On November 23rd, 2023, shortly after 1.30pm, three children and a carer were stabbed at Parnell Square in north inner-city Dublin.
Rumours spread rapidly via social media that the assailant was foreign. Within hours the city had descended into chaos as a rioting mob set fire to vehicles, attacked emergency-service workers and looted shops.
Many workers were inadvertently caught up in events; others were part of services charged with restoring order to the city.
Two years on from the riots, some of those caught up in one of the most violent nights witnessed on the streets of Dublin in modern times tell their story.
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The senior fire brigade controller
John Reilly, senior district offer with Dublin Fire Brigade, arrived at its headquarters on Townsend Street in Dublin city centre at 4.45pm and was briefed by his colleagues on the earlier attacks at Parnell Square.
The fire brigade’s response had been rapid. Firefighters in Dublin also work as paramedics and at 1.30pm were already responding to an alarm on Henry Street. They were diverted to Parnell Square when the first call came in.
“They were on scene in just under 90 seconds, which is phenomenal,” says Reilly.
As he discussed the incident with his colleagues, he didn’t yet know of the gathering mob at the top of O’Connell Street, who had minutes before his arrival at Townsend Street blocked a Luas tram from turning on to Parnell Square, forcing it to reverse back down O’Connell Street.
“We were unaware of the gathering protests and the tram getting blocked on O’Connell Street. Obviously it had relevance for us later, but at the time, that wasn’t an emergency situation,” he says.
Given the nature of the earlier incident, they discussed potential repercussions.
“I thought, there’s a high possibility this is going to escalate.”
At 6pm Phibsborough firefighters were called to a vacant building fire just off North Circular Road, not far from O’Connell Street. They were met by a hostile crowd.
“I immediately contacted all the district officers to inform them of potential threats against firefighters and to follow all necessary protocols to ensure safety,” says Reilly. “All fire calls had to be individually risk assessed before any mobilisation.”
The next call received related to a Garda car that had been set alight. Reilly made what might seem an unusual decision given the circumstances and the potential safety risks to firefighters.
That fire engine was one of the engines that responded to Parnell Square. A few hours earlier they responded to help save the child’s life. A few hours later, the same fire engine got destroyed. It’s quite ironic
— John Reilly
“My initial response was: it was car, not a structure fire; I’m not sending anyone to it. I assessed the risk and [decided] I can’t put my crews into trouble just going in for a car, as opposed to a house, so I wouldn’t send a crew into it.”
Just a minute later, the situation changed.
“We were called again to say there was someone trapped in the car. So then, I instructed what we call a full predetermined attendance to go to the scene. That’s engines, a district officer and obviously, in that situation, the ambulance.”
A minute later, confirmation came that a garda was trapped in a van beside the burning car, which still warranted the attendance of the crews already on route, again from Phibsborough.
“The problem was the crews, as they were going in, got blocked by a mob. The first crew went in, along with the district officer [in a separate vehicle] and got blocked. We didn’t let the second crew go in,” says Reilly.
“The first crew reported that they were unable to get to the van as they were being surrounded. Their windows were being smashed. And the district officer, his windows were being damaged also.”
Reilly saw video footage of what happened next.
[ From the day after: Timeline of how the Dublin attack and riots unfoldedOpens in new window ]
“It’s very interesting to see how people think. I can clearly hear some people shouting: ‘What are you doing? It’s the fire brigade: stop.’ And they were picking up equipment that was pulled out of the truck and putting it back.
“The district officer got a heck of a fright when someone picked up a beer keg and went to throw through his window, but then another person stepped up and took the beer keg off the guy who was about to throw it.”
Minutes later, a call came through from gardaí to say the garda had been rescued from the van by his own colleagues and the car fire had not spread to the van. The badly damaged fire vehicle left the scene.
“That fire engine, the one from Phibsborough, was one of the engines that responded to Parnell Square. A few hours earlier they responded to help save the child’s life. A few hours later, the same fire engine got destroyed. It’s quite ironic.”
Reilly’s next move was to instruct all stations that fire and ambulance crews were to avoid the city centre and that any emergency requests to attend central hospitals would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
At 7pm he called the bus and tram operators.
“The Luas had been trying to stop, but obviously for the one in O’Connell Street it was too late,” he says, referring to the tram that was destroyed by fire.
“Some of the buses were also too late because they were already in the city centre. But, more importantly for me, I had to make sure that the overhead Luas high-voltage power lines were de-energised.
“I then contacted the chief fire officer to brief him on the escalation of the violence at that time.”
