Where do you start with the story of the forty year old Indian man who was attacked, slashed, and savagely beaten in Tallaght over the weekend?
You start, self-evidently, with an expression of horror and sympathy. Not merely for the fact of the attack on him, but because of the highly distressing nature of it, wherein the apparent motivation was either a sincerely held false belief that he was a threat to children in the area (Gardai have confirmed he was not) or an insincerely held false belief that he must be such a threat because of his background and skin colour. In any case, this man has been the victim of a horrific crime, perpetrated it would appear by Irish attackers.
And then there are the alleged perpetrators: According to witnesses, the victim was attacked by a large gang of teenage males. He is not the first person in Dublin to have been the victim of that kind of attack, and he will not be the last.
Or you could talk about the online reaction: How videos of this man were circulated online by internet vigilantes, including allegations of the most defamatory nature. Those who shared and retweeted those videos, and who made those false accusations, should really be talking to their solicitors about the legal exposure they have accrued to themselves by falsely labeling the victim with one of the worst accusations that can be made against an adult male, or indeed any person.
And then you have to talk about the root cause of all this.
I have written before on these pages that there is little point in people like me condemning acts of vigilante thuggery like this – condemn it though I do – since those who are out of their minds on thuggery like this will not listen.
Nor is it in any way an attempt to justify what happened to note that the root cause of incidents like this – insofar as migrant men are being disproportionately targeted – is Government policy.
Let’s speak some plain, observable, facts.
First, these incidents disproportionately take place in poorer and more deprived areas, where people with a strong and often militant sense of local community have felt threatened in recent years by the pace of immigration and the number of foreign men who have been moved into their communities, either through IPAS centres or through the phenomenon of migrants gravitating towards areas where accommodation is cheaper.
Second, vigilantism arises only when local communities lose trust in the authorities of the state to conduct policing on their behalf. This is an observed international phenomenon, and we have seen it on this island before with paramilitary groups and others involved in vigilante justice against those alleged (falsely or otherwise) to be involved in the drug trade in their area.
Third, vigilantism is a deep symptom of distrust not only in the police force, but in the political class.
Fourth, people in these communities really resent migrant crime. They resent it more than they resent crimes committed by “natives”, because there is not much that can be done about the natives. But importing people who commit crimes from overseas feels like a direct attack on those communities to the people who live in them. This poor man, attacked savagely having done nothing wrong, is a victim of anti-migrant sentiment that is being fueled and supercharged by genuine incidents of migrant-committed crime that – even though it is played down in the national media – gets noticed by people in the communities affected by it. Rumours spread. Prejudice is fueled. Newcomers are treated with suspicion at best and hostility at worst.
Some of my colleagues in the media seem to think their job is to stop such sentiments spreading by playing down genuine incidents involving migrants when they occur. What they are doing in the process is supercharging distrust in their own authority and trustworthiness.
Fifth, the response of all reasonable and respectable and wanting-to-keep-their-jobs-by-saying-the-right-thing middle class people to this incident will be to blame the “far right” and “far right rhetoric” for this incident. Those people are not without a point, as a deranged anti-foreigner and pro-violence cache of extremists does indeed exist in Ireland.
However, that cache of extremists did not exist, or at least did not exist on anything like the present scale, five or ten years ago. The broader point here is that they have been super-charged by Government policy which validates – in the eyes of some working class young people – everything they say.
Sixth, and in summary, crimes like this happen much less frequently in societies where trust in the immigration system is high. They will happen much more frequently while trust in the immigration system is as low as it presently is.
By and large, the happiest communities and the most peaceful ones tend to be relatively homogenous. I do not mean that in a racial sense, but in the sense of their broad composition. My own rural community consists of families who have been here for a long time, who mostly own their own homes, and who know each other. It does not consist of houses in which an unknown number of immigrant men are sharing the same house in a corner of the estate, with few of their neighbours knowing who they are, or where they came from, or how many of them are sharing the same bedroom.
When communities are thrown into that kind of turmoil: Constant newcomers and low trust as to who those people are, suspicions and tensions will rise. This is not political science, it is obvious and common sense to most people in Ireland.
The man who was viciously attacked at the weekend is not to blame for his own assault. Those who assaulted him should – and I hope will be – prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the environment in which something like this can happen is a result of the political and social conditions created in the country. It is the result of working class communities being turned into low-trust communities.
And the blame for that environment lies with the politicians. The same politicians who will, I expect, spend much of the next week blaming everyone other than themselves for it.