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Ireland’s taoiseach has vowed to introduce tougher legislation to crack down on far right groups the authorities blame for inciting hundreds to riot in Dublin after a knife attack.
About 500 people and riot police clashed on Thursday night as attacks and looting spread into shopping streets for hours, with vehicles set ablaze and property damaged. Rumours that the attacker who had stabbed three children in the Irish capital was an immigrant were apparently seized on by far-right groups on social media, authorities said.
Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s taoiseach, described the rioting as “shameful”. “These criminals did not do so because they love Ireland . . . They did so because they were filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos,” he told a news conference on Friday.
Hate crime legislation already before the Dáil parliament will be accelerated and passed within weeks, he added, to “modernise our incitement to hatred legislation for the social media age”.
Those involved “brought shame on Ireland”, Varadkar said, and promised to also toughen legislation to use CCTV footage to apprehend the perpetrators.
Far-right groups have mounted anti-immigrant protests in recent months and a series of serious assaults on foreigners have shocked the country.
Ireland has a long history of emigration but is less accustomed than other European nations to the record number of refugees and economic migrants it has seen this year.
One in five people living in Ireland was born outside the state, according to official data. Ireland received 141,600 immigrants in the year to April 2023, a 16-year high and the second successive 12-month period which topped 100,000 people.
Barry Cannon, a lecturer in sociology at Maynooth University, said extremist groups courted people in neglected and deeply marginalised inner-city communities.
“The far-right is targeting them and has been targeting them for a long time. And a key element of that targeting is whipping up fear around crime,” he said. Such groups were becoming more active ahead of local and European elections next June and a general election due by March 2025, Cannon added.
Helen McEntee, justice minister, said the instigators of Thursday’s riot set out to “wreak havoc and sow division”.
Ironically, an immigrant — a Brazilian Deliveroo rider — intercepted the attacker, hitting him in the head with his bike helmet. “There are protests against immigrants and I am an immigrant and I was there, right there to protect Irish people,” Caio Benicio told broadcaster RTÉ.
Drew Harris, commissioner of Ireland’s An Garda Síochána police force, said violence escalated after protesters tried to breach the cordoned-off crime scene outside a school near Parnell Square close to the centre of Dublin, where the attack happened.
Three children and a care worker who threw herself in front of them to protect them, were injured in the attack with a long knife.
A five-year-old girl, who underwent emergency surgery for chest wounds, remained in critical condition on Friday. The care worker was in serious condition and a police officer was also badly hurt in the riot.
A six-year-old girl also remained in hospital, but a boy aged five was discharged on Thursday night.
The presumed attacker was also injured and taken to hospital. Harris said no one had been arrested for the attack and the motive remained unclear.
But 34 people were arrested following Thursday night’s riot and “many more arrests will follow”, Harris said. Varadkar defended the police and vowed: “We’re going to get them [the rioters].”
The taoiseach, whose Fine Gael party prides itself on being the party of law and order, said that police were “operating on the basis that there could be a recurrence of these events over the course of the weekend or into the future”.
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