|
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.〔A. Jamie Saris and Brendan Bartley. "Icon and structural violence in a Dublin 'underclass' housing estate." ''Anthropology Today'' Vol. 18 (2002), No. 4, p14.〕 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 consciousness at all, it is generally through the reporting of severe problems to be found therein. Perhaps the most spectacular demonstration of this tendency in recent years is the media coverage of the serious troubles in the area around Hallowe’en 1995. At that time, the Gallanstown Housing Estate in Cherry Orchard erupted into a major civil disturbance which was described by the Gardaí at the time as an ‘organized riot.’ The photo in Figure 1 was taken immediately after the riot, and clearly some planning for (or at least expectation of) a conflict is in evidence on ‘the Red Wall’. We can read clearly, several times over, the phrase ‘Let the games begin’. As with any important event, accounts attributing both the cause and the meaning of this disturbance vary considerably. The magnitude of the incident, though, is not in doubt. On Hallowe’en night, several units of the Gardaí were lured into the area in hot pursuit of joyriders in stolen cars. They were then surrounded and driven off the street by crowds bearing rocks and petrol bombs. The Gards came back in force and were driven off the streets again. Over the course of several hours, tens of people were injured, two children very seriously, and dozens of arrests were made. In addition, a number of Gardaí were severely traumatized by these events (we know of at least three early retirements connected to this incident). Indeed, the Hallowe’en Riots are still viewed by the authorities as one of the most disturbing incidents of public unrest in the Republic of Ireland within living memory. The background to these troubles is complex, and we can only outline it here. It is generally acknowledged, however, that the atmosphere in Cherry Orchard had been tense long before Hallowe’en night of 1995. Drug dealing and joyriding had reached critical levels. In some parts of Cherry Orchard, especially around the Red Wall in Gallanstown, heroin was being dealt openly: indeed, people were being ferried to Red Wall from all over the city and from up the country to buy illegal substances. One group of individuals, in particular, were pointed to locally as being centrally connected to a wide variety of criminal activities, especially drug dealing. They seemed better organized than most other groups, with an older set of men who had some criminal connections (some of them had done jail time). They also possessed strong local kin connections in a population that had only recently been moved into the area from all over the greater Dublin area. Around these men was a larger set of younger members with only loose affiliation to the group. Their leader was a charismatic figure in his own right: to this day, some find him very threatening, while others openly admire and respect him. This younger group enjoyed their local notoriety, styling themselves ‘The Red Wall Gang’ after their favourite hanging-out spot. But however important ‘The Red Wall Gang’ might have been in the area’s, and indeed the nation’s, drug problem, there is no doubt that by 1995 their eponymous pile of bricks had become one of the central nodes in a nationwide market for illegal substances. Drugs were one aspect of a bigger problem, however. In our interactions, many residents articulated a feeling that they had been substantially abandoned by the state and the broader society, that Cherry Orchard had become the designated ‘skip’ of Dublin Corporation, the last stop on the line before final eviction from the system. Garda interactions with the community became progressively more strained from the late 1980s, as police, largely from rural or more middle class backgrounds, began to conflate all activity 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 enemy and their civilian sympathizers. In short, the Gards believed themselves to be to be involved in a war that they were in the process of losing. As one policeman recalled the situation to us, ()e made the mistake of allowing the minority to turn this into an enclave where ‘anything goes’, the strongest survive, the weakest go down. Now, that is the perception that the criminal element had. ()nce they got into their stride (), the stakes were increased as time went on. Until people said ‘this is a no-go area’. The section of the Gardaí that was most committed to a warfare model of policing saw the riot as a providential opportunity to develop more heavy-handed tactics. Some police, for example, ‘leaked’ to the media that the Hallowe’en ‘attack’ had resulted directly from a misguided community policing initiative. They claimed that this initiative had been infiltrated by criminals for the purpose of gathering information about policing policies, organization and activities, information that was then used by the ringleaders of the local gangs orchestrating the rioting. Specifically, these Gards pointed to a group of local youths with criminal records, known as WHAD (We Have A Dream, a title borrowed and adapted, of course, from the Martin Luther King speech), some of whom had a peripheral association with the Red Wall Gang. WHAD is a grass-roots initiative founded in 1988 to provide at-risk youth with some structure to help them avoid getting further into trouble. Hitherto, this group had been seen in a very positive light. In the event, the charge that they were some kind of criminal fifth column was subsequently described in another media report (Irish Times 1995) as ‘factually inaccurate