In the aftermath of a violent attack in the city, Algerian Dubliners worry about a cloud of stigma

Mohand Ouaman Ait Ouyakoub emerges from the side door to a homeless charity on Pearse Street.

It’s a drizzly evening on Sunday.

Ait Ouyakoub is tall and skinny with glasses. He’s wearing a green cap and a yellow safety vest that says STAFF in the back and No Bucks Homeless Café at the front.

That’s the café that the charity runs.

In a few hours, Ait Ouyakoub’s shift at a homeless hostel in the city centre starts. But he volunteers on Pearse Street any chance he gets, he said.

Inside, club music blasts in the air. The room is filled with smiling staff and homeless people waiting for hot food.

Ait Ouyakoub and his colleague Saleh El Hage stride through a cloud of steam floating out of the kitchen down a flight of stairs.

They glide past a hall stuffed with donated winter clothes into a tiny office.

El Hage has been a volunteer here for 13 years, he said.

He’s been trying to help Ait Ouyakoub navigate life in a new country since they met here, often acting as his interpreter. El Hage is Brazilian, but his dad is Lebanese. That’s why he speaks good Arabic, he said.

Ait Ouyakoub moved here from Algeria a little over a year ago.

Just three months after the move, he got beat up hanging out in a park.

A group of young people asked where he was from. “I said I’m Algerian,” he said through El Hage.

Then they threw a can of coke at him, he says, then a can of beer. Soon, he was in the hospital with a broken rib. El Hage rushed to his side. “I said the doctor says you need surgery.”

His ribs still ache a little when it gets colder, he said.

Several months later, a violent attack on kids outside a primary school on Parnell Square, reportedly carried out by a man born in Algeria, has been used to stoke riots and anti-immigrant protests in the city.

Extremists on Telegram channels called on followers to take to the streets and kill immigrants in response to the attack. The city was ablaze.

Shane O’Curry, director of the anti-racism alliance Irish Network Against Racism (INAR), says Algerian migrants now have to live with the stigma. “It’s going to shape their existence in Ireland.”

Ait Ouyakoub said he worries in particular about steeper discrimination when going for jobs, although that won’t stop him from trying. “I’ll go normally and make an application, like anyone else,” he said, through El Hage.

Debunked association

On Friday night, the Facebook page of the Algerian Association of Ireland posted a notice from the Algerian embassy in Dublin about the recent riots.

“The embassy is urging everyone to reduce their travels to the city centre and stay away from any gatherings,” it says in Arabic.

Days after the riot, extremist groups kept searching out instances of crime that involved Algerian migrants and shared them with racist commentary.

At one point, an account with more than 29,000 followers that lists its location as “occupied Ireland” and shares anti-immigrant material posted an article like that from 2001 on X with the hashtag IrelandIsFull. It went viral.

Karolin Schwarz, who researches disinformation and right-wing extremism online, said that in Germany, where she lives, promoting baseless links between ethnicity and knife crime went so far that those pushing it coined a new term: “knife migration”.

“Claiming that knife attacks were only carried out by people of non-German descent,” said Schwarz. That’s not true, she says.

Both older and newer research in Australia and the United States – which have seen similar political rhetoric around immigration and crime – have ruled out an association between immigration or ethnicity and crime.

A study by researchers at four universities in the United States published in 2017 looked at the relationship between immigration and crime rates for 200 urban areas over four decades. The study found that for property crime, immigration had a negative effect. For violent crime, it had no effect on assaults and a negative impact on robbery and murder.

“This is strong and stable evidence that, at the macro-level, immigration does not cause crime to increase in U.S. metropolitan areas, and may even help reduce it,” it says.

In Ireland, crime statistics are often sparse and messy.

Cian Ó Concubhair, assistant professor in criminal justice at Maynooth University, says they’re also unreliable.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has been critical of Garda crime stats for years, he says. “They have just given their stamp of approval this year now.”

But even beyond that, police-recorded crime stats are generally unreliable, he says. Reasons include police corruption, and victims opting not to report, he said.

Victim surveys are one way to capture all that, he said. But “we don’t do a consistent victim survey in Ireland.”

He says the CSO should do it every two years. But existing victim surveys show that crime rates have been on a downward slope, he says.

“Crime rates have been going down since the 1990s in most parts of the developed world,” Ó Concubhair says.

In August, a spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said it had not recorded any significant increase in crime or public order issues directly caused by asylum-seekers in any area.

