A feral society… coming to a street near you soon.

Last Sunday I was on my way into Dublin city centre around 1 o’clock in the afternoon. I was walking up along Foley Street which runs parallel to Talbot Street. The whole of this area has been redeveloped and is now filled with offices, apartments and even some sort of dance centre. Anyhow, towards the end of the street there was a large gang, perhaps twelve or fifteen kids, all male, in or around their early to mid teens. And in front of them, some way ahead was a man, perhaps in his early thirties. As I drew closer it was obvious that they were following the man, albeit at a slow pace and as I drew even with the man I could see that one or two them were throwing what looked like bits of wood and stuff off the pavement at him. He wasn’t quite running but he was moving fast. They didn’t follow him, but turned off a new side street, but not before one of them had come a little way forward and thrown a hard red ball at him. His face was something to see, completely contorted with anger.

Now all this took place in maybe a minute or a minute and a half. And was entirely silent except for something I didn’t catch the last kid saying.

The man didn’t appear anything out of the ordinary, and it was almost impossible to say if he were Irish or not. At a push I’d maybe say he was Eastern European. But as a little scene of an unhinged fury and feral behaviour it was quite something.

Should I have called the Gardai? Perhaps, but it was literally over almost as soon as it had started and they had completely dispersed literally within seconds.

What was remarkable was that there was a fair number of other people around on the street at the same time. At least five or six including a family and other adults and yet all this remained entirely uncontained. The kids simply didn’t care who was there or who saw them.

Now it’s not as if where I live doesn’t experience this sort of behaviour, and the recent fatal shooting of an adult allegedly by teenagers in the North inner city took place only a short way away from where I live, but violence directed at adults is very very rare. Usually its teen on teen. And even that seems to have diminished, perhaps naturally, over this Winter compared to others.

Sure, there are plenty of flats around the area I was walking through at the weekend and it is indeed a place where people live, so the reality is of crossing turf.

But in the city, in a busy enough part of the city and at that time…

The possible xenophobic aspect is concerning but, on reflection, the whole thing is concerning.

Granted, that was one – arguably anomalous – incident I saw but I couldn’t help thinking about something that montevideo had mentioned over the past week and I quote:

One things for sure, ‘breakfastrollman’ hasn’t been filling the coffers of Statoil/Topaz recently, ask the counter assistants. That demograph, the general op construction worker, is sitting at home or on the street corner, munching Kellogs now. As the evenings lengthen, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when idle young men with no money are wandering through the city and suburbs of our urban centres. That’s going to a challenge for all sides to deal with. ICTU have suggested in the ten point plan that a retraining scheme giving 80% wages to workers engaging in structured upskilling funded in part from the public capital programme is the way to go. What else is going to take young men off the streets? No ones recruiting, and there’s no where to fly to. Interesting times…

There is no doubt that the current economic crisis is going to be extremely difficult for both left and right in terms of how expectations that previously existed have now been effectively sunk and how large numbers of young men, only a little older than those I saw on the street on Sunday, are now facing then prospect of diminishing opportunities for employment.

And let’s not pretend that the pre-existing situation was rosy. Any of us who have any contact with the problems of providing education in communities which the Celtic Tiger avoided will be aware that the demands placed on the education system and teachers both ordinary and special needs by behaviours not significantly less extreme than those I saw are so great even during a time of supposed plenty as to potentially be severe enough to cause it to buckle. Employment has provided a respite for some of the teens who have found themselves trapped in that particular social problem. A means, as it were, to find an even keel eventually.

That employment is going. And perhaps that is one of the reasons the government is taking such pains to stress employment and how they’re trying to save jobs. It’s not that long since we saw the unprecedented scenes of the main street in the capital being almost literally torn up during the Love Ulster riots. And that was during the height of the boom.

Nowhere to fly to indeed.