Crowds of rioters have set police and public transport vehicles on fire in the Irish capital, Dublin, amid rumors that a man who stabbed three children and a woman at a city school is a foreign national.
Protesters began to assemble in the center of the city on Thursday afternoon following the knife attack. One of the victims, a five-year-old girl, was hospitalized with serious injuries.
Police arrested a man in his 50s at the scene, and although no description of the man has been released, Irish news site Gript identified him as an Algerian national, citing police sources.
Riot police were deployed to keep the protesters in check, but clashes soon broke out, with multiple officers assaulted, RTE News reported. Fireworks and crowd-control barriers were hurled at police, who attempted to push crowds of angry locals back with riot shields.
Several police vehicles were set on fire, with arsonists also targeting at least two double-decker buses and a tram, according to multiple reports.
Groups of hooded rioters also smashed the front window of a building used to house migrants, and charged police lines with flaming dumpsters.
Police commissioner Drew Harris condemned the “disgraceful scenes,” and described the rioters as “a complete lunatic hooligan faction driven by far right ideology.” Harris said that those responsible for the unrest “will be dealt with properly.”
The stabbing and subsequent riot came a week after Josef Puska, a Romani migrant from Slovakia, was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal murder of a woman in the town of Tullamore last January.
Ireland’s struggle to house and integrate hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers has led to increasingly frequent displays of public anger in Dublin, including repeated protests outside an accommodation center for single male migrants last November, and violent clashes at an illegal migrant squat in the city earlier this year, which culminated in locals tearing down the “shanty town.”
Some 141,000 immigrants entered Ireland between April 2022 and April 2023, according to the most recent figures from the Central Statistics Office. Last year, a record 13,651 people sought asylum in Ireland, the majority arriving from Georgia, Somalia, and Syria.