A few minutes later, a call came in to say another Garda car was on fire, this time at the opposite end of O’Connell Street, on O’Connell Bridge. Again, Reilly decided not to send a crew. There were “no lives at risk”, he says.
“But I instructed the district officer who was attached to headquarters to observe from a safe distance on Burgh Quay. He informed me the situation was escalating and the mob had also set a double-decker bus on fire. That’s at 7.15pm.”
The risk of sending a crew to extinguish the bus fire outweighed any benefit.
“It’s a sole item in the middle of the road – no one’s on board; it’s already ablaze; there’s nothing we’re going to do to save that bus. By the time we would drive out the gate, it’s gone.”
At 7.32pm, the first of multiple calls came in that the tram, trapped earlier on O’Connell Street, was on fire.
“The tram had been evacuated, so again I made the decision there and then we were not responding to it.”
Two minutes later, at 7.34pm the first of multiple calls of building fires were received.
“People who were phoning were not sure if the buildings were actually on fire or something behind the buildings. Some of these [fires] were what people were seeing on social media,” says Reilly.
“I realised then I needed a visual from street cameras, and the Garda helicopter before I could commit any further crews to ensure their safety. I contacted my counterpart in Garda control and requested we send them a senior fire officer to liaise. This was pivotal to our risk assessment of all fire calls from then on.”
He says he had district officers at either end of O’Connell Street so he had “eyes on the street and eyes in the air”.
At 7.40pm, Reilly was informed that the mob was making its way southside over O’Connell Bridge and splintering in both directions along the quays, and pushing forward on to the parallel streets on D’Olier Street and Westmoreland Street.
“I was concerned then that looting was going to be a high probability and premises could be set alight,” he says.
He moved some of his largest fire vehicles out of the city centre.
“I felt, as the potential for structural fires had increased, it was better to have the turntable ladders coming into the centre than getting stuck trying to get out.”
At 8pm, looting started on O’Connell Street. At 8.15pm, the mob was trying to access Arnotts department store through its Abbey Street entrance. Staff were sheltering inside.
“Now, I’ve got people possibly in buildings.”
People were also approaching the Tara Street fire station.
“There were members of the public seeking refuge in the fire station because they feared for their lives. Of course we took them in.”
From 8.20pm, calls came of fires on the southside of the city, on D’Olier Street, Essex Street East in Temple Bar, Grafton Street and South Anne Street.
There were mostly bins on fire in front of buildings.
“We checked them out; we didn’t do anything about them. They would burn themselves out.”
Also at 8.20pm, Reilly was in contact with Garda control to seek a route to the top of O’Connell Street, which had been cleared of rioters, to allow two fire engines in to extinguish the tram fire.
[ Man who started fire on Luas during Dublin riots jailed for three yearsOpens in new window ]
He made contact with the fire brigade’s social media team to inform the public of what was happening in the city and the pressure the service was under.
“I was also hoping was that people who were in the fray might see it, and just maybe, might have second thoughts. Our social media sites get a very high viewing audience normally. On that night we got over 500,000 hits – that’s phenomenal.”
Social media came into focus again at 9pm.
Reilly received reports that the Holiday Inn Express hotel on O’Connell Street was on fire, but later verified through the district officer on upper O’Connell Street and from the fire brigade’s social media that the footage was false; it was a hotel in another country.
“Disinformation was being spread by social media videos. There were reports that army personnel carriers were being deployed on to the streets, which was denied immediately by the Irish Army.”
For the next couple of hours, he continued to resist sending crews in on reports of small fires around the city.
Just before 1am, the city centre was declared safe.
“We went in at that stage to put out all remaining fires. We responded to every potential fire, extinguished the buses, the Garda car, bins, etc. The crews were out literally all night”
At 9am, Reilly finished work.
“Crew welfare was my huge concern going on all night – my priority is to ensure that everybody goes home at the end of their shift,” he says.
The firefighter-paramedic-social media manager
Trevor Hunt was on duty at Phibsborough fire station from 5pm.
“Because I run the fire brigade social media I was already aware there was tension in the city, for sure. I sensed there was going to be trouble, but I didn’t expect it to develop as it did,” he says.
At about 5.45pm, he received his first call of the night, to attend a fire at a vacant building on North Circular Road.
“We encountered antisocial behaviour as soon as we got there. We requested the guards to attend,” he recalls. “It was minor fire, and we had it put out quickly, but because of the crowd there we needed the guards, so we put it out and we left the scene.”
For much of the rest of the evening Hunt dealt with calls outside the city centre and the social media element of the riots, sifting through what was real and fake while making sure the public knew what the fire brigade was tackling.
