Terry Prone: Angry men were stoked up by social media to wreak havoc in Dublin

“We are not backing down, we are only warming up,” he posted on Twitter (now rebranded as ‘X’). “There will be no backing down until real change is implemented for the safety of our nation. We are not losing any more of our woman [sic] and children to sick and twisted people who should not even be in Ireland in the first place.”

McGregor was just one facet of the social media coverage which accelerated Thursday’s unprecedented chaos. Just one of the angry voices proposing something be done. Something non-specific but probably a shut-down of our welcome for refugees and migrants.

Now, “angry” is an interesting recurring word in all the mayhem. Curious thing. People who’ve never smoked but nonetheless get lung cancer might with justification be very angry at what has happened to them, but they don’t burn buses or attack the forces of the law. The word “anger” is promiscuously misused right now. It wasn’t anger that drove people to Footlocker to steal sneakers. It was criminal opportunism. (Interesting that Footlocker and Arnotts were targets of choice, whereas bookseller Eason didn’t seem quite so attractive.)

The footage coming from multiple mobile phones is fascinating, showing, as it does, the rush to judgment based on misinformation about the alleged attacker, who seems to be an Irish citizen for a long time due to the nationalisation process. 

So the fury about an “unvetted non-national”, which fuelled much of the riot, was unsupported by facts, and online commentary criticising our “immigration system nationalising people capable of such acts” frankly idiotic, given that it seems the individual involved has been here for a long time. Preventing them from becoming an Irish citizen because of an astonishingly exceptional piece of violence in the future is beyond the competence of any immigration system, anywhere. 

Also, as a nation, we have this bias for convicting and punishing people for what they actually do, not for what we imagine they might do in the future. We share this bias with most democratic countries.

But to revert to the use of “anger” to justify this and other outrages: The claim is that the disaffected represented on the streets last Thursday believe they are not listened to. This is to misunderstand politics and the listening process. They are being listened to.

In the year coming up to an election, everybody’s being listened to. But being listened to is not the same as being agreed to. If someone advances suggestions — in the middle of full employment — that foreigners are coming here and taking our jobs, while the suggestion may be courteously listened to, the fact is that they’re not. The twinned suggestion that the newcomers are taking our houses is undercut by the number of them living in tents.

The issue is not that the rioters in some way represent an un-listened-to underclass protecting their nation (insert icon of tricolour) from a wave of threatening immigrants. The issue is the racism that caused the rush to judgment setting this whole disaster off.

The fact that a delivery driver who made the crucial intervention through creative use of his motorcycle helmet is not a citizen will not dissuade the lads who hit the streets on Thursday from their belief that their womenfolk and children must be protected from foreigners by stoving in the window of Footlocker. 

Logic plays no part in this deal. Evidence, ditto. Consequences, another ditto.

The lads — and we’ll come back to their gender in a minute — who went home clutching pre-Christmas self-donated gifts don’t register that Dublin burned on the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian and a rake of other international papers. 

They do not care that this will immediately impact foreign direct investment coming into this country, with consequent reduction in the number of good jobs available here. The consequences of their action are, to them, short term and profoundly satisfactory. 

They profited from the deal in physical goods and psychological reinforcement. Just look at the guy running across the street carrying a box filled with fire and stuffing it into the back seat of a garda car. Look at the satisfaction of him as he bangs the back door of the car closed on the flames. Job done.

Just why Ireland — in a newly-proven commonality with the US — has such a supply of young- to middle-aged men high on unjustified anger and ready to take action on what they perceive to be injustice, is worth examination. It might be suggested that, because of social media, this is the first generation with the capacity to express their anger to the world. Previous generations had no such outlet for their anger, and we know that expressing anger makes the human involved even more angry. Add to that the preference on the part of social media for emotions such as hate, hostility, and contempt, and the links created with other like-minded folk, and you have the making of our perfect storm.

A military history buff of my acquaintance says it’s more than that, pointing out that, in almost every generation, a war comes along and culls precisely the cohort most likely to be among rioters and looters. This is not advanced as promoting war, just as a measurable consequence of international conflict. The Second World War generated Rosie the Riveter, the iconic poster girl representing the women who took over the jobs of their husbands, brothers, and sons in the armaments factories of America. Many of those men died. Many of those who came home wanted nothing to do with violence thereafter. 

They were focussed, instead, on getting an education, courtesy of the GI Bill, they would not otherwise have gained and becoming part of what Tom Brokaw dubbed ‘The Greatest Generation’. In addition, Émile Durkheim, the first great theorist on suicide, observed that suicide decreases during wars.

Absent a war, the risk-taking underclass, lamentably described by Hilary Clinton as “the deplorables” achieve social solidarity, excitement, and personal profit by engaging in the behaviour that handed Dublin a literally Black Friday and the burned-out wreckage of buses and Luas carriages used more by that stratum of capital city dwellers than by any other.

The clear-up was admirably fast and efficient. The temperature dropped, which is useful. Cold weather is a rioter’s enemy. People donated hundreds of thousands of euro to “buy a pint” for the man who intervened to save the little girls. The memory, on the other hand, will stay for a long, long time.