'Let’s fight the real enemy' says Cork-based Fahmeda Naheed, following Dublin riots

THURSDAY, November 23 was a black day for Ireland, its communities, agencies, and all those who believe in peace, love, and care.

I have been living in Ireland for 15 years and have not seen such a series of events, ever. My wish is it will never happen again in any part of the world. It has been traumatic for all ages and genders - children, youth, men, women, professionals, and activists - and its further impacts will be analysed in the coming years.

I have since read many perspectives and opinion pieces and discussed with individuals their understanding of the incidents in Dublin that night. I heard political, cultural, religious, civic, and many other perspectives on the day’s events.

I was travelling to Galway on the day for a project commitment when I heard the news. All I wanted to do was to quickly finish my work and return home to be with my kids.

It was not yet clear what exactly was happening in Dublin, and a lot of misinformation was already circulating. 

I have to say it was one of the toughest journeys I ever made.

I was thinking about my five-year-old child, and my heart felt like it was crying. On the bus, the radio was giving updates on what was happening in the streets of Dublin. Only two days previously, I had been walking the same Dublin streets at the same time. I was imagining the situation there. It was very distressing and disheartening.

The following day, I had to go to Mallow for an award-receiving ceremony. I didn’t want to go, but I gathered my energy, attended the event, and drove back home at midnight.

On the 40-minute drive, I was thinking of the child who was in a critical condition in the hospital and other wounded children, adults, and police officers who were receiving treatment in hospitals as a result of attacks.

It took three days for me to process and rationalise my thinking about how I experienced these events as a migrant living in Ireland. There are many to blame for this situation. I have been personally directly targeted by the far right. On a number of occasions, friends notified me about information shared online about me, including threats to kill me, people calling me a ‘Paki’ and telling me to leave Ireland. All anonymous accounts of course. This was a very hard time for me.

I accessed counselling to help me cope with what this brought up for me. My best support came from my friends and other people I know who had faced similar online hate in the past. It felt like I had to put myself back together many, many times.

It is important for me to reflect on this process now, in the context of where we are today in Ireland. I started thinking about Sinead O’Conner and decided to share my thoughts.

Thinking about Sinead as a warrior, a white Irish mother, an activist, and a reformer, I reconnected with her call to ‘fight the real enemy’. The real enemy is disguised in many forms. When hate has taken shape in our daily lives, the enemy has nothing to do. By simply sewing seeds of division, it can sit back and watch as we destroy ourselves in division: migrants vs. locals; whites vs. blacks; white collar vs. blue collar; lower-salary persons vs. higher-salary earners; men vs. women; social status vs. values; looks great vs. looks ugly; LGBTQI+ communities vs. non-LGBTQI+ communities; my faith vs. your faith; my nationality vs. your nationality, and many, many more – the opportunities are endless.

It is those who create and benefit from such social and racial divisions who are the real enemies. The situation helps no-one but those who wish to gain power by spreading hate.

We can label a group of people who did damage on Thursday, such as the teenagers who came out and damaged properties in Dublin city centre. Those teenagers have no understanding of what they were doing; many are puppets of some powerful people who have no other agenda except to weaken the economies.

The damages to public property will be recovered from the public funds, which could be saved for an educational project. The impacts on the environment in Dublin city were huge. A massive clean-up operation was needed and the building infrastructure was altered.

The loss to businesses and trauma to people, to communities, to the Irish nation will endure. Ignorance and blatant racism, under the guise of ‘protecting the Irish’, was a card well played.

So the real enemy here is ignorance, mind- sets, ideologies that promote hate, faiths that cause civilizational classes, and political narratives that deform societies and distort the integrities of communities. When hate is preached publicly, actual lives are put at risk.

The education system needs to be re-evaluated, and parenting can also be questioned: does the modern education system teach the modern needs of communities and active public participation; does it question the traditional school of thought that defines what Irishness and patriotism are; do schools teach children about caring for their environment; do we engage with our youth effectively and create dialogue?

Those who were causing damage on the streets were trained and nurtured in such circumstances, which caused hate and wrought destruction.

We have to talk about the educational opportunities and training we all benefit from. A real question should be asked: have we really educated our youth and graduates from university about how to assess the real needs in our society and communities?

There is misinformation and hypocrisy about ‘migrants taking jobs’ while the economy relies on the migrant workforce and we all benefit, the spreading of misinformation that ‘refugees are taking your houses’ that goes unchallenged. Who benefits from this misinformation, is the question. This is the real enemy we have to talk about.

We have seen the worst forms of hate against women. 

The whole nation still feels the pain of Ashling Murphy’s murder. We have to find and address the causes of gender-based violence, which is a global challenge.

Again, the real enemy is the doctrination against women and those who do not consider themselves engines of change. They are still reluctant to create a better and safer environment for women and are trying all they can to keep them limited —those are the real enemies!

Above all, scenarios like we saw in Dublin last week require us to question ourselves.

Society and its development is not the job of a few. All of us are answerable for our actions and contributions to the shaping of society to greater or lesser extents. Rather than blaming others, why not create environments where we can have open dialogue? Ask those who are sitting next to you or in your community who love to preach such hate. That person can be from any segment of society.

Abuse takes many forms and adds to the disparities which cause frustration, and poverty strengthens the hate. We have 18.5% of the Irish population recorded as having a mental health disorder, such as anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or alcohol or drug use.

Mental health issues have impacted and fragmented our communities and created further divisions in society. Drugs and youth problems need to be addressed from a prevention as well as intervention perspective.

We need to ask about fair distribution within the economy, opportunity, and credit. 

We need to remind everyone that we are all migrants with temporary residency in this world, and that our existence will only be glorified by our actions and positive contributions.

We are all making history - our actions today are the words of tomorrow’s history books. We need to retrieve the legacies of our ancestors who made Ireland a beautiful and spiritual country. We need unity and not divisions. Divisiveness is only colonial propaganda that sets up one group as superior to another. Good and bad guys are everywhere, but the choice is ours to become the good guys!

We need national conversations - in our homes, in schools, in communities, in cafes and workplaces. The best thing that we can do is to address the real enemy and stop accusing each other.

We know we will win; we have confidence in the victory of good over evil; we fight the real enemy. It will be a process, solutions are not possible overnight. We need well-resourced communities and support of marginalised groups. We need to address the issues fully and face them, with goodwill and investing love in our hearts - kindness is education.

We should not ignore the warnings, or create gaps in our societies and communities, which are filled by hate.

MORE ABOUT FAHMEDA

Fahmeda Naheed, who lives in Cork city, is a Project Assistant, at Doras Luimni (Human Rights Organization). She is a poet, researcher, and writer. She is an Ambassador of Schools of Sanctuary and Founder of the Pakistani Community of Cork (Lord Mayor Award Winner 2023). She is also a member of the Ethnic Minority Domestic Abuse Observatory and a Co-Chair of the Cork Three Faith Forum. She is the tutor of Fusion Cooking with Cork City Partnership. She is a former Garda Staff and writes for the Garda Review. She runs her own radio show Let’s Integrate with Cork City Community Radio every Saturday live. She is currently working with Doras on the SALAAM.