For context. Yesterday afternoon a man attacked a group of 5&6 year old children leaving their school. Stabbing 3 of them and a woman, reported to be a creche worker, who tried to stop him. The woman and one little girl were very seriously injured. A passing food delivery driver (who is Brazilian) jumped off his bike and hit the attacker with his motorcycle helmet. Other passersby also intervened and pretty much beat the shit out of the attacker who also had to be hospitalised.

People started to gather and word went out that the attacker is an Algerian immigrant. And this attack was jihadist. This hasn't been officially confirmed or denied. But the protests escalated into a full scale riot. A rumour has also gone around that the little girl didn't survive and it's being kept quiet. I really hope that part is not true. In the last few weeks there have been two very high profile murder convictions of immigrant men. One who murdered a young woman while she was jogging another who very, very viciously murdered two gay men in their homes. There is another trial upcoming of an Afghan man who mutilated and murdered a woman earlier this year.

On top of that we have a housing crisis as we have taken in too many refugees to house. Meaning that accommodation is unavailable for a lot of the current population. Hotels in many areas are full of migrants, which also means that businesses that rely on tourism are making no money. And there have been a lot of reports of increases of rape and sexual assaults in areas where groups of these men are housed.

There has been no civil unrest close to this in Ireland since the civil war 100 years ago. The Gardaí (police) where completely overwhelmed by it. They have no training for events like this. Very little equipment and are a mostly unarmed force. And tbf to them, many were probably shaken following the initial attack too. So they could do nothing other than hang about last night.

I suspect this is likely to be the start of something. Trashing your own city, destroying buses and trams isn't going to achieve anything. But it does show clearly that there is a huge amount of people who feel ignored and there is a lot of stored up anger that could be tapped into if a political movement was to develop out of it.