Muslim refugees unpopular in Ireland

It was a night of shame for one of the most welcoming countries in the world. Ireland was left reeling after as many as 500 thugs responded to a horrifying knife attack on schoolchildren in Dublin on Thursday by launching an anti-migrant rampage.

Fuelled by online misinformation and unsubstantiated rumours that the person behind the attack – which saw three children and a woman injured – was a foreign national, the mobs gathered close to some of the city's most iconic locations, some waving flags and brandishing signs reading 'Irish Lives Matter'.

Shocking scenes saw police officers attacked, with around 50 sustaining injuries – one of whom faces having a toe amputated – while buses and a tram were torched, with one driver punched and dragged from his cab.

Armed police were even dispatched to Irish PM Leo Varadkar's Dublin home after calls on extremist messaging sites for rioters to descend on it, the Irish Times reported.

An intensive all-night clean-up operation saw O'Connell Street, one of Dublin's best-known thoroughfares, return to an appearance of normality yesterday.

But despite reassurances that it was 'safe to come into the city', dozens of businesses chose to close their shutters and missed out on lucrative Black Friday sales.

One hotel manager said he received ten times the number of usual cancellations. 'Now that could just be a moment in time, but the world has seen Dublin on fire,' Paul Gallagher said.

While migrant communities said they were fearful for their safety, with some parents pulling their children from school.

A Muslim-run soup kitchen, where many female volunteers wear veils, shut amid safety fears. Founder Lorraine O'Connor said: 'We don't want anybody to be an easy target. We just don't want any more suffering.'

She added that Muslim migrants were were as outraged by the 'barbaric act' as the wider community. 'But because they say he's Muslim, we have to carry the weight of this on our shoulders, and we shouldn't because, in our eyes, as much as the Irish community are mourning for the hurt and pain of them children and their poor families, we are too.'

Last night, the five-year-old girl stabbed in the chest and a school care assistant who 'used her body as a shield' in an attempt to protect children from the attacker remained in a critical condition in hospital.

While the senseless violence was roundly condemned, warnings were growing that Ireland's political establishment was failing to heed concern at soaring immigration.

On a visit to Dublin, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said 'mainstream politicians' needed to 'articulate' such worries, or risk leaving 'a vacuum for other people who might not be as benign as we are'.

In recent years, soaring numbers of migrants, many of them accommodated in poor areas of central Dublin or small provincial towns, have put acute pressure on Ireland's housing and public services.

A total of 141,600 immigrants arrived in the Republic in the 12 months to April, the highest level since 2007, of whom almost 42,000 were from Ukraine.

And unlike in the UK, where families displaced by Vladimir Putin's invasion were initially accommodated by private individuals, in Ireland they have been put up by the State in hotels and empty office blocks.

In Dublin, huge numbers of foreign nationals have been housed in predominantly working-class areas, where the arrival of unemployed single men can create social friction.

Across the country, a worsening housing crisis and an acute shortage of rental properties, particularly in Dublin and Cork has resulted in a profound change which has severely tested the image of Ireland as a welcoming country.

The upshot has been that an initially warm welcome for refugees has been replaced by mounting tension, with at least 300 anti-migrant demonstrations documented before Thursday's violence.

In one particularly ugly incident back in January, an angry mob of about 200 surrounded a police station in Finglas, a working-class district of Dublin, after rumours spread on social media that a local girl had been raped by a man who had recently arrived in the country.

Just over 14 per cent of the Republic's 5.2million population - 757,000 people – are now non-Irish citizens.

But recent polls suggest that 75 per cent of people believe that the number of refugees Ireland is taking in is 'now too many'.

In a bitter irony, it emerged yesterday that one of the heroes of Thursday's attack on the schoolchildren was himself a recent immigrant.

Brazil-born Caio Benicio, 43, was making a Deliveroo delivery when he witnessed the bloodbath, jumping off his moped and battering the knife-wielding assailant to the ground with his helmet.

'When I saw the knife, I stopped my bike and I just acted by instinct,' he said yesterday.

Downplaying his own courage, the father-of-two paid tribute to a creche worker who was left in a serious condition as she tried to shield the terrified youngsters, describing her as 'very, very brave'.

And he said the anti-migrant anger which erupted hours later 'doesn't make sense because I'm an immigrant myself and I was the one who helped out'.

An online fundraiser asking supporters to 'buy a pint' for Mr Benicio quickly topped £20,000.

Ireland's police commissioner Drew Harris initially blamed the rioting on a 'lunatic, hooligan faction driven by a far-Right ideology'.

Denying that the horrific scenes were proof of a failure of policing, he insisted yesterday 'we could not have anticipated that in response to a terrible crime, the stabbing of school children and their teacher, that this would be the response'.

Meanwhile, last night it emerged that the suspect in the quadruple stabbing was arrested earlier this year for possession of a knife.

The man, originally from Algeria, previously faced deportation proceedings but eventually received Irish citizenship a decade ago.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12788897/Dublin-welcoming-city-explode-anti-migrant-violence-why.html

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