and a misplaced criticism of local community groups’. According to this report, as well as local historical memory, only one of the participants in WHAD was caught up in the Hallowe’en Riots. All accounts agree, however, that the Hallowe’en Riot was a turning point for the whole of Cherry Orchard. The Gardaí decided that they could no longer afford to be as alienated from the community as they clearly were. Other state bodies were also prodded into embarrassed action to salvage a situation that seemed to have spun completely out of control. Dublin Corporation, for example, began proceedings to evict those tenants whom they (and many locals) saw as the most troublesome. At the same time, local activists were frightened into an uneasy alliance with state organizations, despite their severe reservations about many of these bodies. From early 1996 this alliance began to cast around for ‘a way to put the riots behind them’. It was eventually decided that, to symbolize the new birth of the area, the dreary walls in and around the housing estates of Cherry Orchard, which had hitherto been little more than 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 of WHAD. At this point, events took another turn. In the spring of 1996, some months before the murals were painted, but following the advent of a much more intense, some would say harassing, police presence in the area, a sometime member of WHAD, Mark Hall – an enjoyable young man from all accounts, possessed of an infectious sense of humour and a God-given facility for hot-wiring cars – died tragically on the main western thoroughfare into and out of Dublin, at the wheel of a stolen vehicle. This seemingly garden-variety road accident had a profound and unexpected effect on Cherry Orchard’s youth. Mr. Hall’s funeral turned into a major community event, attracting hundreds of local youths, the majority of whom would scarcely have known him. As one of our consultants remembered things, The whole area, I mean, it was like a silence that came over them and you would just see gangs of them linking () one another – boys and girls, walking around. You wouldn’t see one or two of them, just these massive gangs, and the silence that came over them. The girls were more inclined to be crying and the lads just walking around in groups – not doing anything, just being. Within days of this incident, moreover, Mark’s death had been radically refigured. Rather than a senseless death due an unfortunate combination of speed and bad luck, the story grew that Mark’s car had been chased by the police, and that it was this hot pursuit that had forced him to accelerate to his doom. None of our local consultants were able to cite the source of this rumour, but they all agreed that it almost instantaneously became common knowledge among the more alienated youths of the area, many of whom would, again, scarcely have known Mark. The first public pronouncement of this new ‘truth’ was accomplished with paint. Within a couple of weeks of Mr Hall’s funeral, the slogan ‘Mark Hall was killed by the Gardaí’ went up prominently on the Red Wall. This simple declaration was almost immediately contradicted – again, with paint. Within a week, Mark’s mother Dolores took matters into her own hands, personally effacing this revisionist version of events that she felt intruded on her family’s private grief. As another consultant, a friend of hers, said, She had enough of the nonsense. Well I mean, she had a lot to deal with and the last thing she need was them using her son an excuse to have another riot. This painting and repainting, however, once again brought the problem of the subject matter, as well as the authors, of the planned murals, to the forefront of many people’s thinking. An effort was then made to displace WHAD from their position of preeminent mural designers and executors by the Red Wall Gang, who argued that they had the best claim to ownership of that particular wall at least. They put forward the case that the most appropriate subject matter for a painting on it was the regular discrimination and occasional incidents of outright violence that they felt they had experienced at the hands of the Gardaí. In short, they seemed to be saying that while Mark Hall might not actually have been killed by the Gardaí, he was the sort of person who could have been. Those connected to the Red Wall Gang (and some others), therefore, argued that their sense of being at the sharp end of state violence was the element of their experience that was most relevant for ‘community’ representation. Since it had no standing with (indeed was feared and disliked by) the middle-class professional-led community groups organizing the mural-painting, the Red Wall Gang was institutionally sidelined from the start. Its savvy leader, however, had one play left in him. Rechristening himself and his colleagues as a community group, ‘Gallanstown Vision’, they made a seemingly quixotic attempt 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 Community Development movement in poor neighbourhoods in present-day Ireland (Saris and Bartley 2000b). However, this stroke of insight came too late to earn him a place at the mural-planning table. The community groups pressed ahead, figuring that they had won a struggle to get noncontentious. 〔 ==References== https://www.google.ie/#q=A+Jamie+Saris+and+Brendan+Bartley+red+wall+gang http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/just-14-gardai-on-duty-during-night-of-attacks-26789397.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.00139/abstract 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Red Wall Gang」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|