A key distinguishing attribute of the Irish liberal left is that it instinctively identifies with unknown people from other parts of the world above other Irish people. Indeed, even when the unknown do acquire an identity, perhaps after being charged and convicted of a serious offence, the same people will passionately oppose their being deported.
It is a strange phenomenon and has become one of the themes of the Sinn Féin, NGO and far left pile on against communities in Dublin and elsewhere who have been protesting against the wave of migrant accommodation centres being foisted upon them. One of the more amusing parts of Saturday’s protest at the Jury’s Hotel site in Ballsbridge was the brief intervention of a local who shouted at the protestors that Ballsbridge was, like, already fookin’ diverse. His body language and facial expression, however, suggested that his concept of diversity did not extend as far as the north side of the DART line. Well, at least not until it reached Clontarf maybe.
Last night, dozens of people gathered across the Royal Canal from Ashtown train station on foot of a reported attack on a “migrant camp” that is not too far away. I do not need to go back over all the details of that other than to state that whatever happened as reported certainly does not fit Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan’s description of it as a “very, very vicious attack.”
Another report in the Irish Times this morning quotes one of the Ashtown protestors referring to the “vile beating up of homeless migrants.” There is no evidence to date of migrants being beaten up last week in Ashtown, despite all of this being the subject of pretty intensive discussion for the past number of days. So we have the same newspaper that published the story that led to a third-party claiming there had been a vicious attack involving beatings (none of which is verified by the Gardaí) then publishing the claim by the said third party. It is getting pretty Theatre of the Absurd out there now.
Not too long after the Ashtown protest, when most of that crowd had taken the train or bus or driven home, another protest took place less than two miles away as the crow flies, on Cappagh Road in Finglas. The reason for that was local anger and horror at the rape of a local woman early on Friday morning. It was the third successive night that several hundred people, mostly women, had assembled to demand a response from the local Gardaí.
I am not going to discuss any of the circumstances of that as it is the subject of a Garda inquiry, but what is not disputed is that the rape took place. Now, given that one of the organisers of the Ashtown event has put herself forward as a special defender of women, you might have thought that she and the comrades might have felt outrage over the confirmed rape of a young woman from a community the left once regarded itself as having a franchise on. Yet there seemed to be no rally to their proletarian sisters.
Apart from the fact that Finglas is not part of this person’s targeted election area, there must be other reasons why the left chooses not just to ignore what happened to that woman in Finglas, but to reference it as yet another “trope” that is being used by the “Far Right” to justify “very, very vicious” attacks on migrants – including the ones of which the details are as hazy as an early morning along the Tolka river. One of the posters at Ashtown did mention “gender based violence” but they seemed mostly too busy to be bothered with that now.
Also yesterday, a meeting of the Dublin City Joint Policing Committee heard calls directed at Garda Assistant commissioner Angela Willis to consider banning protests within an “exclusion zone” around migrant accommodation centres. Sinn Féin Councillor Doolan referred to the “very, very vicious attack” in that context.
Given that one of Doolan’s local Shinner City Council comrades, Greg Kelly, was happy last year to participate in what was effectively a picket of a Catholic Church in Ballyfermot to “persuade” the priest into flying some LGBT flag, you might imagine that he might take a liberal view on the right to protest.
Indeed, Doolan himself called on people to join the protest, bizarrely partly under the rubric of “anti-racism.” As many pointed out, picketing a Catholic Church was something traditionally associated with Ulster loyalists rather than the former Irish nationalist party.
Assistant Commissioner Willis disappointed Doolan and his Sinn Féin colleagues as well as Labour’s Joe Costello by upholding the right of people to stage peaceful protests. Of course, the far left of Sinn Féin who have risen to prominence in the party since it became a “safe place” for revolutionaries who prefer to watch rather than participate, had no problem supporting what were effectively illegal protests in support of the discredited and corrupt Black Lives Matter movement at the height of the Covid lockdown in 2020. Ironically, and hypocritically of course, at a time when the same party were describing anyone who protested against those restrictions as…. go on guess… FOR ROYSH.
Nor had Coppinger’s party and the communists any problem with all sorts of antics during the water charges campaign, during which a then Minister was effectively held prisoner in her car. Neither do I recall them condemning the violence that followed the shooting dead by Gardaí of a man armed with a knife who had earlier attacked a person working in a shop. A working person like those who used to be the icons of the left before they were displaced by men in fabulous frocks.
Anyone who believes that any of this gang of Shinners and communists, believes in such concepts as free speech and non-violence and tolerance or the truth, really ought to dust off the oul library card.
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