tumble of thoughts vie for attention. On Wednesday, a rioter who burned out a garda car and attacked a migrant hostel was jailed for six and a half years.

For the huge but silent majority it was an affirmation of values, a re-taking of control.

Declan Donaghey was the first person to be convicted and jailed by the Circuit Court in connection with events of that evening. Some 363 days after Dublin burned.

All across the country, right-thinking citizens welcomed the emphatic verdict, but also wondered: How can it take so long, why are the wheels of justice turning as if vying for a gold medal in the slow bicycle Olympics?

Why are so many perpetrators of disorder still walking the streets?

If the night itself revealed a crisis of authority, one that had many demanding the resignation of Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, the debate moved on to the seemingly funereal pace at which those responsible were/are being held to account.

Comparisons were made with the rapid, sledgehammer counter-thrust by UK authorities to this past summer’s widespread riots, a detonation that followed a mass stabbing in Southport on July 29th in which three children tragically lost their lives.

By mid-August - little over a fortnight after mobs unleashed terror on towns across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - more than 1,000 people had been arrested, 480 charged and 99 sentences had been handed down.

All of this is part of a broader debate, a ticking time bomb that might yet explode as an election issue ahead of polling day on Friday.

Hard and legitimate questions are once again being posed about the efficacy of Ireland’s legal system, about a perceived indifference to the victim’s fate, about the alarming proportion of offences committed by those on bail, and about whether the access to free legal aid is being routinely exploited at the tax payer’s expense.

A number of political parties have addressed the issue in their election manifestoes, proposed changes in the bail laws in particular gaining traction with a public horrified that serial miscreants so often receive what amounts to a green light to reoffend.

Also in the spotlight, is a perceived trend of prioritising the rights of the wrongdoer over the injured party, a fashion which leaves the law-abiding with a bitter taste on the tongue, a sense they - rather than the authors of evil - have most to fear.

Tens of thousands of us who hail from blue collar corners of the city - corporation or council estates - yet who rose on the wave of our parents’ industry, are increasingly fed up with the working class-equals-victim mantra pedalled by political opportunists.

The notion that those from lower income backgrounds are doomed to a life of hopelessness is deeply patronising to those from that demographic who, through education, industry and ambition, have established a societal foothold.

On Wednesday, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, as they frequently do, sent this observer’s blood pressure hurtling into the cardiovascular danger zone.

They responded with predictable alarm to An Garda Siochana’s pragmatic online release of the images of 99 “persons of interest” from the night of the riots and their appeal for public assistance in identifying these individuals to rule in or to rule out of fruther inquiries.

Distilled down to its essence the ICCL response amounted to a scolding of law enforcement, a tut-tutting “how dare they”.

It was tone deaf to the public mood.

The perpetually outraged, as is their wont, reduced those who had suffered that evening to an afterthought.

A year has passed since Dublin stared into the abyss, since the night when rampaging forces of darkness implanted a heavy jackboot on society’s windpipe.

And, for want of the oxygen of decency, a proud but besieged city came perilously close to asphyxiation.

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