Tales Of The Gurrier

So it comes to this. Make no mistake about the reasons for what happened on Saturday. Do not allow yourselves to be influenced by the political posturing and obfuscation that has arisen and is as inevitable as flies on a corpse. The people responsible for the rioting and destruction were criminals and ‘disaffected’ young teens. For disaffected read poor. What we witnessed was an upsurge of the underclass on Saturday. Those betracksuited young men with downy upper lips and Celtic jerseys that frequent the seedier parts of Dublin and and are cause of the oft repeated phrase anti-social behaviour. Turning over cars and torching them in the centre of the city on a Saturday afternoon strikes me as a tad more than anti-social. Spitting in public is anti social behaviour, graffiti and vandalism are examples of anti social behaviour. Punching pregnant women in the stomach and setting a man on fire with a petrol bomb. That is not anti-social behaviour, that is sociopathic behaviour.

Ladies and gentlemen of Ireland we reap what we sow and have sown ourselves a terrible whirlwind of rage. Young men and women who see themselves excluded totally from a nation grown smug and adept at congratulating itself on its own wealth and prosperity. Young men bereft of the ability to express themselves save through aggression. Whose very language and identity is a web of posture and inchoate rage. Spread a smattering of sloganeering and duplicitous republicanism over that. Add some alcohol, some of the deep and abiding hatred that only a mixture of sport and politics can bring to the table and then one flashpoint, an ill conceived march and a riot was the only outcome.

The dogs on the street knew that there was to be trouble on Saturday. Not just from the sloganeering republicans but from the criminal elements of the city. People knew. People who worked and lived in town knew this was about to happen. Why did the authorities not know? On the approach to town on Saturday morning waves of young men were making their way toward the city centre, it was obvious they had one thing on their mind a little bit of the old ultra-violence. In the words of one protestor in response to the question why are you protesting (read rioting) against the Love Ulster march vox popped, ‘We fought them in 1916 and we won, and we’re going to win today’. Not even the vilest republican lickspittle could come up with a gem like that.

No my friends this is a monstrous fuck sandwich of our own making. Observe the shops that took the brunt of the looting; Footlocker and Shuh purveyors of Dublin’s finest white trainers and tracksuits, uniform of our ‘disaffected youth’. The video footage, eye witness reports and photos all clearly show that larceny and theft were the main targets of the rioters, the cars were set alight after they had been robbed. The people beaten to within an inch of their lives? Apart from Charlie Bird a man who likes the spotlight a little too much to be a reporter were women and in some reports ‘foreign nationals’ (read black or brown skinned people). It is to the those members of society who are least able to defend themselves either physically or from being singled out that the mob will turn. Women, mothers, daughters, sisters, spouses invariably bear the brunt of male violence when it is wrought within the home. Violence born out of an inability to articulate emotional turmoil, an inability to engage with the world at large, a deep seated anger at their place in the world and an unrealistic expectation of that place foisted on us all by our society.

A country that fails to provide its citizens with the ability to express themselves, which fails to identify the members of its society who have not the mental or emotional vocabulary to make their way through life cannot be surprised when under educated, ill informed, under nourished, isolated, paranoid, violent and insular citizens are the result.

People of Dublin the Gurriers are amongst you and we are all to blame for it.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under Bloggery, Dublin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.