I lived 20 years in South Africa, one of the most violent countries on Earth, and never saw a single street fight.
I have lived 1 year in Ireland and seen two people have their heads kicked in on the street.
Tonight I walked past a man beaten till he was unconcious. I watched his head get wedged under a car tire, his torso pushed under a bumper by the force of the kicks. He went limp as two men kicked him. He was corpulent and it took many kicks to move him. They kicked him, he got to his knees and they kicked him back down.
This was in the center of Waterford, the 3rd biggest city in Ireland. The victim was Lithuanian and the attackers Russian. My girlfriend, Irish, tried to intervene and the Russians, herding her away, simply told her that the Lithuanian hadn’t paid his dues. They mentioned 20 thousand Euro and 60 thousand Euro. While one Russian was talking to her I saw the unconcious man stagger to his feet, walk around the corner and then pull a knife on two other Russians following him. They beat him back to the ground. He got up again and walked down to the quays and around a corner.
My only concern was getting my girlfriend and another friend back to our apartment just a few hundred meters away. Tomorrow we will report it. Hopefully the growing statistics on foreign-national crime will kick start the Gardae (Irish police) into cracking down on them. Till then I can only think of moving out of the city center. I don’t want to run away but there is no chance I or the few others in the area can stand up to this. These are hardened thugs from eastern Europe, they won’t think twice about silencing a few people.
A strange night really. Earlier our friend’s jacket had been stolen from Muldoons (a pub) while my girlfriends coat was close to being stolen. She had to grab the coat back from a young woman who was walking out the door. Only a few minutes later did we realise she had taken the other friend’s jacket.
It is horrible that I get to experience this in Ireland. It is sad to see the difference between poverty driven crime as we have back home in South Africa and this greedy, brutal and organised crime I see in Ireland. I have no sympathy here, there is no excuse for it.
