“Up rolls the riot van and sparks excitement in the boys…”
Irish people don’t seem to deal with the sun very well. This is what I’ve learned from two years working in a shop. Whenever a few days’ sunny weather is promised to us, the place goes into meltdown and people fail to make decisions with their usual rationale. Suddenly, they are toing and froing, almost panicked by the crowd around them - their brains seemingly frazzled by the heat.
This is just in a closed environment. People seem to believe that sunshine is a license to engage in behaviour which common courtesy normally dictates to be ‘anti-social’. This is particularly true of teenagers, who – at the risk of sounding like an old man – seem to be far ruder and indifferent to the feelings/circumstances of their peers than my generation ever was. And this is just in general, without the sun’s license to bill (the taxman, for the amount of wasted police time often involved in cleaning up their mess).
For example, take this clip. We had a few wonderful days last week: summer seemed to finally arrive in glorious style, and people everywhere flocked to the beaches and parks to bask in its rays (which, as I write this, we are paying for now by drowning in a classic Oceanic Temperate downpour). Portmarnock was, in the beginning, simply jammed – but it didn’t take long for it to become outright anarchic.
According to the original uploader, his group of friends were innocently attempting to pay their way onto a bus when another gang attempted to shove their way on at the same time, resulting in confusion over fares paid which the driver eventually resolved by kicking every single member of the two motley crews off his carriage.
When the protestations of this considerable number of people became more aggressive, the Gardaí were called, who allegedly began “hitting any body in the vecinity” with their spring bats as soon as they arrived. Thankfully, though, this story had a happy ending for the camera-teen and his posse when another bus turned up to whisk them away from the frontline – not that they had any idea where they were heading afterwards.
The events of this video took place on the Friday (May 25th) of the warm weekend, but I learned from a friend of a friend that there was more carnage the following night, with a local shop being forced to close for two hours in the middle of the chaos when a scumbag pulled a knife on a member of staff. Having had knives held to me before, I can assure anybody who hasn’t experienced it that it is not something one cherishes for the rest of their days.
I’ve hung around Portmarnock for many years now and some of my closest friends come from there. Before we all came of age, we would spend our weekends on the beach getting drunk. Illegally, yes (though not me – I don’t drink, so you’ll never take me alive, coppers!). We had some minor scrapes with the Gardaí (if you could call a certain Anthony Gallagher telling the unwitting authorities that he was the trade union leader and social activist James 'Big Jim' Larkin a "scrape"), but nothing of the scale caught on camera here.
Not even on the notorious Flagon Day: a day where people turn up to a specific part of the Portmarnock beach dressed in suits to drink flagons all day – it was a momentous and peaceful occasion in years past, but I distinctly recall the event being ultimately ruined by Facebook and gangs of lads from outer areas arriving late in the evening to start fights. That and the fact I got older while the Flagon Dayers stayed the same age (and wore less formal clothes…and less clothes in general).
Anyway, back to last week's bedlam. There must be at least 50 oddly dressed or scantily clad teenagers in this video milling around the place for no other reason than a disproportionate sense of self-importance. Let’s be honest here, the only person to come out of this with any credit is the girl in the yellow hot-pants at 2:46 who seems to have won acclaim amongst YouTube commenters. Yet what must it have been like for John and Jane Doe trying to pass through this warzone, even when they were in the relative safety of their cars?
While this video and some accounts of the weekend’s turbulent events are my only evidence, it seems to me that the atmosphere surrounding this crowd is far more aggressive and confrontational than that of the Flagon Dayers of yesteryear. The threat of a riot van would have been enough to make us at least consider our actions, but this mismatched group of teens just go on as if they can’t be touched - like they’re in a really, really bad episode of Talifornia (which is diabolical to begin with).
But even if guards had followed through on their threat to start throwing teenagers into the back of riots vans, would the teens have learned their lesson? Or would they just have viewed it as being a handy lift home?
As the uploader said in the video, “All this for one bus.” Exactly, mate. A fucking riot van was called because of an argument over a bus. That in itself should tell you something was amiss before the aforementioned argument occurred. If a summer of this nonsense lies ahead the Gardaí would want to consider adding more riot vans to their fleet.
This was published during my brief spell as a writer-in-residence with Teaandtoast.ie, a now seemingly defunct political and culture website (the Facebook page remains but is largely inactive). A good friend of mine who had become editor of the site in May asked me to contribute to the cultural aspect of the website she was developing, so I wrote slightly comedic feature/opinion pieces on various societal ills which occurred in Dublin between May and July of 2012.
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