I PREDICT A RIOT...

UPDATE: Opportunist rioters indulge in an attack on asian shopkeepers...hat tip Dossing Times. From the set here: http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~z/today/ UPDATE: Apparently these unfortunate gentlemen had the temerity to question the looting of their shop. My plan today was to catch the bus to Dorset St., drop my kit at the Kings Inns library and potter across the river for coffee and a light snack at the Saturday market in Meeting House Square before heading back to hit the books. But I didn't get around to it. Lucky thing too as I have one of those heads which attracts the unwanted attentions of rioting scumbags, at whom I cannot help but look with frank bourgeois disapproval when I see fuckbaggery in progress. This is kind of dumb as I am less than prepossessing and have been on the wrong end of an unprovoked knack-attack [as a Limerickman, I don't use the term knack to refer to members of the Travelling community, but to shell suit wearing troglodytes] on more than one occasion. I was on O'Connell St. some years ago during the English football fan debacle, and the Celtic enshirted were out and about that day too. I stopped answering politely the various requests to know the time was from oiks on both sides of the divide when I realised the questions weren't prompted by a lack of chronographs, but by a less than disinterested desire to know what accent I would deploy. I wouldn't have wanted to be relying on RTE to let me know that the centre of my capital city was overrun by scumbags, however, and the first I knew of the rioting in town was a casual browse of a couple of blogs including the dossing times, back seat drivers and slugger o'toole. Freestater has a nice little post on the matter too and Noam Delevan blogs up a storm over at sic notes. I had to wait til 6 to catch anything on the national broadcaster, being forced instead to rely on what Sky were beaming into the State, which is outrageous. Good thing I tend to forget to stump up the licence fee, or I'd feel robbed. It is to be hoped the police have the cop [pun intended] to rely on the vast amount of citizen-created photographic material across various blogs and uploaded to flikr to secure prosecutions. Rather than concoct an essay on the matter, I'll just aggregate here the knee-jerk comments I posted to a couple of blogs: at back seat: One can't help but notice the plastic paddy regalia. Good report. at disillusioned lefty: Lucky I got distracted from going into town this afternoon. You wouldn't want to be relying on RTE to let you know that the centre of the capital city was overrun by scum. I'd like to know how the authorities have permitted this to get so out of hand. The cops were quick enough to storm into the hippy dippy kids of the cycling fraternity when there was no danger to property or limb. Alas, when genuine thugs are burning property, threatening innocent people out shopping on a saturday, not to mention causing massive political upset and a few heads require to be cracked open, the thin blue line seems just that little bit lacking. at freestater: It's no coincidence that shops which were attacked were Footlocker and Schuh, trainer emporia descended on by behooded scum. Looting in Dublin city centre, a lesson to us all but one I don't see us learning. There was a lovely image on the news of some fucker getting nicked by two cops emerging from one of the shops with a bag of swag. He was nearly in tears. The police are tactically crap. A seven year old with a game boy and a copy of Advance Wars 2 could do a better job than the crowd up in the Phoenix Park, frankly. Routing the march through a building site/arms dump was also extremely clever. Take a bow all down the Mansion House. Gay Mitchell made the excellent point that these bastards are doing this shit in certain communities on a constant basis. Of course that's perfectly tolerable to our incredibly complacent government and bourgeois Tygger society as long as our leafier burbs aren't affected. Stand up the boys in the camel-hair coats and their chums in the construction industry who ghettoised swathes of the population in a process of self-enrichment in the 70s and 80s. Will the govt. be taking responsibility for this as well as their incompetent oversight of the police and march-route planners? I think not. It was shocking to see someone throw a molotov at another human being and if the fucker who did it isn't caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law with a concomitant sentence it will be a very bad look out. Again, it demonstrates that we've incubated a pretty nihilistic element in our society, but of course up til now they've really only been bothering the benighted residents of Finglas, Darndale, O'Malley Park etc. Will the govt. be acknowledging that?