Dublin riots: Irish media more upset by "far-right" than it is over the stabbing of children

it's been a terrible week in Dublin with the shocking stabbing of three children and a school care assistant outside a primary school followed by rioting and violence across the city 34 arrests were made several guard officers were injured in the riot and uh the commissioner Drew Harris said and this is a quote people have been radicalized through social media and the internet so was that the cause of the violence and did the reporting of the incident worsen the situation so here to discuss this I'm joined by journalist and broadcaster Ella ween thank you for coming Ella so firstly I suppose we should address why this has happened what are the origins what are the tensions here well the idea that it's simply an organized far right Outburst um is a total misunderstanding of the complexity of what's been going on yeah anyone who looks at what these uh people did in that evening looting Foot Locker setting things on fire as crester said at the beginning of the show you know a lot of it is just uh idiot Behavior that's opportunism yeah it's the kind of thing you know the kind of thing that happened in the London rights um in you know a few years back here where you know people take an opportunity and they do stupid things and there's not necessarily anything too uh dramatically political about that but but there is something that happened and and there's a kind of a melt a boiling sort of Po thing going on here which is that the way in which the incident was reported um of the two little girls being stabbed and the care worker and the whole thing that happened um the Irish M Irish Times leapt on the opportunity to say this was somebody who was a naturalized citizen he's been here for 20 years you know there was almost you could almost feel the sort of tension in the Irish media Elite saying don't go there on the Immigrant question don't go there even though Dublin is a small town even it's C City and uh word had spread that what this person looked like and so they're they quite quickly became this sort of tension of they're not telling us the truth they're not they are they're they're lying you know they're going to spin this a certain way um and I think that has been a large part of what fed into the Outburst of anger there's also the case that you know Dublin uh has had a lot of problems well the whole of Ireland has but in particular duin with housing um and you know as whether you want to call them the Left Behind sort working class whatever is there's a you know section of people still living in Dublin and on the outskirts who are extremely destitute extremely poor and extremely ticked off with the sort of Dublin foret um pretending like nothing is nothing is wrong There's real tensions um in that City and that has also fed into it sort of spilling out so it's a complicated thing to try and assess and the and for me anyway I think it's telling that the Irish media has um got more head up about a it's imagination of a farri attack yes than it has the stabbing of two children well there's two things is I mean firstly going on a riot and setting things on fire that's not a sensible response to anything and that should be said um but also if the media and the police are going to be smearing the entire group of people as far right won't that heighten resentment yeah it will and I mean Brendon O'Neil wrote for spiked um a few days ago talking about the fact that these people were called lunatics you know so which is you know it might have been just a throwaway word by the guardi but I don't think it was it was a kind of you know these you have to be sort of mentally ill to not go along with the official line yes of and it has been nauseating actually listening to um in particular British uh media coverage of what I you know getting all these people from disinformation units in Ireland academics or alah Vadar also sort of defining this as sort of a saying it's us and them in fact actually F wrote an article over the weekend saying Irish commentator saying there's the US who are we love immigrants there's no problem We're a nation of immigrant lovers and and don't just don't talk about it and then there's them these awful OES who hate immigrants and again I mean you wish that they'd get outside of the um the little area in Dublin and know that actually there are some tensions in relation to immigration I know they're not not everybody's not far right but there have there have been incidents in Ireland in which the discussion about immigration has been much like it has here just totally clamped down on there seems to be a mirroring here I mean there's a lot this idea of an elite political class who are completely out of touch with what's actually going on and they're just projecting this idea of how they would like things to be yeah well to take a very small example um you know that in a town where my parents live um called Bonas there was a you know a Sports Hall that was meant to be being built planning permission takes a million years in Ireland it was a big rigal and you know for a small community it was going to be a great resource and um you know after the war was in Ukraine happened almost overnight it was turned over to housing for Ukrainian refugees now you can have an argument about whether or not you provide housing for Ukrainian refugees and I'm sure lots of people would you know particularly in Ireland they well they were quite liberal about that yeah but you don't just get to undemocratically and unfairly snatch a resource from a community that had you know was invested in it and that kind of thing