The worst image from the Dublin violence is not on most of the front pages

Amongst the thousands of videos uploaded on social media yesterday was one which briefly appeared of panic-stricken and distressed people around the primary school in Parnell Square where three children, and a woman who tried to protect them, had been stabbed by a man wielding a knife.

I can’t imagine the terror of that moment: of thinking that your child, who you had left safe and sound into school that morning, could now be lying bleeding on the ground calling out for you.

This has never happened before in Ireland, never. Small children coming out of school into the sunshine have never been subjected to a random, frenzied, knife attacks. Much like the Ashling Murphy murder, it doesn’t feel real: this further slippage into a society which seems less safe by the day.

Yesterday, two women from a nearby créche which provides after school services went to collect children from Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square East. They were to walk with them the few hundred feet between the school and créche in the busy north inner city as they always do. It was just an ordinary day.

As they came out the door, these 5 and 6 year old children, they were suddenly and violently attacked by a man unknown to them, who starting slashing towards their faces, their necks, their little bodies, with a long knife – maybe ten inches long, one witness said.

Three children, two little girls and one little boy, were stabbed. One little girl, aged 5, was badly wounded and remains in a critical condition at Temple Street Children’s Hospital.

One of the women, who desperately threw herself between the attacker and the children, was also stabbed several times. She “defended those children with all her strength” one report said, and she is currently in a serious condition.

If it wasn’t for her heroism, and the incredible bravery of a passing Brazilian delivery worker, followed by the courage of others who stopped and restrained the knifeman, many more might have been injured or killed.

As it was, the medics who rushed from the Rotunda and from ambulances were met with the screams of hysterical, petrified, children who had been stabbed and terrified as no child should ever be.

It is unimaginable, horrifying, sickening. If this is our much-vaunted change, we are better without it.

This morning, the papers were full of angry headlines and vivid, stark, blown-up photos, but their focus had shifted, away from the stabbed children and onto the riots that followed.

As my colleagues, Fatima and Noble will testify, last night Dublin city centre was aflame in appalling, unprecedented scenes. A Luas train was burnt out, as were 3 Dublin Buses. Garda cars and Gardaí were attacked. Shops were looted.

It felt as if a powder keg had been lit, though in truth much of the rioting and looting that followed the stabbings were opportunistic.

The anger now being seen across middle-Ireland at the fear that is being created by these knife attacks was not driving the teenagers smashing windows last night. At the risk of sounding like a bleeding-heart lefty, that is an expression of the disconnect that has been festering amongst disadvantaged young men for a long time.

But the media, like the government and the Oppositon, were eager to change the conversation, and Dublin city centre being set on fire gave them perfect cover to do so. So the usual nonsense about  the ‘far-right’ started immediately, and the front pages are full of those photographs this morning.

But as spectacularly awful and vivid as those pictures are, with flames leaping from the page, that is not the image that I can’t shake all morning.

Instead I’m thinking of the haunting photograph of a pretty little pink schoolbag belonging to one of the little girls, lying on the ground next to paramedics who are working to save a child.

It’s a Skye Paw Patrol schoolbag. As parents of small children will know, Paw Patrol is the business, the delight and distraction of small children with its clever rhymes and songs, and its gorgeous puppies.

One of the puppies is Skye, and her big soft eyes, and floppy ears decorating the front pocket of the little pink schoolbag are a reminder of the innocence and joy of childhood.

That Skye Paw Patrol schoolbag doesn’t belong in a scene with stabbed children and frenzied attackers and paramedics and frantic parents. The incongruity is horrendous. But, in truth, nothing belongs in that scene. It should never have happened.

The media might want to move on to burning cars and condemnations but this is the dreadful scene I keep returning to. Children going to school clutching their Paw Patrol schoolbags in their little hands and ending up knifed on the ground or traumatised for life.

As a friend from the area said to me today, the attack took place in a part of the city which people in authority have long neglected. Those with power and influence never really give much thought to the problems of families in the inner city, unless they want to call them names for having the effrontery to protest peacefully in places like East Wall when migrant centres are dumped on already struggling communities.

You might have noticed that the carefully couched, politically correct language that apply in general debate didn’t apply then. It was perfectly fine to call people ‘knackers’ or ‘scumbags’ when they objected to hundreds of men being brought to live in their areas without consultation.

Its fine to punch down on your own while virtue-signalling about tolerance, when you’re a flag bearer for the new, shiny, progressive Ireland where children are stabbed leaving school.

Yes, the rioting was awful and destructive, and should never have happened. But that’s not the primary story from the past 24 hours. It’s only a week since Ashling Murphy’s heartbroken boyfriend, Ryan Casey, in a powerful appeal as part of his witness statement, said that Ireland no longer felt safe anymore. The media did their best to censor him.

Now a 5-year old girl lies in a critical condition in Temple Street hospital. Our thoughts and prayers are with her. That’s where our attention should be too.