I said to the two lads: ‘If they break through the riot police, run.’ If they had have broken through, we were gone
— Alan Somers
“One of our roles would be to put out factual information, but also that there’s a human side to the fire brigade,” he says. “We’re there for the community but we’re all from the community. At the end of the day, we all have families we want to go home to.”
When, close to midnight, the Garda gave the all clear, Hunt was part of the crew sent into the city to begin putting out the fires.
“What I saw was rubble and rubbish all over the place. There were gardaí in public-order kit everywhere. At this stage there weren’t any protesters visible, but there was an awful a lot of people trying to make their way home. People walking by who obviously had been sheltering in place for hours.
[ Running riot — Frank McNally on a manic night in DublinOpens in new window ]
“They look shocked. You could tell they’d been in town since the before the trouble started; they were carrying shopping bags. They looked out of place, to be perfectly honest with you. A stream of people coming out of the city on foot, because there was no public transport, no other way to get home.”
Most of the fires were small, he says, but there was a significant number of them.
“There was a strong smell of burning vehicles, rubber, plastics. You could see a mist in the air throughout the city centre and there were still smouldering fires, and damage to shops as well. It was surreal. We were out doing the remnants of the fires until about 3am”
For Hunt, the riots marked a turning point in how he thinks about the city.
“The work was the same – firefighters putting fires out is bread and butter. What was different was co-ordinating with the guards on safe routes,” he says.
“It was a turning point where I thought: ‘Okay, we can have this kind of disorder in Dublin city centre. We’re a European city and I know every European city has incidents like that.’ I think I realised that things that happen elsewhere can happen here too.”
The Luas driver
Alan Somers was driving his Red Line Luas tram from the Red Cow, in the west of the city, into town in the early evening. He had heard something was happening on O’Connell Street but descriptions were vague.
“We just had heard that something was brewing, but no one really knew what, or if it was serious or not,” he says.
He reached the Jervis stop in the north city centre, which seemed quieter than normal at about 6pm. His next stop was the next stop eastward, Abbey Street, on the far side of O’Connell Street.
“The signal [for the tram] is a bit back from the junction before you get to O’Connell Street, and I didn’t know what I was looking at, at first. Then I got my signal and I took off and, well, I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I couldn’t believe I what I was seeing; it was just carnage,
“In the space of 10 or 15 feet, it looked like everything was on fire – cars, buses. I think a Garda car on fire. I looked up to my left and there was a Luas that had been trapped. It was burned maybe a half an hour after I went through that junction. It was absolute madness.”
Somers’s tram made it through O’Connell Street to the Abbey Street stop a short distance past the junction outside Wynn’s Hotel. He was surprised that several passengers got off.
“I was just seeing flames and people running here, there and everywhere, and I was thinking: ‘We need to get out of here quick’.”
Somers continued down Abbey Street towards the next stop at Busáras.
“You could see little gougers just coming from different angles, running towards O’Connell Street,” he says.
Most remaining passengers alighted at Busáras and when he reached the next stop, Connolly, he stopped and switched off the lights in his tram.
“I turned the power off of the tram so it was in complete darkness. A couple of other drivers came up to me because they didn’t feel safe on their trams and we took our high vis jackets off, so we weren’t noticeable and we waited in the dark.”
Their ordeal was far from over.
“The helicopters were above us, you could see clouds of smoke. We could see there was a big gang gathering at Busáras; they were right on the junction, hundreds of them. The riot police were making a half circle around them across the junction, trying to stop them coming down Amiens Street. And I said to the two lads: ‘If they break through the riot police, run.’
“If they had have broken through, we were gone. We had a single door open, ready to run. Luckily, they were pushed back towards Matt Talbot Bridge.”
The worst thing about the night were the calls from Somers’s family.
“My mother and father are elderly; they were ringing me, my sister, my wife, my two daughters. They were all up the walls and I was trying to tell them: we’re okay; we’re grand. But all they were seeing was the stuff on the news.”
After about five hours in the tram, a Luas security team arrived to take the three drivers back to the Red Cow depot where they arrived at about 1am.
“It’s two years I know but I still remember it like yesterday. It was terrifying. I have no problem with people protesting, but these a***holes?” says Somers.
“The kid that was stabbed at Parnell Square, that was awful and that was all forgotten about because you had these a***holes just coming in and looting.”
The bus driver
At 2.30pm Rachel O’Neill was driving the number 38 bus from Blanchardstown on the western side of the city into the city centre when she was told to divert away from Parnell Square.
“I was told over the radio a serious incident had happened,” says the Dublin Bus driver.
