Who were the instigators of last weekend's riots in Dublin - republican activists, so-called 'skangers', or football hooligans, asks Paul Cullen
It was a very Irish riot. No one killed, thankfully. No one seriously injured. Shoppers ambling peacefully down Grafton Street while a mob rampages up Nassau Street. Missiles thoughtfully left out for the rioters on a building site on O'Connell Street. More cleaning staff to sweep up after the trouble than riot police to prevent it happening.
The Garda's only helicopter developing a technical fault just when it was needed.
A week on, our anger exhausted on diatribes against scumbags and skangers, what have we learned? Why did the riot happen and who was involved? The television footage and still photographs may have struck us all with awe, but how bad in reality were the disturbances?
The raw figures tell a more modest story than that recounted on airwaves throughout the week. There were 42 arrests. Some 14 people were injured. Two petrol bombs were thrown and four cars, two mopeds and two bicycles were burned, according to the Garda Commissioner's briefing released during the week. Twelve sets of shop windows were smashed and two wheelie bins were emptied.
Hardly Beirut in the bad times, then. Not even Belfast, where petrol bombs come by the crate when trouble is brewing, or the suburbs of Paris. And hardly unique either - last Saturday alone, the international media reported street disturbances in Portadown, the Basque Country, Uganda, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Iran and South Korea. In Nigeria, rioting over the previous week had left 157 people dead.
Granted, most of these countries are not the normal yardsticks we use for comparisons. Yet, even at home, we seem to have a short memory when it comes to such disturbances.
Last year, more than 700 people were arrested on public order offences on St Patrick's Day. The national holiday has seen repeated flare-ups of street violence over the years, many of them drink-related, including a mini-riot some years back. Just two years ago, there was major rioting in Finglas over a number of nights around Hallowe'en after gardaí blocked off one of the access roads to a traveller encampment.
The H-Block riots of 1981 stand out in many people's minds, but what they forget is that these were not confined to the main protest outside the British embassy. Throughout the city, mini-riots broke out as opportunistic elements took advantage of the lack of Garda presence there. .
Dublin has a long history of social disorder, according to Tommy Graham, editor of History Ireland. "Throughout the 18th century, for example, there were repeated outbreaks of violence, much of it sectarian, involving gangs of youths and students from Trinity."
A week on from the most recent riots, we're still looking for answers. How come Dublin's main thoroughfare was taken over by rioters for more than three hours? Who was involved? What was it all about? Much of the post-riot analysis this week has sought, understandably enough, to find a culprit. Looking for a single cause, however, or even a single group to blame may be mistaken.
At first, the spotlight fell on republicans, both mainstream and dissident. The national question remains the greatest potential touchstone for violence in our society and once again it was the catalyst for trouble last Saturday.
In the end, just 350 supporters of Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (Fair) assembled in Parnell Square shortly after noon, but some republican sympathisers had come prepared to create trouble whatever the numbers.
However, the evidence suggests that organised republican groups had limited involvement in what unfolded and even less influence. Sinn Féin told its members to stay away and threatened them with sanctions if they didn't. Informed observers say this edict was followed and few republicans travelled down from the North.
The 32-County Sovereignty Movement called off its planned protest, and while Republican Sinn Féin did organise a counter-demonstration, its numbers were small. Gardaí say 50 RSF members gathered at Parnell Square, near the Fair march, and 16 of these went off to Talbot Street for a wreath-laying ceremony at the memorial to the victims of the Dublin/Monaghan bombings.
SINCE THE 2003 May Day riots, gardaí have kept close watch on anarchist groups in the capital. Yet there was no evidence here either that protests were planned. Left-wing and republican groups generally saw the Fair march as a provocation they would be foolish to respond to.
But, as one contributor to the indymedia.ie website has suggested this week in a lengthy analysis, "Our mistake was to assume that political protests need to be organised by somebody. In general this is true and I don't know of any other event that has taken place in Dublin in the last 20 years which happened without being organised or planned by some organisation or other. The riots of central Dublin were an exception to this rule; no organisation planned them and almost nobody saw them coming."
Least of all the gardaí. Suddenly, the small knot of RSF protesters were joined by 300-400 youths who poured out of local public houses. These, along with opportunistic types who joined in later, were the key element responsible for turning a few scuffles into a fully fledged riot.
Ironically, it didn't help that most of the RSF group then left the scene, leaving the protest leaderless.
"It seems RSF couldn't control the crowd, then went off leaving behind a disparate group of youngsters," says Dominic Bryan, directors of Queen's University's Institute of Irish Studies, which has studied riots in Northern Ireland and sent monitors to observe Saturday's protest.
"There was no control mechanism when the violence started. It wasn't just the police who were badly organised, the march organisers were too."
Clearly, there was some advance planning. Chain text messages had been sent out to rally a crowd with the promise of trouble. The mob fired golf balls and billiard balls at the gardaí and two petrol bombs had been prepared. Whoever put a brick through the windows of the Progressive Democrats' office had to have known where to find it.
However, most of the missiles thrown as the trouble developed came from the stacks of building materials conveniently stored on the street for the renovation of Upper O'Connell Street.
"It's very difficult to control a riot," says Bryan. "Crowds are diverse things; once a flashpoint happens, as it did last week, different interests get involved."
VIRTUALLY ALL THE rioters were young males, many sporting the uniform of tracksuit or hoodie. Football colours, principally those of Celtic, were prominent, leading many observers to tie the rioting into the phenomenon of football hooliganism generally.
Others, including indymedia.ie's contributor, ascribed the violence to an expression of self-destructive rage by the young urban poor: "The people who took part in the rioting were largely drawn from the urban poor, mostly disenfranchised young men from impoverished estates around Dublin, people who normally have no political voice whatsoever, people who rarely vote, who are disorganised, who live in communities that have been ravaged by poverty and drug and alcohol abuse, people who many of those who live lives of privilege and relative comfort write off as 'scumbags' or who Marxists describe as 'lumpen'." Because these people had nothing to lose, according to this view, they reacted in an entirely different, less rational and more violent way from the usual political protester.
Now this might seem to confer a cloak of justification on mere thuggery, but it does help to explain what happened. Rioting can be empowering for young males with not much else going on in their lives. In Belfast, for example, Bryan has studied the phenomenon of "riot as play", involving young people who throw missiles at the police largely for entertainment.
Whether the rioters have been left behind by the Celtic Tiger or havechosen to be left behind is an argument for another day. There were plenty of picture phones and expensive clothing on show on Saturday to give the lie to claims that the rioters were poverty-stricken. The addresses of those charged, too, revealed a spread of backgrounds that resists simple categorisation.
What is evident is the alienation of a specific sector of youth from the rest of society. Lack of education, drugs, male violence, the growth of gangs, a lack of role models and the influence of television may all be factors but one thing is clear - calling people skangers won't make them go away.