I have an occasional feature here, one not updated for a few years now, called ‘I told you this would happen’. In this series I lambasted governments and other similar authorities for doing nothing about Islamic extremism and thereby eliciting a negative possibly kinetic reaction from ordinary people to the extremism that had been ignored by those who had suffered the effects of such Islamic extremism. I published this series because I hate the idea of mobs and vigilantism. I’ve been in enough public disorder situations as a photographer many years ago to understand that King Mob makes for a very poor and despotic leader and like vigilantism it rolls over and harms everything in its way and everyone both the innocent and the guilty.

It is far better in my view that we have functioning governments that deal with the problems brought to our shores by Islamic extremism than we have mobs of angry people in the street. Governments, elected by the people in honest contests and with losers consent to the result, should be the authority that can and should be societies weapon against dangerous and destructive ideologies whether those ideologies be political or religion based ones.

But what happens when a nation deliberately ignores problems such as Islamic extremism or concerns about excessive levels of and incompatible types of immigration? When that nation smears those who speak out about these issues as ‘Nazis’ or ‘Far Right’ or where every legal and peaceful method for ordinary people to get their voices heard is stymied and these voices silenced you get potentially awful situations arising. A nation that could meet that description above is the Republic of Ireland and is the subject of a recent article on Spiked by Brendan O’Neill.

Various groups and individuals have been speaking out for years about Ireland’s open borders immigration policy and the negative effects that this has had on native Irish people because of its cost, the societal disruption, the worsening of housing availability and crime brought by migrants to Ireland. These counter migration groups have as far as I can ascertain been mostly legal and peaceful and have expressed similar concerns to those voiced by Britons with regards to uncontrolled and potentially dangerous migration and about Islamic extremism.

But the Irish establishment ignored what the people were saying about the problems that their government had dumped on them. The people pointing out that Ireland had a problem were smeared and silenced and excluded by Irish political, media and academic Establishments. These Establishments marginalised those with what seem like well founded concerns about too rapid demographic change and the crime and disorder along with the pressure on housing that this rapid and somewhat incompatible migration has brought.

But the anger felt by people who feel that their own government is ruining their own country has not gone away. It might have been sealed in a box by the Irish government but that box was becoming something akin to a pressure cooker with no safety valve. This pressure cooker would only take one spark to set it off and people’s anger explode.

That spark came last week when a man, alleged to be an Algerian migrant who had been given Irish citizenship, carried out a knife attack near a Dublin primary school injuring five including young school children.

The attack was very quickly accompanied by angry people gathering in the street and that anger was in my view justified. Those who have warned in the past of this sort of thing happening have been smeared as ‘far right’ by the Establishment yet they have been proven somewhat correct and in a particularly horrific manner. The anger at the Establishment and their allowance of child stabbing monsters into Ireland was extremely high and by nightfall had turned into a full on riot with Irish police being attacked and a mob allegedly trying to burn out a migrant centre.

Following the disturbances the Irish Establishment from the political leadership down to senior police officers tried to blame the ‘far right’ for these disturbances and obviously not blame a political policy that has gone a long way to creating the sort of opposition that took to the streets of Dublin.

Brendan O’Neill called these riots ‘the fury of the cancelled’ and it’s an appropriate title for his piece on the disturbances.

Mr O’Neill said:

Buses, cars and trams were set ablaze. Huge crowds clashed with guards (police). Shopfronts were smashed and stuff was looted. Some chanted ‘Get ’em out’, clearly a reference to certain migrant communities. These were horrible scenes. Unlike leftists like Naomi Klein, who once described ‘spontaneous looting’ as a species of ‘resistance’, I do not believe it is acceptable to desecrate and steal from your own community, however pissed off you are. Protest by all means. Burn down public trams and violate private property? No.

And yet, we cannot write off this unrest as the antics of imbeciles. To me it looks more like the fury of the cancelled. The rage of the overlooked. For years now, there has been a simmering discomfort with Ireland’s immigration policy. Some in Ireland believe too many people have arrived, too quickly, and that we need a ‘mature debate’ about it. But whenever they say something, they’re branded bigots and scum. When hundreds of opponents of mass immigration marched in Dublin earlier this year, President Michael D Higgins accused them of ‘sowing hate’. Is it possible that the fire and violence of the kind we saw in Dublin last night is what happens when every other avenue of expression is shut down to people?

Mr O’Neill is correct to call out and decry the violence against public and private property. However he is also correct to wonder whether Dublin would have had this level of violence had those bringing up legitimate complaints about Irish government immigration policy and the growth of Islamic extremism in Ireland had not had their voices shut down by the Establishment? If, as Mr O’Neil has said that it was the case that moderate voices calling for a proper mature open debate in issues such as immigration, were silenced then it should not be surprising if more immoderate voices started to make themselves known.

Nobody, least of all me, wants mobs on the streets or vigilante gangs operating with impunity. I know where these phenomena end up and it’s not a nice place at all. I want to avoid such things but to do so two things must happen. Firstly there needs to be a free and open debate about contentious issues such as migration and secondly the naive and dangerous pro-open borders and pro-Islam Establishments in places like Ireland and many other parts of the Western world needs to be removed via the ballot box.