Hospital staff struggle to save a young man, stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle. In a nearby Garda station, officers bring in suspects from a brutal gang attack. Alcohol is at the heart of another violent, Saturday night in the capital. But who cares?
Accident & Emergency department at the Mater Hospital, Dublin, 4 a.m.
The smell of urine and vomit is so overwhelming that security staff use up an industrial-size can of air freshener every night and still it makes no difference. Hospital porters casually mop up puddles and splatters of blood with slow, easy strokes.
Suddenly, gardaí and ambulancemen burst in the door, soaked in the blood of Raimo, a 26-year-old Latvian legal immigrant whose neck was sliced open by a young Irishman wielding a broken bottle on O'Connell Street. Doctors and nurses scramble to the trauma room. This is where doctors take decisive action, even cracking open chests to manually massage the hearts of stab victims back to life. Now they are battling to keep Raimo from bleeding to death. He has lost so much blood that the tatoo on his chest and shoulders looks like calligraphy on parchment.
Simultaneously - as if the staff hadn't enough to deal with - a drunken man starts attacking anyone in his way. He is lashing out because his father, who has been brought in drunk and unconscious by ambulance, is lying on the floor on a mat. The son doesn't understand that staff have placed his father there for his own safety. The young man is so violent and irrational that two security guards and two hospital porters can't hold him. The nurses call Mountjoy Garda Station, which is close to the hospital entrance. They have to call three times before gardaí arrive. Garda intervention in casualty is routine - gardaí are called 12 times a month on average to the Mater to deal with alcohol-frenzied patients.
This, believe it or not, is a quiet night in A&E at the Mater, where in general 90 per cent of all assault cases, and at night, at least 50 per cent of all cases, are alcohol-related. Human bites, stabbings with broken bottles, attacks with nails protruding from planks of wood, Stanley knives stuck so deep in victims' skulls they have to be removed in theatre under general anaesthetic - the staff at the Mater have seen it all.
All night, from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. without break, people stumble in the door with injuries inflicted through alcohol-related violence. One doctor says in frustration, "Where do they get the money? I couldn't afford to go out and get that drunk." A mild-mannered, middle-aged man with a bleeding face walks in and says quietly, "some young fella didn't like the look of me". He is one of six assault cases being treated by the hospital that night. On a busy night, 20 or more are treated.
People don't realise that many of the alcohol-related cases they see could be Irish Times readers - they're as likely to be from the IFSC as anywhere else, says Dr Eamon Brazil, A&E consultant. Cocaine and other drugs can make behaviour even more erratic and irrational, but alcohol is the main problem.
"There is little embarrassment about ending up drunk and injured in A&E - the attitude is: so what? We are definitely seeing more violence," says Dr Brazil.
A man stumbles in with blood cascading from his nose and a bottle of whiskey in his back pocket. He is too disoriented to follow a doctor's instructions to hold his head back and keeps looking at his legs, shouting, "look at my jeans, look at my jeans". A doctor, deadpan, answers: "look at my floor". The injury isn't as bad as it looks, and when the bleeding has stopped, the man resumes his belligerent behaviour, nagging staff and making vague verbal threats.
Gardaí estimate that "99 per cent" of random violence in Dublin at night is alcohol-related. The word "random" hardly seems appropriate. Most assailants are drunk and most victims are likely to have been drinking too. The vast majority of assaults involve 18- to 25-year-old men beating up other 18- to 25-year-old men.
Women, while forming the minority of assailants, are the most vicious in their attacks, gardaí and A&E staff agree. The current trend is for women to use glass to deliberately disfigure and deform their victim.
"Often, friends have assaulted friends. The victims don't want to report the incidents. They know their assailants and just want to get back on the street as soon as possible to get whoever did it to them," observes one A&E nurse.
That seems to be the story with "Brian", who is lying on a trolley with his head lolling from side to side and his slashed upper lip flapping open.
He can't remember what happened. His tiny, nervous young girlfriend - who has a child - says she and Brian had been drinking at home. When they left the house to walk to the chipper, a gang of youths assaulted Brian with a cement block. Staff want to keep him overnight for observation, but as soon as his lip has been stitched up he discharges himself against advice.
Another victim, "Jimmy", comes in with a bloody face acquired on O'Connell Street and with two aggressive young female companions. When asked what happened to him, Jimmy sneers and the two women shout "F**k off".
Back in the trauma room, a doctor urges Raimo's friend, also Latvian, to keep talking to him. Caked in Raimo's blood, the friend gently holds his hand. Raimo keeps asking, "What about my shift?" Raimo is worried that if he doesn't turn up for work in the morning with a cleaning company, he will lose his job. The friend answers, "Don't worry, I'll do your shift."
A nurse holds the wound to staunch the flow of blood, but lifts the bandage to show me the gash in Raimo's neck, so deep and wide that it's hard to believe it was made by a broken bottle.
Broken glass is the weapon of choice on the streets of Dublin, but human bites come a close second. Bottles can slice like butcher knives, but shards of pint glasses are the worst.
Long and thin, these shards can nearly decapitate in the hands of a drunken monster. Not that knives aren't common. Sometimes victims come in with the knives sticking out of their heads. The weapons have to be removed by a surgeon.
