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True, though some of the ones brave enough to set fire to buses might be.
There’s been a lot of tension between Brazilian couriers and Dublin’s feral youth these last few years. A lot of Brazilians work courier and food delivery jobs and a certain section of young Dubliners like stealing their motorbikes. I don’t know the number but a few Brazilians have been severely injured or killed by joyriders and thieves (or in one case by the police trying to stop the thieves).
It is interesting that in a lot of the videos about youths attacking people in gangs etc coming from Dublin in recent years the perpetrators were white, presumably natives (as first-generation white immigrants would mostly be older than 15/16/17 I imagine). Are these the same types that were rioting against the migrants yesterday?
In much of Western Europe the poor white peripheral underclass is somewhat geographically separated from the largely immigrant underclass in the capital (London, Paris and Berlin all have this dynamic to some extent, e.g. working class white English tend to be rare in Inner London). Is this less the case in Ireland?
I’m not a Dublin native but I think it would be very strange if turned out that the rioters weren’t mostly Irish.
There are lots of videos and newspaper articles about the absolutely wild behaviour of Dublin youth over the years, they’re definitely capable of burning down trams and stealing buses (not so different from Belfast youth in that regard though riots are still very rare in Dublin).
Ah, I meant to ask whether those who rioted yesterday were likely youths otherwise involved in organized crime (like that you discuss).
Yes, the same class of youth is given to trangress in both cases.
Amusingly, there actually was quite a bit of looting by Africans of sports goods stores - presumably caught up in the far-right spirit and violently enthused by the prospect of their own deportation.
This all took place extremely close to my flat (I live in a rough but very convenient/central part of Dublin), and I can attest the escalation was : angry protests by a cross-section of Irish working class (mammies with prams, old people, the youth, etc), followed by garda over-reaction, which tipped the crowd into a fury and attracted red-blooded young proletarians mainly interested in trouble. What's underexplored is that the police were on edge because there had just been a potential terrorist attack, and they were greatly concerned by the prospect of additional attacks.
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I would say most of the people involved in the riot were young Irish men, aged from 14-22. Even saying they were "rioting against the migrants" is giving them too much credit: it mostly seemed like opportunistic destruction and looting for destruction and looting's sake.
It's an interesting question. The suburb Blanchardstown is known for its large black migrant population, and there are many suburbs which have largely retained their white native working-class population (Inchicore, Drimnagh, Ballymun, Whitehall). As far as the city core goes, if you knocked on a random low-income apartment I'd say you'd have about even odds of finding a native working-class family or six Brazilian migrants sharing a bedroom. Dublin is radically different from, say, Paris: there's no equivalent of the banlieues in which a large community of second-generation migrants are geographically isolated from the city centre.
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