The Irish Daily Mirror, yesterday afternoon, reported on a video that has, allegedly, been widely shared on social media in recent days. It features a man wearing a somewhat crusty looking balaclava, urging others to violence against the Gardai, and named individuals including the leader of Sinn Fein, and the Garda Commissioner:
A masked man has threatened to shoot Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and also threatened the life of Garda Commissioner Drew Harris in a video widely shared on social media and posted in response to violent clashes at a site earmarked for refugees in Dublin this week. pic.twitter.com/4Sg4X4BPie
— Irish Daily Mirror (@IrishMirror) July 17, 2024
Mary Lou McDonald has reported this video to the Gardai, as she should. Multiple media reports indicate that Gardai believe the person behind the balaclava to be a seasoned criminal. The idea of such people as valiant defenders of their communities is, I think, reasonably far-fetched. Threatening somebody’s life is not protest, but thuggery and criminality. It is also notable that the sentiments expressed remain sufficiently unpopular and taboo – even amongst sections of the intended audience – that our hero feels the need to keep his face masked.
I’m choosing to write about the video though because I think it touches on something which is a predictable enough problem for those involved in the protests against immigration centres in Ireland, and a phenomenon which also featured in the Dublin riots of last November: The extent to which frustrated and angry communities attract the proverbial young men who just want to watch the world burn.
A journalist pal noted to me yesterday that one frustrating thing about the events in Coolock from his point of view is the extent to which those involved in the protests have neglected to learn the lessons of movements like Just Stop Oil. In my friend’s view, rather than engaging in combat with the Gardai, the protestors should simply copy wholesale the tactics of Just Stop Oil: Glue themselves to the roads. Launch random traffic blockades. Disrupt sporting and cultural events. Remain resolutely peaceful and non-violent while nevertheless causing as much disruption as possible.
There’s much to be said, I think, for such a strategy for several reasons, not least because it would make the media – which is filled to the brim with hypocrites – condemn tactics which they have openly tolerated for years when perpetrated by those with whom they are ideologically sympatico. The other thing to be said for it is this: One of the “unknown unknowns” about places like Coolock is the number of people who share the frustration of protestors, but who decline to become involved in protests because they are worried about getting involved in clashes. Were I a Coolock resident, for example, this is a disposition that might apply to me, as it would to a couple of others I know.
That said, I’m not sure my friend is entirely right.
It is, in fairness, difficult for protesters to always think strategically or in PR terms, and it is certainly easy for someone to criticise them from the sidelines, especially when, as in both my own case and that of my friend, we are unaffected by the outcome of their protest either way. There is also a difference with Just Stop Oil, in that the environmentalists are fighting for something remote and theoretical – the state of the world in fifty years – where as people in Coolock are faced with something more immediate and, to them, frightening: The immediate and imminent transformation of their communities.
It also seems to me that protesters will be criticised no matter what they do: I’ll hold my hands up here – when the East Wall protests blocked the Port Tunnel in 2023, I was one of those who wrote that such an action was foolish on the grounds that it inconvenienced innocent people and would only undermine public support for the cause of the protesters, which I thought was an important one. It would therefore be somewhat hypocritical of me to go down the road of telling people to block roads today.
These are amongst the reasons why – while I’d certainly condemn the moron in the video above – it’s hard for me to take the side of the state or its agents in the state-funded media against the people of Coolock in this instance.
The Coolock protesters, for example, might point out that they have, in fact, been maintaining a peaceful blockade of the site in question for a number of months, and that the media only became interested in their grievances – to condemn them – when violence broke out on Monday.
Ultimately, the state is, foolishly in my view, turning these protests into a battle of wills over a single question: Who governs Ireland? The bet that the state is making is that the public will ultimately decide that Simon Harris, for all his flaws, is a better answer to that question than our balaclava-wearing friend above. Yet as Niamh pointed out yesterday, the resources of the state to enforce its own answer to that question are limited: 400 gardai might be sufficient to quell unrest in Coolock, but they are insufficient to quell 15 or 20 Coolocks happening at broadly the same time, a point I mention in light of the newly announced plans for 30 large accommodation centres nationwide.
At the same time, protesters do have duties and responsibilities. One of those, frankly, is to police their own ranks. The nature of this emergent conflict between communities and the state is such that it is likely to attract elements like our hard-man friend above, interested in whipping people up to commit violent acts. That all of this is ultimately a consequence of state policy does not absolve individuals of their own duty to keep things within the boundaries of the civilised. Threatening people’s lives is a crime, and it should be prosecuted as a crime. Staying on the right side of the line between steadfast civil disobedience and outright thuggery is a duty that all those who take on the responsibility of leading these protests will have to take on.