“They never tell us exactly what it is – they don’t want us distracted when we’re driving – but when they say ‘serious’ you think an accident, someone knocked down.”
On her break, she heard about the attacks on Parnell Square. She emerged on to the middle of O’Connell Street in the early evening, and realised very quickly she wouldn’t be picking up her bus as planned from Parnell Square West.
“Nothing was moving. No buses coming down Connell Street and I could see that there was a crowd gathered at the end of the street.
I had a load of messages and missed calls from my family saying: ‘Where the hell are you? Tell me you’re not in the middle of all that going on?’ Because they were seeing videos
— Rachel O’Neill
“They weren’t rioting, nothing like that at that stage, but they were angry about what happened and rightly so – people were angry – but you could feel tension in air and I knew this was going to kick off.
“I knew I was going to get pretty serious.”
O’Neill knew it was most likely that the bus she was due to drive out of town would be diverted eastward, so she turned right from O’Connell Street.
As she walked in the direction of Mountjoy Square teenagers were passing her on bikes and scooters heading to O’Connell Street. At Mountjoy Square she was told to put on her out-of-service sign and take her bus to the Blanchardstown terminus.
At Blanchardstown, she began driving another city-bound bus. On the Navan Road, just before Cabra, she received a call from the control centre telling her to terminate the service.
“We were told we weren’t to go past Cabra Cross. There was a bus on fire in town. I kind of realised: okay, it really has kicked off.
“I got out to speak to the other drivers – we had all been told to terminate at Cabra Cross, and I saw I had a load of messages and missed calls on my phone from my family saying: ‘Where the hell are you? Tell me you’re not in the middle of all that going on?’ Because they were seeing videos.”
She had to tell her passengers the bus was going no further.
“Most of them were foreign nationals who didn’t seem to be aware of what was happening. They seemed oblivious and they were like: ‘Why are we stopping here and how am I going to get to town?’
“I was warning them about going to town because of what was happening, telling them there’s rioting going on,” she says.
“Then, there were teenagers seeing the buses, running across the road trying to get on because they wanted to go into town and see what’s going on.”
Obviously, O’Neill says, she was not going to let them board the bus.
Once the passengers had departed and the teenagers had been deterred, O’Neill and the other drivers drove their buses to the Phibsborough garage.
“There must have been about 100 drivers back in the garage then,” she says.
At around 10pm, they were told services would not resume that night.
For a while afterwards she felt somewhat edgy.
“If I was waiting to pick up a bus, I didn’t stand out on the path, I’d stand up against the railings or a wall, so I could see my surroundings.”
She looks back on the night of the riots as a “strange, random, one-off kind of thing”.
“There is some antisocial behaviour on buses, but 99 per cent of the time people are nice to me on my bus.
“What I still don’t understand is why bus drivers became a target that night. People just seemed to lose their minds.”
The shop worker
The staff door of Arnotts department store leads out to Prince’s Street, the small side street that separates Penneys from the GPO on O’Connell Street.
During the afternoon, staff were returning from breaks with increasingly dramatic stories of an incident on Parnell Square.
“It was purple-monkey-dishwasher-type stuff at first,” says Keith McGovern, an Arnotts retail assistant, referring to the phrase made popular on The Simpsons cartoon series that captures the end product of a game of Chinese whispers. Each tale was embellished or distorted by the last.
As darkness fell, the stories changed to tales of gangs on O’Connell Street moving ever closer to the shop.
“At first it was just a sense that something was coming in our direction. Then the mobs went on the move down O’Connell Street and there was a bit more panic, people starting to talk about how they would get their bus home,” says McGovern, who was working in the store’s linen department.
Being a Thursday, there was late-night opening at Arnotts, but before 7pm a decision was taken to close the store.
“Obviously there were still customers in the shop, so you have to be mindful not to create panic,” McGovern recalls.
After the store was cleared, staff made their way to the exit on Prince’s Street.
“There were gardaí at our staff door with large guns, and so that was the first shock. Some of us had cars in the car park so, maybe 20 of us went there.
“One of the girls asked me was there anywhere she could have a cigarette. I said: ‘My car is on the roof – we will go up there and you can have your cigarette’.”
McGovern and his colleague made their way out on to the roof. From there, he saw what was unfolding in the city.
“I see that view nearly every day and I often take a picture of a sunset or sunrise and it’s lovely, but this time the sky was filled with smoke and helicopters.”.
Looking down on to the street below, he could see looters trying to gain access to the shop.
“You could see them kicking in the shutters on the Abbey Street side where the men’s clothes are.”