keeps happening yes and it causes tensions in people who are not anti-immigrant not they're not sort of what the Irish media paint them as sort of foaming at the out far types they are people who want to have some kind of sense of fairness and a nuanced discussion about immigration the problem is the more that this gets pushed underground the nastier it will get and there is a problem with anti-immigrant sentiment in certain parts of Ireland and there are far-right people who would take an opportunity and I think that those of us who are on the left or you know liberal on immigration need to take this very seriously and not let the sort of Dublin for set set the agenda on discussions about immigration I mean one of the things that's really worrying is that this has pretty much given the Irish political Elite the green light for an incredible Bill around hate speech which is one of the I mean really it's one of the worst well we've covered it quite a lot on this show because they they are really pushing this through and it does seem incredibly Draconian I I'd say it's probably worse than Scotland's hat speech Bill and it will be weaponized I mean haven't the didn't the Irish government even say that they couldn't really Define hatred no yeah they they defined it in circular terms hatred is hatred hatred is anything that inspires hatred that's that great I'm glad that's on the statute books nice and clear in a very kind of Irish way as well the way in which they've discussed the bill is by saying they have a alignment where they say you can be offensive which is which is you know Irish people have to talk double speak which is you can't be offensive because the next line says but anything that could possibly incite hate inight hate not inight violence inight action inight you know but inight hate this nebulous term yes will be outl Lord so you absolutely can't be offensive because most people don't like feel hatred towards things that are offensive so you end up in just this horrendous sort of Quasi intellectual soup of words that actually really means that the there is going to be no free speech in Ireland political or otherwise and the thing that you just get so depressed about is that this won't Happ the outcome of a lovely country which is sort of tensionless and everybody gets along it will do the exact opposite well I mean that's I mean you've spoken many times about censorship and the history of censorship and we know that if you do this if you're trying and clamp down on people's right to free speech bad ideas do not disappear no they just well no they don't disappear but also they you lose people who have a sense of principle on an issue which is that you you know if you are take the issue of immigration if you are liberal about it and you think that you want to have a sort of nuance disc about it and you have a load of people who might disagree with you but who are saying we are just not allowed to talk about this we keep getting called racist we keep getting called all the Nuance gets lost and you end up it ends up with an us and them mentality um which the Fon ools of this world are very comfortable with because they like to look down their nose at people but the rest of you know normal citizens who can see that having a concern about immigration does not make you a sort of Tommy robon type yes um I think they just lose all hope of any kind of nuanced outcome for the discussion but is it hardly that the commentar and the type of commentators that you're describing there they feel very comfortable with this because they know that their opinions their their set of values are currently on the same side as the Irish government and as what's considered the right opinions to have the Overton window I suppose whereas you know how how can they not be sure that this is laying a precedent for censorship of their own opinions later later down the line well they're just I mean it's all tied up in a very NE neat bow and Island I mean if you take a different issue um discussion about uh ideology and transes with the teacher Enoch Burke I think his name was who was eventually ended up in jail for um a long Saga of refusing to use different pronouns for a child in a school that he taught religious school that he taught um and uh the you know there was such a clamp down of the way in which it was discussed in an RTE um in Ireland so much so that a one radio show that were kind of had a really nuanced open discussion about this was immediately petitioned and supported politicians support the petition to be taken off air so there just is such an maybe it's to do with the um maybe it's to do with the fact that the kind of history of isand and the way in which sort of social social tensions work there that there a completely new sort of religious oppression which you've written about the new Puritans uh Ireland is such a great example of that of sort of Don't Rock the Boat mentality a kind of keep your mouth shut mentality within the political Elite has just allowed a really repressive uh cultural attitude to kind of prevail and but the important thing to know that is that normal people aren't going along with it and there's a lot of bubbling tension and it could go one of two ways it could go in a kind of pro you hope and I think we should push for it to go in a sort of pro- free speech um Pro Freedom Pro democracy open debate way but if there's too much clamped down then it could go to quite dark territory Ella wean thank you very much for joining me

Channel: GBNews

Views: 225,001

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Id: ZAS5jBgImg0

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023