Why did gardaí not move more heavily and quickly against Dublin’s rioters?

The riots in Dublin city on Thursday have put Minister for Justice Helen McEntee and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris under extreme pressure. Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has called for them to resign, saying control of the streets was lost to rioters and that McEntee and Harris must take the blame.

There is no doubt the Garda was pinned to its collar for several hours on Thursday as the riot broke out. Initially, a small far-right group clashed with gardaí protecting a scene on Parnell Square east, where children – aged 5 and 6 years – and their childcare provider (30s) were targeted in a stabbing attack at lunchtime that day.

The far-right group, numbering a couple of hundred, became so aggressive the Garda Public Order Unit was deployed against them. Once those clashes began they quickly spread through the north inner city, with opportunists rioting and looting. Garda resources were drafted in from all over Dublin, indeed nationally. Teams of public order gardaí flooded the streets and the trouble was eventually under control by between 10pm and 11pm.

But the rioters – burning Garda cars and buses and looting shops – had been free to rampage for hours. Harris has denied there was any “personnel” failure within the Garda. But why were more public order gardaí not deployed much sooner to avoid the destruction? Or are there downsides to investing in 24-7 “riot squad” policing that Irish society should steer clear of, especially as large-scale violence is so rare in the Republic?

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Michael Mulqueen is professor of policing and national security at the University of Central Lancashire and a former senior police officer in Leicestershire Police and Cheshire Constabulary. An Irishman, he watched the events in Dublin with interest.

When policing an event like the Dublin riots, he said, the Garda had to combine “the laws and powers that we have” with the “proportionate use of force for this gathering storm”. If the use of force was initially disproportionate, “the chances are you will be using that force unlawfully and that causes a whole range of nightmares down the line”.

“This was a quick flash incident,” he said. “Is it realistic to think you could draw in resources from Kildare, Wicklow, places like that, at the speed that people might like, in hindsight?” It was very hard to assess that from the outside looking in. In a UK context, however, police forces “can be caught short” when dealing with violence, especially football violence, though fixtures are known about in advance. Even commanders in the London Met Police have “limited resources”.

During his own policing career, when he was responsible for a catchment area of up to one million people in urban and rural settings, “at no time was I able to deploy anyone’s magic number of police, no way”. At times he “was protecting 250,000 people with six police officers”. That was an example of a financial reality in policing that now “rubs up against” Dublin’s sense of being “wounded” by Thursday’s riot.

He noted there were complaints about whether the Garda had properly monitored the far-right planning via social media and messaging apps on Thursday.

However, the Garda operation began as an investigation into a child stabbing. As such it was “beyond the familiar boundaries of police thinking” to foresee a situation where those claiming to defend the rights of that child would attempt to trespass “all over a forensically-sealed scene of crime”.

Dr John Coxhead, professor of policing practice at the University of East London, said it was not realistic to expect any police force to respond in great numbers almost immediately to an unexpected major outbreak of public disorder.

He added the Garda could decide to organise itself to ensure it had a very significant group of riot squad officers available for deployment quickly and at any time. However, that would result in a significant change to the character of Irish policing, which he cautioned against.

He believed the Garda’s response time to the riots, when it took several hours to deploy the resources needed, was also “understandable” in the context of international policing. “I think you would find a similar pattern elsewhere in terms of that timing,” he said.

Any “major incident” like that witnessed in Dublin was, by definition, large-scale and unusual, and it was “to be expected” that policing would come under extreme pressure for a period only to regain strength when extra resources became available.

Such “unusual and major” incidents always presented a challenge for frontline services – policing, fire or ambulance. Local resources often came under extreme pressure initially, only to be aided by back-up arriving from further away in time.

Dr Coxhead said policing was about striking the balance between keeping the peace and preventing and solving crime through a police service that the local community wanted.

“Do the people actually want a paramilitary public order policing capability?” he said, of a very developed, permanently on standby riot-control capability. “It’s a dangerous shift to start to see the policing model slide towards more heavy-handed public order [tactics].

“And if you look across Europe it’s more difficult to revert back to a local policing model once you start to slide down that slope to what looks like paramilitary policing. The important thing [for the Garda] is to learn from what happened, but not to throw the baby out with the bath water.”

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