The anti-immigrant movement is getting more disruptive and dangerous, councillors tell Gardaí

The anti-immigrant movement is getting more disruptive and dangerous, councillors told Gardaí at a meeting Monday of the Dublin City Joint Policing Committee. 

“We now have a criminal element embedded in what – some people might say the far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-asylum seeker – the criminal element are embedded, leading, and supporting this now,” said Sinn Féin Councillor Daithí Doolan.

Social Democrats Councillor Tara Deacy, who chairs the committee, said that “Temperatures seem to be heating up by the week.” 

Green Party Councillor Caroline Conroy said, “As this is going on it’s getting nastier and nastier.”

Doolan, the Sinn Féin councillor, asked what the Gardaí’s strategy is to deal with the situation. “Are you being supported at the highest level of the department – are you being supported, resourced, encouraged to deal with these people?”

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has said that Gardaí planned to take a more hands-off approach to policing the far-right – and Justice Minister Helen McEntee, the Fine Gael TD, has backed this approach. Doolan referred to this hands-off approach.

“But the level of violence we have seen over the last 12 months, 18 months is unacceptable,” he said. “We can no longer let this element hold a city the size of Dublin or smaller towns across the state to ransom.”

At the meeting, Garda Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis said there is a strategy. “We have a graduated response,” she said. 

That starts with attending protests and trying to keep them peaceful and minimise the amount of disruption they cause, Willis said. “We have a legal obligation to facilitate peaceful assembly,” she said. 

“I do acknowledge the criminal elements,” Willis said. But “despite what past anyone has, they have an entitlement under the Constitution, under the European Convention on Human Rights, to peaceful assembly”.

The guards try to manage protests with the least disruption to the city possible, “but guided by judgments in the European courts there is a particular level of disruption that we must tolerate”, Willis said.

“Until a criminal offence is committed it’s very difficult for us to do other than to facilitate the protests and prevent disruption to traffic etc,” she said. 

“We try to leave enforcement as a last resort,” she said. “We may not arrest on a night for fear of escalating the situation. These things can turn in seconds from being peaceful to being a riotous situation and we don’t want there to be another riot.” 

But Gardaí have been making arrests, Willis said. “There were 54 arrests made last year in relation to offences committed at protests, and 15 already this year,” she said. 

At the meeting, Willis provided an update on nine arsons in the Gardaí’s Dublin Metropolitan Region, at places “that are deemed to be being prepared for accommodation by international protection”. 

“We have suspects identified in all but three incidents that have happened, and in one case, in the Fitzgibbon Street area, we have an image of a suspect we just haven’t yet identified him,” Willis said.

There have been 10 arrests made in relation to arsons in Dublin, and nine people have been prosecuted and are before the courts, Willis said. “So, really good progress being made in relation to them.”  

“They all seem to be isolated incidents,” she said. “We don’t see a connection between them. They all seem to be localised.”

Doolan was sceptical. “You might claim they are not linked,” he said. “The person who struck the match may not have been the same person, but the political organisations behind it, the people standing literally fanning the flames, are one and the same.” 

“I think it is time to see a strategy to undermine, to ring-fence these people, and to shut them down,” he said. 

Willis said there is an “overall investigation being undertaken by the special detective unit and that is around this far-right sentiment and the whole spreading misinformation online”. 

“That whole information online piece, that’s the bit that is the biggest challenge for us,” she said. 

Deacy, the Social Democrats councillor, said that regardless of how much the Gardaí are actually doing to keep communities safe, “there is a perception of inaction”.

“I get a lot of correspondence from people asking what’s happening,” she said. “People are fearful to leave their homes” when there are these protests in their area.

Conroy, the Green Party councillor, said she is worried about the children that have been getting involved in anti-immigrant protests recently. 

“They think it’s great craic. They’re going up and down with their bikes, they’re cheering, they’re saying awful things about immigrants,” she said.

Is there anything the Gardaí or the council could do to “remind people what else happens when you get arrested … what it may imply for their future careers and all that”? Conroy asked. 

Willis, the Garda assistant commissioner for the Dublin Metropolitan Region, said  “We’re certainly happy to join in the messenging around the consequences for people that do get caught up and get arrested in the course of this kind of activity.”