The trial of Declan Donaghey, who has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail for setting a Garda car alight during last year’s Dublin riots, seemed to offer a more nuanced explanation for the events of November 23rd than mindless violence and Garda incompetence.
Donaghey pleaded guilty and was remorseful. He acknowledged what he had done – burn one Garda car, damage a second one and throw the saddle of a bike at a migrant centre. In a handwritten letter read to the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, he apologised “to the Government and everyone involved”.
The court heard he told the garda he “got caught up in it” and wanted “to support the victims”. He said he now realised “I only made myself look like a scumbag.” He said it was “just a spur-of-the-moment thing”.
Donaghey was unemployed “due to mental health issues” and lived at home with his parents on Dorset Street. He has a partner and stepdaughter and is on a number of medications for anxiety and depression.
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He was not entirely convincing. He told the gardaí that he had a close relative in the school on Cavendish Row where a child had been stabbed earlier in the day and which was the proximate cause of the riots. It was a bit of a stretch; the court heard it was in fact his partner’s cousin’s child, who was uninjured, that attended the school.
Despite this, his backstory chimed with the narrative that the underlying cause of the events of last November was the poverty and social deprivation in the north inner city that has gone unaddressed for decades. The match that lit the fuse may have been anti-immigration activists spreading disinformation about the stabbing on social media, but the bomb had been sitting there for years.
The mask slipped somewhat when the judge handed down a six-and-a-half year sentence. As he was led away, Donaghey shouted “scumbags”. His supporters were reported to be shocked. Some crying, others saluted him.
They were all escorted out of the court by the Garda Public Order Unit, and the dominant counternarrative that a culture of lawlessness and impunity underpinned the riots was the one that was left uppermost in people’s minds.
In truth the narratives don’t conflict, but a lasting impression of the events of November 23rd was that the rioters – regardless of the forces at play in the background – did it because they thought they could get away with it.
The riots almost seemed recreational rather than the release of pent-up anger that has built up over decades in a community that has long been neglected. It was pretty clear that the people helping themselves to armloads of goods from looted shops were not there to make any sort of political point. More significantly, they seemed undeterred by what they regarded as even the slim possibility that they might get caught.
[ Gardaí identify 18 ‘people of interest’ in Dublin riots photo appealOpens in new window ]
The Dublin riots are not an isolated event in this regard. Some of the participants in the anti-immigrant protests that followed – notably the protests in Coolock over the plan to house asylum seekers in the former Crown Paints factory – exhibited the same sort of “only here for the lols” attitude.
If the move by An Garda Síochána this week to post images on its website of 99 “persons of interest” in relation to the Dublin riots in order to rule them in or out of involvement (29 have, at the time of writing, since been removed) achieves anything, it might be to ‘wise up’ those who see rioting as a sport. The images were painstakingly scraped from 17,000 from CCTV and other sources, and the individuals are clearly recognisable. An Garda Síochána is stressing it should not be presumed that identification means criminal involvement in the riots.
If the list of people arrested on the night of the riots and charged in the immediate aftermath is any guide, many will not live in the inner city and either travelled in or just happened to be there. Many will have jobs and be over 30.
It is not, however, a simple case of the long arm of the law extending through the internet. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has flagged a number of issues with the approach, including the possibility of someone’s right to a free trial being jeopardised. The ICCL also raises the possibility of someone whose picture has been published being harassed or subjected to vigilantism. This is particularly pertinent in the case of someone who may not have committed an offence at the end of the day. But it also holds for those who have broken the law.
The ICCL’s points are valid. Many of them, such as the right to a fair trial, predate digital media but the risks have now been amplified by the advent of social media. However, they must be balanced against the wider public good. Nothing focuses the mind quite like the thought of your family, boss or landlord seeing your picture on the Garda website.