On my last night in Dublin, I watched the city burn

I joined my friend at the edge of the bridge. We watched masses of black rise from O’Connell Street, meeting with the clouds overhead. We were halfway across the river, and at such a distance, only a suggestive orange glow was visible.

I want to know what’s going on. Come on.

We ducked between swarms of people with the same idea, bumping into some who were stopping to take photos. We hurried past cars with silent engines and blinking hazard lights. Angry bus drivers and hopeless commuters. The possibility of a terror attack bounced around my head, but I pushed it away. Violence didn’t fit the image I had of my final night in Dublin.

The smell of burning metal grew thicker the closer we got to our hostel. Gasoline and plastic hit the back of my throat in bitter waves. We stopped short at the sight of the fire. My hand hovered over my phone as I watched the flames rise greedily up the sides of a double decker bus. Its outer surface was peeling away like layers of sunburnt skin, and the flames seemed to tease the surrounding buildings: “Look at me, look how high I can climb!” 

Then, from deep within the bus’ bowels came a loud boom. Then another. A call to move away.

Maybe we should wait it out across the river. I saw a Maccas near Temple Bar.

At the McDonalds, we were met by a large security guard locking the door. He mouthed the word “closed” through the glass. Irritated, I eyed the customers tapping on self-service screens under the warm, artificial lighting, but the security guard had already walked away. 

We merged with a crowd of people pooling around a bus stop, feeling safe surrounded by other bodies with nowhere to go. Pubs and bars were emptying around us, and I had to swerve as I typed into a search bar: Dublin, Dublin fire, Dublin bus fire.

Abruptly, the group began to disperse. Panicked voices moved around me. I joined a group of women who were running to a nearby Krispy Kreme, with my friend close by my side. I glimpsed the swarm of young men charging around the corner, clad in balaclavas and armed with metal poles, before entering the shop and waiting for the reassuring click of a sliding lock.

The women took up positions around the shop in stunned silence. The most practical of the bunch began devising ways to get home, since public transport seemed to be down. Some were offering lifts from family members while others waited quietly for their phones to charge. I sat there listening to their camaraderie, knowing that the only place I had to go was metres away from a burning bus.

I logged into my Twitter account which I hadn’t used in years and scrolled until I found what I was looking for.

Children stabbed. Protests. The Far Right.

I skimmed through photos of riot police holding back white men with signs declaring that “Irish Lives Matter”. Dread rose from my stomach tasting of stale alcohol, an ugly reminder of how innocently the night had started.

I feel sorry for the tourists. Dublin’s not normally like this.

I looked up from my phone and gave the woman who spoke a smile of acknowledgment. Her sympathy was directed at me and my friend. We were the token tourists in this situation.

But it wasn’t us the protestors were telling to leave: holding up signs, declaring that “Ireland is full”, hoping their hate would send people running.

I didn’t belong here. This was not my home. This was not my country. I was barely feeding the economy with my hostel pasta dinners. I was taking up space on buses, trains, and trams. I was using up resources, and then moving on, bringing with me a postcard and a shot glass.

It’s times like these that I’m ashamed to be Irish.

The speaker stopped pacing and resigned herself to her phone like the rest of us. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t just Ireland; I wanted to share stories of Melbourne’s lockdown protests and neo-Nazi marches. Trump’s familiar calls to “take back our nation”, and France’s months of vicious civil unrest. Stories that made the violence outside feel further away. Stories that we normally viewed from the safety of a phone screen. That we could quickly turn off when it all felt too much.

We should call the hostel. You know, find out if it’s safe.

When we eventually began heading back to our hostel, it was at an inconsistent pace of a half-jog. The tourists and locals we’d stood shoulder-to-shoulder with only hours earlier were now gone. The bars and pubs were locked and dark. The streets were mostly silent. We quicken our pace to a run as we bypassed this ghostly alternative to Temple Bar.

As we neared our hostel, I saw the bus again. It had collapsed in on itself, no longer alight, but surrounded by layers of debris. It had burned to the point of complete destruction, the fire swallowing it up and spitting it out. I stopped to take a photo. Unlike the other travel photos that had taken over my camera roll, this wasn’t something I wanted to remember, but something I needed to capture.

As I lay in bed, I jumped between Twitter and my group chats. I saved a photo from a news article to send to my friends back home. It was weirdly cinematic, with bright flames and billowing smoke. It captured the night better than my own photo, which was pixelated and blurry.