Coolock is Our Future

There are no brakes on this train

small irish factory building in flames with protest in foreground

Dublin is on fire again: over the past month there have been mass protests at the Crown Paints factory site in Coolock, a mostly-deprived area of the city where the Irish government is proposing to house over 500 of international protection applicants. The scheme was mooted a while ago, prompting local protests; coverage died down in the national press for a short while but flared up again with the empty site being set on fire a number of times in the space of a week (this has a tendency to happen to proposed immigrant housing in Ireland). The burnings were accompanied by clashes with Gardaí, and marches against police intervention.

While the violence is relatively unusual, the protests against local housing of migrants isn’t, with less eye-catching actions taking place up and down the country constantly. The pattern of protest and rote system response is becoming background noise. Ignoring the circumstances of the individual protests, we need to shake ourselves out of this stupor and find a way off the carousel. What are the chances of that happening? The answer is zero.