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- Q7305204 subject Q16814190.
- Q7305204 subject Q8554229.
- Q7305204 abstract "The Red Wall Gang was a drug dealing/joyriding gang that operated in the Cherry Orchard area of Ballyfermot in west Dublin from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. By 1995, the red wall around which they gathered was a major hub in Ireland's illegal drug trade. They are known for the area's 1995 Halloween War with the Irish Garda, The trouble in Ballyfermot was organised by local criminals who, gardai say, are intent on setting up a no-go area in Cherry Orchard.The area has a history of violence towards both law-abiding residents and gardai. On Halloween 1995 gardai learned of another concerted attempt to kill or injure gardai and they mounted a major exercise involving up to a hundred gardai.They also enlisted the help of Dublin City Council to put up concrete bollards on roads around Cherry Orchard to reduce dangerous driving by joyriders in stolen cars.The criminals involved had hijacked a JCB digger with the intention of ramming and wrecking garda vehicles..Drugs, deprivation and structural violence.When Cherry Orchard intrudes on the Irish national consciousnessat all, it is generally through the reporting ofsevere problems to be found therein. Perhaps the mostspectacular demonstration of this tendency in recent yearsis the media coverage of the serious troubles in the areaaround Hallowe’en 1995. At that time, the GallanstownHousing Estate in Cherry Orchard erupted into a majorcivil disturbance which was described by the Gardaí at thetime as an ‘organized riot.’ The photo in Figure 1 wastaken immediately after the riot, and clearly some planningfor (or at least expectation of) a conflict is in evidence on‘the Red Wall’. We can read clearly, several times over, thephrase ‘Let the games begin’.As with any important event, accounts attributing boththe cause and the meaning of this disturbance vary considerably.The magnitude of the incident, though, is not indoubt. On Hallowe’en night, several units of the Gardaíwere lured into the area in hot pursuit of joyriders in stolencars. They were then surrounded and driven off the streetby crowds bearing rocks and petrol bombs. The Gardscame back in force and were driven off the streets again.Over the course of several hours, tens of people wereinjured, two children very seriously, and dozens of arrestswere made. In addition, a number of Gardaí were severelytraumatized by these events (we know of at least threeearly retirements connected to this incident). Indeed, theHallowe’en Riots are still viewed by the authorities as oneof the most disturbing incidents of public unrest in theRepublic of Ireland within living memory.The background to these troubles is complex, and wecan only outline it here. It is generally acknowledged,however, that the atmosphere in Cherry Orchard had beentense long before Hallowe’en night of 1995. Drug dealingand joyriding had reached critical levels. In some parts ofCherry Orchard, especially around the Red Wall inGallanstown, heroin was being dealt openly: indeed,people were being ferried to Red Wall from all over thecity and from up the country to buy illegal substances.One group of individuals, in particular, were pointed tolocally as being centrally connected to a wide variety ofcriminal activities, especially drug dealing. They seemedbetter organized than most other groups, with an older setof men who had some criminal connections (some of themhad done jail time). They also possessed strong local kinconnections in a population that had only recently beenmoved into the area from all over the greater Dublin area.Around these men was a larger set of younger memberswith only loose affiliation to the group. Their leader was acharismatic figure in his own right: to this day, some findhim very threatening, while others openly admire andrespect him. This younger group enjoyed their local notoriety,styling themselves ‘The Red Wall Gang’ after theirfavourite hanging-out spot. But however important ‘TheRed Wall Gang’ might have been in the area’s, and indeedthe nation’s, drug problem, there is no doubt that by 1995their eponymous pile of bricks had become one of the centralnodes in a nationwide market for illegal substances.Drugs were one aspect of a bigger problem, however. Inour interactions, many residents articulated a feeling thatthey had been substantially abandoned by the state and thebroader society, that Cherry Orchard had become the designated‘skip’ of Dublin Corporation, the last stop on theline before final eviction from the system. Garda interactionswith the community became progressively morestrained from the late 1980s, as police, largely from ruralor more middle class backgrounds, began to conflate allactivity in the area into ‘street culture’ and ‘criminality.’Thus, the local penchant for track suits, sovereign rings,and particular hairstyles became the uniform of the enemyand their civilian sympathizers. In short, the Gardsbelieved themselves to be to be involved in a war that theywere in the process of losing. As one policeman recalledthe situation to us,[W]e made the mistake of allowing the minority to turn thisinto an enclave where ‘anything goes’, the strongest survive,the weakest go down. Now, that is the perception that the criminalelement had. [O]nce they got into their stride [pause], thestakes were increased as time went on. Until people said ‘thisis a no-go area’.The section of the Gardaí that was most committed to awarfare model of policing saw the riot as a providentialopportunity to develop more heavy-handed tactics. Somepolice, for example, ‘leaked’ to the media that theHallowe’en ‘attack’ had resulted directly from a misguidedcommunity policing initiative. They claimed thatthis initiative had been infiltrated by criminals for the purposeof gathering information about policing policies,organization and activities, information that was then usedby the ringleaders of the local gangs orchestrating therioting.Specifically, these Gards pointed to a group of localyouths with criminal records, known as WHAD (We HaveA Dream, a title borrowed and adapted, of course, from theMartin Luther King speech), some of whom had a peripheralassociation