The Irish blogsphere is already awash with eyewitness accounts of what happened in the city centre on Saturday so, in the typical style of this blog, let me give you the anti-eyewitness report…
I’d like to believe I was the only person in town who was toddling about blissfully unaware of what was going on in O’Connell and Nassau Streets but, judging by the happy relaxed faces that I remember all around me, I was very much not.
I’d arrived in Jervis Street around twelve and over the next 4 hours sauntered (in true Dublin fashion) from Arnott’s through Temple Bar over to Nassau Street back up by Tower Records and up to the top end of Dame Street. By the time I went into Oxfam Books on Parliament Street (and scored the first Fountains Of Wayne CD for €6 btw!) their radio filled me in on everything I needed to know.
Though I’d like to tell you that I put my online journalist head on and bravely headed right for the centre of the trouble with my cameraphone I have a very healthy sense of my own self-preservation and in particular the preservation of my wife… All I knew was that there were rioters in town and that cars were being set alight on Nassau Street and I wanted to be as far away from whatever it was as I could… Sorry, does that ruin some Charlie Bird-esque illusion of me you had…? 🙂
In retrospect there was a weird vibe to town; a fair few sirens more than usual, the garda plane in tight circles above and, later on, far fewer cars on the road then there would normally have been. I suppose your head just doesn’t expect a riot in town on a Saturday…
So, much as I’d like to have juicy shots of street violence for here like the ones in the Metroblog Flickr group, all I have to offer are the two I took below:
The top one was a portrait that took my eye just off a perfectly functioning Nassau Street (I thought it looked like a thinner me; turns out it’s Seamus Heaney!), the second is one of the tiny metal pails they use for holding sugar in the Queen Of Tarts. Sorry. Seems like the unerring Dublin instinct for sniffing out and rubbernecking trouble failed me miserably… Well, my dad is from Offaly…
Glad to see on Sunday morning though that the tabloids hadn’t missed out on the biggest story of the year:
Well, most of them anyway…
R