Where There’s Smoke
Last Autumn, the main street of Dublin was the setting of a violent anti-immigration riot led by far-right agitators: buses and trams were set on fire, shops were broken into and looted, people held up signs which read “Irish Lives Matter”. When I recounted this to my friends and family abroad, they were shocked and puzzled; however, there was little surprise in my circle of friends in Dublin, for we knew this was just the peak of an anti-immigrant sentiment that had been steadily growing among a portion of the Dublin population.
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It was November 23rd, and I had travelled to the coastal suburb of Dun Laoghaire to celebrate Thanksgiving with my American partner and a dear friend of ours. We spent a magical day reading and writing in the local seafront library, and I told myself that I had a lot to be thankful for. Once we felt satisfied with our day’s accomplishments, we indulged in some pizza to ease our growling stomachs. A Vonnegut quote kept echoing in my head: “if this isn’t nice, what is?”.
As we sat down to eat, our friend showed me a headline on her phone: there had been a stabbing outside a Dublin school, the victims were three children aged four to six and a teacher. We were still figuring out the details regarding the stabbing, when I got a message from my flatmate saying “careful in town, riots all over the place”.
After that, my social media got inundated with photos and videos of the protest: shop windows getting smashed, people yelling racist and xenophobic messages, fire eating up buses and trams: I felt like I was looking at a war zone. I then read that the riots had been triggered by the fact that the perpetrator of the stabbings was Algerian.
I got various messages asking if I was okay, and then I was sent a list of safe houses where people who weren’t able to get home could spend the night. Buses along my commute weren’t running and the city centre wasn’t safe, so getting home via public transportation wasn’t an option. In the end, we managed to reach our flat by sharing a 70€ taxi, which we were lucky enough to find amid the chaos.
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In the following days, as the dust settled, and as the people of Dublin worked hard to repair what had been destroyed during the riots, I collected more information regarding the happenings of November 23rd. The attacker, albeit Algerian in origin, was a naturalised Irish citizen who had lived in Ireland for two decades; instead, the man who stopped the stabbing was a Brazilian immigrant who heroically jumped off his Deliveroo bike and used his helmet as a weapon to disarm the aggressor and save the children.
I’m mentioning this to make the point that this riot, despite being triggered by the stabbing, had actually very little to do with the real mechanics of that tragic incident: instead, it was directly related to a sentiment of xenophobia that had been steadily growing in the city, and which is strictly linked to the various issues faced by the city, such as its rampant housing crisis
According to online sources, Dublin is the city that was struck the hardest by the housing crisis that has been spreading in various parts of the globe. This means that accommodation is nearly impossible to find, with landlords getting inundated by emails mere minutes after they advertise a new property online. Getting a property viewing is a huge challenge, and if you do get one, it is unlikely that you will be chosen to be the new tenant because competition is immense and fierce. Once you do find a place, you have to pay astronomical prices or settle for very inconvenient locations and living conditions. Some of the people I’ve met in Dublin shared a house with twenty-five (that’s right, 25) others. I’ve even met people who rented one half of a double bed, with a stranger renting the other half, for 600€ per month each.
The city is also poorly connected: there is no subway, and the LUAS tram only has two lines laid in the shape of a cross, which means that it reaches very few areas. The most used means of transportation is the Dublin bus, which is slow, unreliable, and frankly, a little smelly. Traffic in the city is bad enough that my morning commute would take me almost one hour and a half via bus, although I would only be covering about 11km (approximately 7 miles).
This is a long winded way of saying that Dublin has become a difficult city to live in, and very little has been done to make life easier for its inhabitants. A few solutions could be building more apartments, lowering the rent of the existing ones, increasing the lines of the LUAS tram, adding new types of public transportation, diversifying and increasing the bus lines. None of this has been done; and, with the immigration flux growing, migrants have been scapegoated by far-right agitators as the sole culprits of people’s rightful discomfort.
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In recent years, Dublin has seen a sudden spike in immigration, both from mainland Europe and from other continents. The reason Dublin has become a more appealing destination for EU citizens is that, after Brexit, it is no longer possible for us to move to the UK without a VISA: Ireland has therefore become the closest English-speaking country that can be accessed without any VISA requirement, due to its being part of the EU.
Dublin is also an appealing destination for US expats, since all the American corporations in the EU either have their HQ or one of their divisions in Dublin. Moreover, the US and Ireland have had a longstanding friendly relationship, therefore Americans are given preference over other groups when applying for Irish VISAs, with much lower requirements in applying for long term residency than those asked of other nationalities. It goes without saying that English being the predominant language constitutes further encouragement for Americans to migrate there.
As I have found out in the past year, Dublin is an extremely popular destination for Brazilians, too: according to the Embassy of Brazil, there are about 70,000 Brazilians living in Ireland, and most of them live in Dublin. That is because they can migrate to Ireland on a stamp 2 visa, which allows them to work part-time while school is in session, and full-time during holidays. This is a rare VISA arrangement, since most English-speaking countries, such as the UK, have much stricter requirements for Brazilian immigrants: indeed, were they to enter those countries on a student VISA, they wouldn’t be able to legally work enough hours to survive alongside their studies.
These are only the three nationalities that I’m most familiar with, but there are many other groups that migrate to Dublin for endless reasons, making the city a wonderfully diverse cosmopolitan hub in Europe.
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As months passed, small episodes of my personal life gave me a taste of just how much the hatred had grown in the city. Once, a drunk guy got on my bus and started threatening all its foreign passengers, including the driver, who was Ukrainian. He pointed at us and said, “I know some of you aren’t Irish”. A lady reported him to the police, and he got off the bus with one last threat to the driver: “I’m gonna remember your face”.
A Brazilian student at the English school where I worked told me that he was thrown off his bike and attacked by teenagers who insulted him for being an immigrant; another one of my students, also from Brazil, told me that a similar group had thrown eggs at him.
A range of people threw crumpled fliers at me once as I was talking to a friend, who suggested they might have heard my foreign accent.
When the riots happened last Thanksgiving, I was all but surprised.
My favourite part about living in Dublin was that the city served as a gate to many different cultures and places. I could walk down the street and hear people speaking Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese, Ukrainian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Japanese, just to name a few. There I have met friends from all over the world, and I felt enriched with awareness of many new cultures. In Dublin, I’ve even learned a little Portuguese by listening to my Brazilian students talk every day. The Irish capital has the potential of being a bridge between the EU and the rest of the world, with endless financial, cultural, and linguistic advantages.
I moved away from Dublin last December because I had the privilege of having that option. I don’t know how things will develop there in the future, but I sincerely hope that the current state of hatred will be mitigated and that the various issues of the city will be addressed with empathy, love, and compassion.
I deviated from my usual column style for this article to spread awareness about a situation that is not often discussed abroad, and that is very close to my heart.