Reports of hate crimes and non-criminal hate incidents to the Gardaí grew by 29 percent in 2022,, according to its official figures.

The weight of shame

On Monday evening, Mohamed Tienti and his colleague slid out of Donnybrook Fair on Morehampton Road, where they were assembling Christmas hampers.

They joke about who looks more Algerian. His colleague is Irish, but his dad was born in Algeria.

“You look more Algerian than me,” said Tienti, chuckling. His colleague nodded and laughed. They said goodbye, bumping fists.

Strolling back to the city, Tienti said he can get away with telling people he’s French, and being Algerian, he speaks fluent French.

When a woman walked past with two dogs and flung him an angry glance as he tried to pet them, Tienti said he wondered if she thought he was Algerian.

Later, pacing on the boardwalk along the quays, he said he’d probably tell people he’s a French Jew, pulling up the collar of his jacket.

Moments later, as he sat down outside a Caffè Nero in the Docklands and lit a cigarette, he said he wasn’t joking. If someone unfriendly asked him where he’s from, he’d hide the truth. “From now on,” he said.

Or maybe he can say he’s from planet Earth.

That’s what he said to anti-immigrant activist Philip Dwyer last November when Dwyer hassled him outside the old ESB office block in East Wall, asking where he was from, among other things, and filming the response.

“Like what I said to Philip Dwyer, yeah,” he says, chuckling.

On Thursday night, when Tienti heard the attacker was Algerian, he was so pissed off he wanted to beat him up, he says. All his Algerian friends felt the same, he said.

“They were saying this person got us in trouble, and everyone’s gonna start say shit on us, and everyone is gonna start rejecting us,” said Tienti.

He’s mad that the guy targeted innocent kids, too. “They were just going out of school.”

The morning after the attack, he says he felt ashamed showing his face at Donnybrook Fair.

He’d thought about going on a fiery rant about how the crime had nothing to do with being born in Algeria if they asked, he says. But his colleagues just asked if he was okay. “I was comforted by that,” said Tienti.

People are shaped by their experiences and influenced by circumstances, he says.

“There’s always someone who’s gonna kill someone, but we should think what circumstances pushed them to end up like this,” said Tienti.

There are Irish people who’ve killed people, he says, but that’s not because they were born here.

Ait Ouyakoub, the Algerian homelessness worker, said when he heard about the attacker, his first thought was that he probably had mental-health issues. He could’ve been from anywhere, he says.

“It’s terrible what happened. He doesn’t represent us,” he said in Arabic.

O’Curry, the director of INAR, says Algerian immigrants might face deeper discrimination now. “In accessing housing, employment, equal pay, education, etcetera etcetera,” he said.

The stigma could affect migrants from North Africa and the Middle East in general, too, he said.

Under pressure

Ait Ouyakoub says when people he deals with at work have an attitude towards him because of where he’s from, they often change their minds when they get to know him.

“Few minutes, you see the two guys sit at a table with coffee, like friends now,” he said in English, smiling.

But he does feel pressured to prove himself, he said.

Immigrants have to be of “good character” to get citizenship and have talked about the toll of labouring for perfection to meet the legally ambiguous condition in the past.

In 2018, Irfan Talla, a Kosovan immigrant who’d moved here at 14, had his citizenship application turned down because the Minister for Justice decided he didn’t have good character as he was done for speeding and driving without insurance in 2011.

Talla said he had made a genuine mistake about insurance. He was insured on one of his brother’s cars but had taken a different one of his brother’s cars on the day, not realising he wasn’t covered on that one, says a Court of Appeal judgment about the case.

The judge overturned the refusal, disagreeing with the Minister for Justice that the old traffic offences meant that Talla didn’t have good character.

O’Curry, the director of INAR, says migrants are expected to go beyond what’s accepted as reasonable behaviour for Irish citizens. “The expectation for people from minoritised backgrounds is to be model citizens, even under circumstances of extreme pressure,” he says.

When someone unravels, sometimes in response to racism or humiliation, he said, they get demonised. That comes through in the reports they get through INAR’s hate crime and racism reporting platform iReport, he said.

Tienti, the Algerian man working at Donnybrook Fair, says that when the government left lots of asylum seekers to live in a big conference hall in Citywest transit hub, fights broke out often as they tried to navigate a crammed communal life with no privacy.

“What are you expecting? People are going to fight for food, for water, for using the bathrooms,” said Tienti.

