Coolock unrest: Small group of protesters gathers at asylum-seeker housing site after violent clashes

About 40 protesters, some wearing face coverings and carrying Tricolours, were gathered in front of the heavily-barricaded old Crown Paints factory in Coolock on Tuesday afternoon, while uniformed gardaí maintained a presence in the environs of the site following hours of serious civil unrest in the area on Monday.

Young men with bicycles made up a portion of those gathered, which also included women with prams. At 3pm, a Garda helicopter could be seen circling over the Coolock site.

Large concrete barriers, about 3m high, were erected overnight to block access to the disused site, where the Department of Integration plans to house roughly 550 asylum seekers.

Concerns are mounting within An Garda Síochána about a growing, complex and volatile security threat in the north Dublin area after clashes between gardaí and protesters.

Mark O’Meara, president of the Garda Representative Association (GRA), said there was a “clear delay” in the deployment of the force’s public order unit in Coolock on Monday, potentially exposing members to “to extremely volatile and dangerous conditions for a number of hours”.

“This was an organised operation, however, as a result of the delayed deployment of the public order unit it was extremely fortunate that our members did not suffer more serious injuries than those that were sustained,” Mr O’Meara said in a statement released on Tuesday afternoon.

The GRA president said that he would be raising the matter with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris and senior Garda management. “We will express serious concerns on whether lessons were learned from the incidents of last November and demand that we are better prepared for any possible future attacks.”

Tuesday morning passed off without incident at the site, although The Irish Times witnessed one man verbally abuse two uniformed gardaí at the junction between the Malahide Road and Greencastle Road. “Get a real job,” he said.

One security guard, working at the adjacent industrial park on the Malahide Road, said the morning had been relatively quiet. “But we’ll see,” he said.

Monday’s Garda operation, which continued on into the night in a tense stand-off with protesters and far-right agitators at the site, at its height involved up to 200 members of the force, more than 40 Garda vehicles and the Garda helicopter monitoring from above.

The violent scenes included fireworks being aimed at lines of public order unit gardaí. Also thrown at gardaí were glass bottles, so-called “fast gas” canisters, rocks, stones and kerbing taken from businesses within the Malahide Road Retail Centre.

Large wheelie bins were also taken from the industrial units – after the businesses hastily closed around lunchtime – and set alight by youths on the northbound carriageway of Malahide Road.

Taoiseach Simon Harris condemned the violence in Coolock on Monday night as “sheer thuggery”. It was not community engagement and should be called out, he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland on Tuesday morning.

Mr Harris said workers on the site and gardaí should not have been put in danger. “I’ve had it up to here with this ‘whataboutery’. We will continue to communicate better with communities, good, decent people across the country who want to talk about legitimate issues.”

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Simon Harris rejected any suggestion that the Government bore responsibility for the unrest in Coolock.

The Fine Gael leader was speaking at a press conference on housing where he and Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman defended efforts to engage with the community there about the planned refugee centre.

He said he found commentary put forward by some quarters about a lack of consultation to be “quite extraordinary”.

“What we saw last night was absolutely nothing to do with engagement with the local community about migration. What we saw last night was lawlessness, criminality, and thuggery. And there’s one group of people responsible for that, the thugs and the criminals,” he said.

Mr Harris added: “What form of community engagement process does anybody in this country think we could have and should have put in place to tell someone not to throw a petrol bomb at a guard? Or not to throw a brick? Or not to set a digger on fire? Or not to injure a security guard?”

“We need to do better around community engagement absolutely,” he said, but added there is “a huge amount of work going on. I support it fully, listening to communities, talking about resources, but what we saw yesterday in Coolock was no more anything to do with that than the man in the moon.”

Me Harris also said he was worried when “thuggery, lawlessness and the far right” is conflated “with decent people in our democracy asking questions”.

He said he was encouraged by people in Coolock who called for calm and said “this ain’t us”.

He said what happened “is not a reflection on the people of Coolock” but was about people “trying to rip communities apart in this country.”

Mr O’Gorman said there was “no excuse” for what happened in Coolock.

He said his department notified TDs and councillors about the plan for the Crown Paint site as far back as March and said there was further engagement with them and community representatives in April.

The Green Party leader said “very detailed information” had been provided. “As the Taoiseach says even if there wasn’t, it’s still not an excuse to throw petrol bombs,” he said.

Earlier Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said it was “a very dangerous thing” to connect Monday’s disorder with a perceived lack of communication between the Government and communities where asylum seekers are set to be accommodated.

“Yesterday was violent criminal disorder. This was not a legitimate protest,” she told RTÉ News at One on Tuesday afternoon. She earlier defended the response of the force to the unrest on Monday.

She said the former Crown Paints site is still being prepared for housing those “seeking protection”, but that the process was at the “early stages”.

“Information is being provided as it’s there, as it’s available. There’s nobody going to be moved on to this site without further engagement with the community,” she said.

She said that gardaí were in the process of procuring a water cannon. The Irish Times previously reported that a water cannon, borrowed by An Garda Síochána from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in the aftermath of November’s Dublin riots, was returned in April without ever being used.