Rocks, Molotov cocktails and fireworks rained down on Irish riot police earlier this week. Each time a rocket hit, protesters in Coolock, a deprived north Dublin suburb, erupted in cheers.
Over the past three months, protests outside the Crown Paints factory in Coolock, which is being repurposed to house 1,500 asylum seekers, have been largely peaceful. At times, they have swelled to thousands of demonstrators attempting to block work on the abandoned factory. Locals have set up small wooden huts at the entrance to the site, which have been manned 24 hours a day, holding banners reading “Coolock Says No” and “Irish Lives Matter.”
The protest had managed to hold up work until early Monday morning, when builders arrived under police escort. The situation quickly deteriorated, with hundreds of protesters gathering on the site – some hurling abuse at police, setting fire to a JCB excavator and setting fire to a pile of mattresses. Irish riot police in turn marched forward in a phalanx, retaliating and pepper-spraying the crowd. The conflict spilled over to nearby town halls, where skirmishes raged for almost 24 hours, leaving one security guard in hospital, several police cars damaged and 21 people charged so far.
The riot is the latest escalation of political violence in Ireland, with similar scenes in Newtownmountkennedy in April and Dublin last November, focused on the government’s sloppy immigration policies. After years of policies designed to attract more asylum seekers from around the world, earning it the nickname “Treasure Ireland”, the state has recently been overwhelmed by the number of arrivals, stretching its already meagre housing and services even further, particularly in small rural towns and poor urban areas such as Coolock.
Ireland’s Taoiseach, Simon Harris, was quick to express shock at the “sheer brutality” displayed during the riots. But the violence, while never justified, was far from surprising. In 2022, the Irish government received a cabinet memo warning that a large influx of asylum seekers could threaten “social cohesion”, particularly in disadvantaged communities. Little attention was paid to the warning, as ministers accepted 100,000 Ukrainians and tens of thousands of asylum seekers from developing countries. The increase in arrivals has been exponential since then: in June this year, Ireland had more than 10,000 non-Ukrainian asylum applicants, an increase of almost 100 per cent on the same period in 2023 and 350 per cent on 2019.
To house the growing number of new arrivals, the government has rushed to take over hotels, office space and industrial sites, sparking hundreds of peaceful protests across Ireland. Communities have been irritated by the aggressiveness of the policy, with asylum seekers being dropped off across the country, often at night and with little notice to local residents, who had no say in the matter.
To make matters worse, in 2022 the government passed legislation that allows planning laws to be waived when housing migrants. This means that while a couple would have to apply to their local council for planning permission to build a family home in Coolock, the government could convert a factory, licensed for business purposes only, to house thousands of foreigners without council consent.
This is a good deal for landlords, who are paid handsomely from taxpayers’ money (it is now often more lucrative to house migrants than hotel guests in Ireland). It is also good for the government, which has a freer hand to place migrants anywhere in the country, thus fulfilling its much-vaunted “international obligations”. It also deals a blow to Sinn Fein, their main rivals, who tend to enjoy strong support in deprived areas like Coolock and have come in for the most political criticism for the government’s enthusiasm for mass migration.
Local communities, however, are being left to fend for themselves. Residents living near the potential migrant centre in Coolock tell me they have sent hundreds of emails to TDs and government departments objecting to the development, to no avail. Deterred in this way, Coolock residents staged a months-long protest to bend the government’s ear, which was also unsuccessful. So when the police arrived earlier this week, followed by the Irish gendarmerie in Kevlar, frustration was ripe for violence.
Ireland’s police force, An Garda Síochána, endorses the Peel principles of policing by consent. But there is little evidence of this on the ground, as communities are reluctant to accept large numbers of asylum seekers – many of whom appear to be young, male economic migrants – and trust in the police is declining in some deprived areas. The government has identified more than 30 other large buildings for use as asylum accommodation, many of which are likely to require police surveillance. It is likely that some of these, such as in Coolock, will result in violence, further eroding community support for the police, who are generally respected and, unlike in the north, seen as apolitical.
Coolock is one of Ireland’s many deprived neighbourhoods hardest hit by the influx of asylum seekers. The Crown Paints factory employed more than a hundred locals before it closed in 2016 due to cheaper foreign imports. The area is plagued by unemployment and crime, and locals fear having to compete with a thousand more migrants for a hospital appointment or a school place.
But most of all, they worry about what the migrants will do to the fabric of their communities. Similar stories are emerging across Ireland of gangs of young male migrants hanging around parks and shopping streets, drinking and harassing women. Many don’t speak English, so the government has employed interpreters to help them adapt to Irish life.
“We don’t have much, but we have each other,” was a popular refrain in Ireland during hard times. Now the people of Coolock expect to have even less and will have to share what’s left with strangers.