unironedman

As I sit here in my little office, relatively insulated from the world’s madness, I actually have a brief moment where I can’t recall if the riots were this week, or last. It’s a measure of how much sheer emotional data has swarmed down the information superhighway. It’s been a deluge. A flood. An overload. And yet it only happened five days ago, on Thursday last. My head, to use the vernacular, is bleedin’ melted…

It all began around half-one in the afternoon as young kids gathered outside an inner-city crèche, waiting to be collected. A man approached and stabbed a young five-year old girl multiple times. In total, four were injured, including two more children and a carer, who was stabbed as she shielded the children.

Several men intervened. One – a Brazilian food delivery driver on a scooter – ran over and hit the assailant over the head with his helmet. A young French waiter jumped in, and a local Irishman managed to take the knife away. Another young gent started CPR on one of the children. Whilst the attacker was a foreign national, three of the four who intervened were also non-national. (I don’t really love that phrase in any way, but here we are; we are all from a nation somewhere).

Firefighters, police and paramedics rushed to the scene.

What followed was chaos, but for many with their noses to the ground, it wasn’t a huge surprise. Within an hour or so of the news percolating around the city, a crowd began to gather at the cordon set up to preserve the crime scene at the top of O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. Angry chants were followed by fireworks. Once the crowd had reached a critical mass, it burst through the cordon and the rioting and running battles with the police kicked off in earnest. The main focus of their anger (initially, in any case), was that the attacker was ‘foreign’.

By the end of the night, at least 13 police cars had been damaged or torched, along with a couple of double-decker buses and a tram carriage. Many shops were looted and the list of assaults and violent behaviour is too long to list here. Two members of An Garda Siochána had to escape violent attack by jumping in the Liffey. Many were assaulted.

And of course, most of these events were filmed and broadcast in real-time, many by the perpetrators. Such is the way with the modern riot. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to many of the rioters and looters that much of this footage will be used to incriminate them.

I am not going to post any images of the night, but they are all freely available to see online. Here’s one link which gives an overview of the night’s madness.

Nor am I going to get into the weeds of the whole ‘why’ question, and the issue of racism in Ireland, other than to say it’s a problem, and has been growing over the last number of years, and that our softly-softly approach has clearly not worked. But as the dust settles (and the charred carcasses of buses and cars are loaded up and taken away to be scrapped, and the shattered glass is swept away), there is a general gloomy feeling in the air that things have changed. It was not unusual to hear people say ‘I never expected this to happen in OUR country…’

There is much to do. But the genie in this particular bottle of horrors is well out now. The old refrain of ‘céad míle fáilte’, or a hundred thousand welcomes, seems a little hollow.

With that in mind, it’s hard to get too excited about the mundane stuff of life. Except, of course, when you are lying in a hospital bed with critical and life-changing injuries. Then, the mundane can seem glorious, no doubt. And so, my own ‘stuff’ happens about me. Some I like to think I make happen; other stuff just happens anyway. Or, as I like to put it, if you want to make God laugh, just tell him what you’re doing tomorrow 😉

Gym continues, as does my course. The EMT course enters its last week, and then hopefully there will be a week’s placement on a local ambulance service. After that, there are practical exams. It’s all go. I am enjoying it, and certainly my time in the brigade is standing to me.

My mate Mark landed a couple of tickets to see Greta VanFleet in the Three Arena, and that was some show! They hail from the same part of the world as Jim, who blogs here (https://fitrecovery.wordpress.com/). The boys sure know how to rock out!

I did have a gig of my own too, in the local pub. Not quite on the same epic scale as Greta Van Fleet, but it was perhaps our best night yet, I reckon. A good crowd, and plenty of folk up dancing and acting the maggot.

And there have been a few runs at the weekends. With the course on, I am down to the bare minimum as regards running, but that’s okay; the gym is picking up the slack, and I am slowly starting to see and feel some benefits from three visits a week. To date, attempts to add extra workouts have failed 😉

And there are always dogs…

And despite the gloom from last week’s awfulness, there will always be Irish humour to make sure you can smile too. From a post on social media: a lady was passing council workers cleaning up the streets and wondered what all the dry powder was on the roads. Quick as a flash, one of the lads said it’s so they can track the footprints of the rioters and looters. The lady thought that was a good idea, and they all fell about the place laughing, explaining it was just there to soak up the oil. She was a good sport to go public!

And there there’s this, which really made me laugh…