Human bites are among the most distressing cases.
A nurse recalls two nice young men from Co Clare, not drunk, who were visiting Dublin and dancing their hearts out in a club, when inexplicably two guys jumped them and tried to bite off their noses.
The most traumatic aspect for the victims was having to go through tests for HIV and hepatitis, which prolonged the agony of the attacks for months.
Pearse Street Garda Station, Dublin 2 a.m.
THE weeping, mascara-smudged eyes in the Guinness ad on Tara Street bridge seem to be crying for everybody who drank too much and got more than they expected. "Feel" says the ad. Feeling is certainly what the young mother locked in a cell at Pearse Street Garda Station is doing. Her sobs resound from behind the blue cell door. When Sgt Finbar Murphy and I step into the brightly-lit cell, we find her hunched and humiliated in a corner, a picture of remorse. The hard cement floor and walls, covered in pale yellow high-gloss paint, offer no comfort or distraction. She seems genuinely shocked to have been arrested and she's worried for her two-year-old at home.
She looks at us imploringly with her red, swollen eyes, trying to explain how she got herself into this mess. She was all dressed up for a night out in Temple Bar with her boyfriend. They had "only a couple of a drinks" in a pub before trying to gain entry to a club. When the bouncer refused them admission, the woman saw it as a personal rejection. She allegedly hit the bouncer in the face with her mobile phone.
"She's a good woman," says Sgt Murphy as he closes the door on the cell and, alone again, the woman loudly sobs once more. "She won't get in trouble again." She doesn't know it yet, butwithin the hour she will get a "fool's pardon", as Sgt Murphy puts it, a release without charge. Fool's pardons are granted to about half of the people arrested for public order offences on the Temple Bar/Grafton Street beat covered by Pearse Street Station.
When offenders have sobered up, gardaí release them in time for the last bus. More than half those arrested for public disorder offences return to the station next day to apologise. They might have been biting, punching, kicking and screaming while shouting "my father's a TD", but the next day acute embarrassment sets in with the hang-over. "If we had a video camera to record their behaviour and could show it to them the next day, they'd never drink again," says Sgt Murphy.
The cells are like a human zoo. Across the corridor from the young mother, a solicitor is raving behind another blue door. On his arrest, four gardaí could barely hold him. They had his coat pulled down over his handcuffed arms and still he tried to headbutt them. Now, his arrogant face peers at me through the hatch.
With a calm, easy manner, Sgt Murphy opens another hatch. The puffy, morose face of a known trouble-maker appears. He has allegedly assaulted a bus inspector, but says he was only trying to help a sick friend home on the bus. He admits to drinking 10 pints in six hours. At the next hatch, we see the face of a 40-ish woman in an oversized rugby shirt, so drunk she can hardly stand. She doesn't seem to remember the assault for which she was arrested and wants to "go home to Mama". On an average night, gardaí based at Pearse Street station make between 20 and 30 alcohol-related arrests. Last St Patrick's night, they made 38.
The station is like a laboratory for the bizarre effects of drink on the human nervous system. You see all human life on the bank of two dozen CCTV screens. They are linked to a network of cameras that provide coverage of life on the streets. People's faces are so clear that I find myself looking for people I know.
A hen party is plucking its way through Temple Bar, the bride-to-be marked by a silver halo. A stag party lurches in from the other direction, the groom mincing clumsily in full drag. A woman is kissing a man in Meeting House Square - the man barely able to stand but keeping a grip on his beer bottle in one hand. Suddenly, an image on a screen jars with the good-natured mood. A gang of men in their 20s are jostling against the crowd, looking for a fight. They deliberately bump and bait, spoiling for a row. The control centre calls gardaí on the beat to give description and location. We watch as they mix with a milling crowd waiting for taxis outside a club. On the screen, we see two young gardaí running towards the scene as Operation Encounter arrives in an unmarked car to provide back-up. Young gardaí on the beatare being backed up by flying squads of uniformed gardaí in unmarked cars.
But already a man has taken the gang's bait and within a blink of an eye, he is on the ground, having the life kicked out of him. The entire drama, from the moment the gang was spotted, has taken only two minutes and Operation Encounter has responded within 30 seconds of the first blow being struck. It seems quick, but not quick enough when you're watching the eerily silent scene on a video screen. "When you see somebody on the ground being kicked, a minute can seem like hours," says Sgt Murphy. A few minutes later, the perpetrators we saw on camera are being processed in the station. One of the men, a well-dressed professional type, denies all allegations. "We've got it on videotape," Sgt Murphy calmly tells him. "I want a solicitor now and I want all our conversational exchanges in writing," demands the man in a suddenly sober, middle-class voice.
It's then you realise the so-called "random violence" isn't caused solely by some out-of-control, ammoral minority. Many of the alcohol casualties processed in Pearse Street station every night are people of privileged background. They're appalled and offended to be arrested. They don't see anything wrong in what they've done because they can hardly remember it.
• Some names have been changed to protect people's identity
• Series continues tomorrow and Wednesday and is available online at www.ireland.com/focus/streetcrime