Harmful stereotypes that link ethnicities, nationalities or immigration statuses to crime can ramp up existing pressures on immigrants to be perfect, said O’Curry. It can worsen mental-health problems, he said.

Misguided and inaccurate public associations between ethnicity and crime can be harmful, says a guide for reporting on crime from the Australian non-profit Police Accountability Project.

“Leading directly to increasing forms of discrimination, including employment discrimination, racial profiling, hate-motivated violence and has well-established psychological harms and social exclusion,” it says.

Schwarz, the disinformation expert in Germany, says there was a big debate in her country about the relevance of people’s places of birth when reporting on crime a few years back.

The German Press Codex, she said, says reporters shouldn’t draw attention to the nationality or religion of perpetrators unless they were directly relevant to the crimes.

“As a rule, membership of a minority group shall not be mentioned unless it is in the legitimate interest of the general public,” says the German press code.

It must be borne in mind, it says, that these references can stoke prejudice against minoritised people.

Far-right actors online campaigned against it, said Schwarz, and several outlets began drifting away from the principle and brought up criminals’ nationalities more often, especially if they didn’t have German citizenship.

That emboldened extremists to go further, demanding names of aggressors if they were described as German. “To claim that they would not be ‘really’ German if they didn’t have a first name that didn’t sound German enough,” she says.

Failure to protect

O’Curry, the director of INAR, says what led to the events on Thursday stems from a longer-term failure to take growing anti-immigrant sentiment seriously and hammer out a plan to combat it.

“It behoves the state to demonstrate to minorities that it’s going to protect them,” he said.

On Friday, Dublin City Council posted a statement about the turmoil in the city the night before, with an extended quote from the chief executive Richard Shakespeare.

It condemns the violent attack on kids and gives updates on the council’s efforts to clean up the city and restore order.

It doesn’t mention or condemn the anti-immigrant origins of the chaos that followed the stabbings, though.

A spokesperson for the council has not yet responded to queries sent on Saturday asking why not.

Deborah Byrne, Labour councillor for the north inner-city, said she was disappointed.

Obviously, not everyone vandalising the city was racist, she said, but ignoring the racist roots of the riot doesn’t show a shift in attitude.

“I think we are in denial if we don’t address those,” said Byrne by phone on Saturday.

Neither the government nor the council have an active integration strategy at the moment.

The government is running a public consultation for a new national strategy at the moment. It closes on 30 November.

Byrne said the council should’ve offered reassurance and support to immigrants in its statement, especially to Algerian Dubliners, she said.

On Sunday night, Byrne, alongside six other councillors, sent an email to the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare.

It invites him to lend his voice to a joint statement that strongly condemns racism and commits to making the city more welcoming.

“We would further suggest that the Lord Mayor meet with leaders from Algerians in Ireland and other affected communities to reiterate that they are welcome in Dublin,” it says.

The council’s senior executive officer wrote back on Tuesday to say Shakespeare had discussed the email with his senior management team.

He’s going to list the issues as an agenda item for a group leaders meeting on 4 December, it says.

But in the meantime, the council’s chief executive has asked about all the inclusion and integration measures already baked into policies. “To inform the discussions at Group Leaders next Monday,” says the email.

Delight at the end of the tunnel

Back at the homeless charity on Pearse Street on Sunday evening, Ait Ouyakoub said he still has lots to be cheerful about in Dublin.

He likes working with the homeless, he said.

At the homeless hostel he checks the rooms to see if everyone’s okay and keeps on top of safety.

One time, a homeless man tried to kill himself, and Ait Ouyakoub acted quickly to save him, he said.

He points to three framed newspaper clippings on the wall of the charity’s tiny office, and a smile grows on his face.

One shows him getting an award for his volunteer work with them.

“Refugee volunteers receive award from Head of Irish Red Cross,” reads the headline.

One more thing, says Ait Ouyakoub. One time, he entered a cooking competition in the city and won the whole thing with an Algerian dish full of couscous.

He was the last to showcase his food, and people who were about to leave couldn’t get enough of it, he said, smiling. “I won.”

On his phone, he pulls up a video of the contest, showing a long table filled with colourful dishes. Then comes his food, neatly arranged on a platter.

Ait Ouyakoub glances intently at the screen with a broad smile.

At the George’s Dock Luas stop, Tienti was still sketching out a new identity, listing all the European ethnicities he could probably pull off.

Definitely Greek, he said, getting on the Luas.