Attacks on Roma reveal stupidity of the mob

No bags were snatched, no one was beaten up at night, no homes were broken into and no cars were robbed.

But, all of that changed when some dastardly Roma families arrived and were given carte blanche by the powers that be to direct a massive criminal enterprise.

No matter what happened, gardai didn't seem to care. They didn't lift a finger to help an increasingly brutalised population.

True, there were a number of court cases and investigations are under way, but that doesn't prove anything.

You see, the gut feeling of some local people was that the problem was being ignored. And, everyone knows that gut feelings trump facts and statistics, so it must be true.

Anyway, to get back to the story, law and order was soon just a distant memory and Waterford was swept into an abyss of disorder and chaos. Anyone who has seen Sin City will get the idea.

Frightened and isolated, some brave souls decided to take a stand the way any self-respecting vigilante group does these days - they started a Facebook group.

Disgusted at the degree of impunity these wretched Roma were afforded to engage in criminality, posters on these Facebook groups advocated responses like "burn the cockroaches out" and "throw them in the river".

Before long, tensions had been inflamed to such a degree that a crowd of 200 people had gathered outside the homes of these families shouting things like "Roma out".

Then, a breakaway band of plucky crime-fighters, who purport to care only about upholding the law and protecting the community, smashed the windows of a house and kicked the door in.

Victory was finally theirs when a number of frightened families, including elderly women and toddlers, had to be escorted from the premises under a Garda escort for fear that they would be physically attacked.

These may not sound like the most lawful of crime-fighting tactics, but you're missing the point.

It is the Roma who are the criminals, anyone else who happens to engage in criminality in this scenario is just a concerned patriot who was driven to break the law out of desperation.

Or, at least that's the narrative that is being spun in Waterford, and elsewhere, to defend the indefensible. In reality, it takes a special kind of stupid to think that the best way the combat alleged criminality is to engage in actual criminality.

But, then again, racists are not exactly renowned for being the most rational of creatures. For them, the issue is black and white. Roma are thugs with a genetic or cultural predisposition for crime.

So, there's no need to afford them due process in which evidence is presented and their guilt or innocence determined by a court of law.

They should simply be rounded up and driven out of town. After all, why wait for a court to tell them all what they already know?

The most puzzling part of this naked prejudice is its advocates' insistence that it's not informed by racism.

Unfortunately for the "I'm not a racist, but" brigade, blaming an entire ethnic group for the sins of a few of its members is the very definition of racism.

Many of the people who were driven from their homes over the weekend have been living in Ireland for most of their lives. Some have Irish passports.

They are Irish citizens who deserve the same protections, and are subject to the same laws, as everyone else living in this society.

If the rabble-rousers in Waterford bothered to get to know their neighbours a bit better, they would know that one of the families is related to Marioara Rostas, the teenager who was raped and murdered and whose body lay in a shallow grave in the Dublin mountains for four years.

Today, that family is cowering in a safe-house, afraid to leave to buy food for their children in case they are attacked.

Tellingly, according to Sean O'Rourke's radio show, many of the so-called protesters did not want to be identified on air, suggesting they're not proud of terrorising women and children. They're right to be coy.

If anyone is giving Waterford a bad name these days, it is not its Roma residents.

It is those people who won national headlines when they engaged in mob rule at the weekend.