They headed back inside but the exit had been closed, as had their access to the shop, leaving them trapped in the car park.
“It was probably only 15 minutes but it did feel a lot longer,” he says.
Eventually, security – having repelled the looters – was able to allow those stuck in the car park back inside. They joined their colleagues in the first-floor restaurant where people tried to devise plans to get home and waited to be told by gardaí they could leave the shop.
“When we walked out the door on to Prince’s Street, about an hour later, we knew it wasn’t over. There were guards everywhere, standing on each corner, directing you to the next corner, saying: ‘Don’t look back just keep going,’ almost military-esque. They would only let you down certain streets and certain directions.”
On reaching O’Connell Street, he could see something on fire on O’Connell Bridge
“There was smoke everywhere. It took a while to figure out it was a bus on fire. We were directed up towards Parnell Square, which the guards had cleared, so we had to walk past the burnt Luas,” he says.
“Most people who were on the move around there were workers looking to get home. There were maybe six or seven of us, but we could see similar people, so you might say: ‘Walk with us, you don’t walk on your own.’
“Some of the girls, I think, were very scared because they’re as Irish as me but maybe didn’t have the same skin colour as me. They would have been particularly scared.”
Eventually, they reached Capel Street. McGovern, who lives in Meath, began to walk along the Luas line towards his mother’s house near Phoenix Park.
“Capel Street was actually pretty hectic – a few what I’d call bogies around there, lads changing into shoes which obviously they didn’t pay for and discarding their old ones.”
The next day, he was surprised to see some customers in the shop.
“There’s people who won’t be stopped buying their sheets,” he says, laughing.
But other customers, particularly older people, stayed away for a year or more, he says. Many staff remain frightened going home after dark.
“As a white man, I know I have a certain amount of privilege. Some of the women, particularly from India, were quite worried about themselves, and still are.
“I would be more sad about that than anything – that our city is like that now.”
The city engineer
The persistent buzzing of his phone during a night out at the Bord Gáis Theatre alerted Dermot Collins, a city engineer with Dublin City Council, that something significant was happening.
“You should really have your phone turned off in the theatre, I know, but the nature of the job, I’m always conscious that something could be happening,” he says.
“But I never anticipated this.”
He made his way to the foyer and opened his phone. The first thing he saw knocked him for six.
“It was an image of these APCs [armoured personnel carriers], vehicles that the Irish Army use, trundling along O’Connell Street.”
The images of tanks on O’Connell Street were fakes, spread by far-right accounts claiming the Army was being deployed in the city centre.
“I knew pretty quickly it wasn’t real, but that disinformation was followed by more and more posts in very quick succession of what looked like fires on O’Connell Street,” says Collins.
He made his way up the quays, while making contact with colleagues.
“We were all trying to establish how serious this was. We didn’t have all the information to hand but we certainly knew we had something major happening.”
It quickly became apparent when he reached O’Connell Bridge there was little he could do that night. Assessing the damage would have to wait until first light the next day.
“Early the next morning I could see the road from O’Connell Bridge right up to upper O’Connell Street was severely damaged. The temperatures scorched the road surface badly,” he says.
“You want to get going straight away, but in a crisis, the first thing you do is put the kettle on – pause for a minute. We were conscious that we didn’t want to be tampering with evidence.”
After getting the all clear from the Garda, Collins began assessing the repair work needed. It would require specialist work.
“The road was so badly damaged it couldn’t be just patch repairs. We brought in specialist paving crews, on top of our own direct-labour staff.”
It turned out to be about 600sq m of carriageway.
“It was quite substantial. I was conscious we had to open up the thoroughfare for Monday to get the city going again and restore normality. It wasn’t just a transportation exercise; it was about restoring public confidence.”
As the road crews carried out their jobs, other council divisions worked around them: waste management; the lighting department replacing burnt traffic lights; the traffic department restoring the signals. More than 200 council staff worked over the following weekend.
“It was a combined effort across the organisation. I was very proud of the way we responded in not only a timely manner, but in terms of restoring confidence to the city.”
Collins says his pride at the response was coloured by the sadness about the destruction wrought on the city.
“I was shocked. I have been living in Dublin for 12 years and it’s a great city and a great environment to raise a family – that’s been my view as a Galway man coming to Dublin,” he says.
“But I was appalled, not just from a public servant perspective, but as a citizen, that our capital city was attacked like that – it really was quite upsetting.
“What emerged was an esprit de corps that we were going to work to get this done in spite of the actions of these people. We were going to get our city back running again.
“Everyone mucked in and worked seamlessly together. We had a body of work to do within a very short period of time and we got it done.”
