Police officers stoned, vehicles burned, stores looted… Dublin descended into chaos this Thursday, November 23 at the end of the day, the scene of violent riots in reaction to an attack that occurred earlier in the afternoon. The head of the police in the Irish capital spoke of events not seen for “decades” and announced several arrests. Update on what we know about the situation in Ireland.
Before the riots, there was a knife attack that occurred around 1:30 p.m. this Thursday, in Parnell Square, in the heart of the capital. A man stabbed a woman and three children near a school. The woman, a teacher aged around 30, and a five-year-old girl were seriously injured, according to police official Drew Harris. A six-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy were also injured. A fifth injured person, a man, is the attacker, according to the police.
It was passers-by who helped control the attacker, according to Irish media. The Journal notably collected the testimony of Caio Benicio, a Brazilian Deliveroo deliveryman who got off his motorcycle and attacked the assailant with his helmet. “He fell to the ground […] and other people arrived,” he says, saying he did not hesitate for a second to intervene. “It was instinctive.”
The suspect is a man in his fifties, according to the police, who did not give further information on his profile. He was arrested and hospitalized after the attack. If the facts “are not yet clear” this Friday morning, the investigators made it clear that they were not looking for “anyone else” and ruled out any terrorist motive, given the first elements of the investigation. This is an “isolated attack for which we must determine the reasons,” insisted Liam Geraghty, head of the local police.
“Rumours” and “insinuations” as to the supposed Algerian origin of the attacker were however spread on social networks following the attack, deplores the police chief, while investigators have nothing detailed profile of the suspect. At the end of the day, hundreds of people took to the streets of Dublin and engaged in violent riots.
“Irish Lives Matter” signs were held up, as well as Irish flags. “Irish people are being attacked by this garbage,” said one rioter, according to an AFP reporter. Vehicles were set on fire, including eleven police cars and a bus, as well as a tram. Stores were looted. Police officers were targeted by projectiles, and one of them was “seriously injured”, lamented the police chief this Friday morning.
It took several hours for the police to restore calm to the streets of the Irish capital. Calm returned at the end of the evening.
A Dublin police official, Drew Harris, attributed the riots to a “faction of crazy hooligans driven by far-right ideology” and urged the population not to give in to misinformation. The Minister of Justice, Helen McEntee, deplored “that a small number are using appalling facts to sow division”, calling for “calm”.
Thirty-four people were arrested after the riots, police said Friday morning, 32 of whom will be tried in immediate appearance in the morning.
The rioters “put Ireland to shame”, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar regretted this Friday. He considered that “these people [who] claim to defend Irish nationals […] endanger [the] most innocent and vulnerable”. He also promised to modify the law “in the coming weeks” to allow the police to better exploit images from surveillance cameras and “modernize” the country’s laws “against incitement to hatred”, “not adapted to the era of social networks.