Off Topic Thread 5.0

Looks to me from the videos that it was the regular shytes! Don't be alarmed lads, I grew up amongst these lads. Very poor to look at. I used to see a lot of this when I was a whelp.

Lowlife don't need much of a reason to act the bullocks.

In my opinion the justice system in Ireland is soft.

Just wondering about the lack of police readiness, is there a shortage? Are they restrained from using force?

There are a couple of dozen far right grifters and a couple of organized but tiny far right political parties that have been steadily organizing under the "Ireland is full" banner for a few years. They franchise into homophobic anti lgtbq stuff around libraries and book shops where the harass staff and have managed to force some libraries to close. This stuff is well documented and well understood by anyone paying attention and it exploits a real issue in Ireland which is that there is a shortage of housing and massive housing inflation which the state is literally refusing to address. For whatever reason the cops have not taken the threat posed by the far right seriously, maybe because they are politically sympathetic or maybe because they don't see the far right as a threat to the state in the same way they see the left and republicanism as a threat to the state. This tolerant attitude extends to the dept of Justice.

At the same time Drew Harris is very unpopular among the rank and file, there was a vote of no confidence in him at the AGSI conference recently, which I think is unprecedented in Ireland. The reasons for his unpopularity include his efforts to restructure the guards which affects OT, scheduling, discipline and other conditions of work stuff that members don't like. Harris is also former RUC and close to brit intelligence/Fine Gael so may have his own particular ideas about the far right and the nature of their threat or their usefulness. Their political targets have been the left (Paul Murphy, etc) and Sinn Fein and I imagine there are vested interests that regard SF and socialists as a far greater threat to the status quo than right wing live streamers going after refugees living in rural B&Bs. But on the Harris question there may be internal Garda politics playing out here, Id say he is under real pressure for his job today, as much as McIntee is under pressure for hers.

I keep hearing that the issue around public safety in Dublin is a Garda resourcing problem but that's an easy answer that doesn't really stack up. It was trotted out when that American tourist was assaulted a few moths ago. That assault happened a few doors fro Store st Garda station, there were probably 50 cops within a couple hundred yards of it. But they don't stand on street corners or walk the streets, they drive around or sit in cars for the most part. And anyway the problem with the riot was not that there weren't police on the street, its that they completely underestimated the threat and misunderstood how the far right mobilize lumpen youth in the city, because they haven't been paying serious attention to it. The reason they were caught flat footed is in that question, not resources but priorities.

Has Eddie been signed anywhere?

'Rum Sodomy and the Lash'

I remember going out and buying it at the time. Probably one of the last albums both myself, and my father both loved. A rare occurance in itself.

A very merry Christmas to anybody left on here that isn't a gum-bumping, partisan reprobate.

(Pretty sure that just leaves Jaco, tbh. Merry Christmas, Jaco).

Hey, I'm not a gum-bumping, partisan repro- wait. No, you've got that covered. Sorry.

Continue.

Happy Christmas, lads/ladies.