with the Red Wall Gang. WHAD is agrass-roots initiative founded in 1988 to provide at-riskyouth with some structure to help them avoid getting furtherinto trouble. Hitherto, this group had been seen in avery positive light. In the event, the charge that they weresome kind of criminal fifth column was subsequentlydescribed in another media report (Irish Times 1995) as‘factually inaccurate and a misplaced criticism of localcommunity groups’. According to this report, as well aslocal historical memory, only one of the participants inWHAD was caught up in the Hallowe’en Riots.All accounts agree, however, that the Hallowe’en Riotwas a turning point for the whole of Cherry Orchard. TheGardaí decided that they could no longer afford to be asalienated from the community as they clearly were. Otherstate bodies were also prodded into embarrassed action tosalvage a situation that seemed to have spun completelyout of control. Dublin Corporation, for example, beganproceedings to evict those tenants whom they (and manylocals) saw as the most troublesome. At the same time,local activists were frightened into an uneasy alliance withstate organizations, despite their severe reservations aboutmany of these bodies. From early 1996 this alliance beganto cast around for ‘a way to put the riots behind them’. Itwas eventually decided that, to symbolize the new birth ofthe area, the dreary walls in and around the housing estatesof Cherry Orchard, which had hitherto been little morethan convenient graffiti canvases, were to be repainted by‘the youth of the area’. In the event, the ‘youth of the area’turned out to overlap substantially with the membership ofWHAD.At this point, events took another turn. In the spring of1996, some months before the murals were painted, butfollowing the advent of a much more intense, some would say harassing, police presence in the area, a sometimemember of WHAD, Mark Hall – an enjoyable young manfrom all accounts, possessed of an infectious sense ofhumour and a God-given facility for hot-wiring cars – diedtragically on the main western thoroughfare into and out ofDublin, at the wheel of a stolen vehicle. This seeminglygarden-variety road accident had a profound and unexpectedeffect on Cherry Orchard’s youth. Mr. Hall’sfuneral turned into a major community event, attractinghundreds of local youths, the majority of whom wouldscarcely have known him. As one of our consultantsremembered things,The whole area, I mean, it was like a silence that came overthem and you would just see gangs of them linking [with] oneanother – boys and girls, walking around. You wouldn’t see oneor two of them, just these massive gangs, and the silence thatcame over them. The girls were more inclined to be crying andthe lads just walking around in groups – not doing anything,just being.Within days of this incident, moreover, Mark’s deathhad been radically refigured. Rather than a senseless deathdue an unfortunate combination of speed and bad luck, thestory grew that Mark’s car had been chased by the police,and that it was this hot pursuit that had forced him to accelerateto his doom. None of our local consultants were ableto cite the source of this rumour, but they all agreed that italmost instantaneously became common knowledgeamong the more alienated youths of the area, many ofwhom would, again, scarcely have known Mark.The first public pronouncement of this new ‘truth’ wasaccomplished with paint. Within a couple of weeks of MrHall’s funeral, the slogan ‘Mark Hall was killed by theGardaí’ went up prominently on the Red Wall. This simpledeclaration was almost immediately contradicted – again,with paint. Within a week, Mark’s mother Dolores tookmatters into her own hands, personally effacing this revisionistversion of events that she felt intruded on herfamily’s private grief. As another consultant, a friend ofhers, said,She had enough of the nonsense. Well I mean, she had a lotto deal with and the last thing she need was them using her sonan excuse to have another riot.This painting and repainting, however, once againbrought the problem of the subject matter, as well as theauthors, of the planned murals, to the forefront of manypeople’s thinking. An effort was then made to displaceWHAD from their position of preeminent mural designersand executors by the Red Wall Gang, who argued that theyhad the best claim to ownership of that particular wall atleast. They put forward the case that the most appropriatesubject matter for a painting on it was the regular discriminationand occasional incidents of outright violence thatthey felt they had experienced at the hands of the Gardaí.In short, they seemed to be saying that while Mark Hallmight not actually have been killed by the Gardaí, he wasthe sort of person who could have been. Those connectedto the Red Wall Gang (and some others), therefore, arguedthat their sense of being at the sharp end of state violencewas the element of their experience that was most relevantfor ‘community’ representation.Since it had no standing with (indeed was feared anddisliked by) the middle-class professional-led communitygroups organizing the mural-painting, the Red Wall Gangwas institutionally sidelined from the start. Its savvyleader, however, had one play left in him. Rechristeninghimself and his colleagues as a community group,‘Gallanstown Vision’, they made a seemingly quixoticattempt to obtain official recognition and funding. In itself,this tactic says something about the ubiquity as well as the ideological and material preeminence of the CommunityDevelopment movement in poor neighbourhoods inpresent-day Ireland (Saris and Bartley 2000b). However,this stroke of insight came too late to earn him a place atthe mural-planning table. The community groups pressedahead, figuring that they had won a struggle to get noncontentious.".
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- Q7305204 wikiPageWikiLink Q8554229.
- Q7305204 comment "The Red Wall Gang was a drug dealing/joyriding gang that operated in the Cherry Orchard area of Ballyfermot in west Dublin from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. By 1995, the red wall around which they gathered was a major hub in Ireland's illegal drug trade.".
- Q7305204 label "Red Wall Gang".