Rosalind Skillen: Violence in Belfast and Dublin shows the need for social change

THE dust is only beginning to settle in Belfast and Dublin following disorder and violence in both cities last week.

Stones, bottles, petrol bombs and bricks were thrown and fires burned in both cities.

Although violence happened in different places for different reasons, there is a lot that these incidents can tell us about the state of public unrest across the island.

Violence erupted in Coolock in north Dublin following a riot at a site that was being used to accommodate asylum seekers.

Disturbances in south Belfast were not sparked by anti-immigration sentiment, and the scenes were much smaller in scale to those in Coolock.

But the mayhem in both areas was mostly perpetuated by young men.

And in both cases, the violence had been a long time coming. In Coolock, residents had set up a camp by the proposed site since March, with tricolour bunting and signs draped across the site saying “Coolock says no”, “Irish lives matter” and “Ireland for the Irish”.

South Belfast DUP MLA Edwin Poots also said that tensions in the Broadway area had been brewing for months (“ongoing from October last year”) between young people coming from the west and south Belfast side of the junction. He said that the situation had been “taken to a different level” last week.

One of the most deeply disturbing elements of what the Police Federation called “pointless rioting” in south Belfast and what Taoiseach Simon Harris called “sheer thuggery” in Coolock was the role of adults in encouraging violence among children and young people.

Videos of adults teaching young boys to chant “get them out” in Coolock were posted over social media network X. Can these boys know the meaning behind what they’re singing?

The rioting in the Broadway area saw older men encouraging children as young as seven to throw paint bombs. Seven-year-olds should be playing, not forced into violence.

Criminal damage, arson and violence is wrong, and should be called out as such, but equally “masked youths” and young men in tracksuits should not be framed as the enemy.

Coolock is one of Dublin’s most deprived communities, with the longest housing waiting lists, GP wait times, and high levels of poverty. Decades of neglect have led communities to feel left behind, eroding trust in government and leaving a power vacuum for the far right to step into.

In Belfast, many communities are experiencing levels of poverty worse than in 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

If we are to shift the current political culture across Ireland, then leaders must get serious about engaging in class politics, generating social change through tackling wealth and structural inequality, and provide collective solutions to social injustices. They must properly address the lack of social mobility, lack of opportunity and lack of investment in education and certain communities.

It can’t be left to under-resourced community workers and already squeezed services to piece together our shattered society. We need governments to build a new social fabric, one interwoven with a politics of inclusion and community care – if not, violence will erupt again.

Rosalind Skillen is an environmental activist and writer @rosalindskillen