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# Cherry Orchard And The Anti-Social Behaviour of the Free State
- URL: https://aontachtmedia.ie/cherry-orchard-and-the-anti-social-behaviour-of-the-free-state/
- Published: 2026-11-08T21:08:47.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-08T21:14:38.000Z
- Description: What we are not shown is Cherry Orchard as a product of capitalism. The estate was built in the 1980s without a school, abandoned to heroin and unemployment, and left to inherit trauma, addiction, and despair.
- Author: Róisín McAleer
- Tags: Critical Analysis

I made the mistake of turning on RTÉ Radio One on the way to school this morning. Cherry Orchard, Dublin was the focus. The presenter asked what went wrong over the Halloween weekend. The news item started en route to school, and twenty-five minutes later, when I pulled up at work, it was still going strong. Burnt-out cars and fireworks were described in minute detail. The conclusion was that “these people” were the problem (whoever “these people” are is anyone’s guess). Guest contributors, including local councillors were sure to point out that “these people” do not represent the vast majority. The solution, each politician agreed, was that “we need more gardaí.”

But the real question of weekend anti-social antics cuts deeper. Who is telling this story, in whose interests, and what does it teach us about Ireland right now?

What we are not shown is Cherry Orchard as a product of capitalism. The estate was built in the 1980s without a school, abandoned to heroin and unemployment, and left to inherit trauma, addiction, and despair. It is the internal colony, you could say, a working-class community treated as a space to be managed, policed, and disciplined, just not developed.

This is the same logic the imperialist system applies globally. The Global South is structurally adjusted, debt-enslaved, and policed when its people resist. At home, working-class estates are austerity-adjusted, starved of services and policed when our youth act out the despair that capitalism produces. The recurring “anti-social behaviour” motif is a colonial technique of divide and rule. It converts the sociability of the poor into criminality, sets the “respectable” worker against the marginalised youth and prevents the working class from uniting against its common enemy.

But we must go further. The Free State is a comprador administration managing the Irish working class on behalf of Zionist capital. It facilitates US military use of Shannon Airport, participates in EU militarism, and aligns with imperialist powers while all the time claiming neutrality. It governs for Zionist vulture funds, developers, and multinational corporations while working-class communities are left to rot. The same state that criminalises young people in Cherry Orchard facilitates the passage of US troops and weapons through Irish soil, making the Irish working class complicit, whether it consents or not, in genocide, war and slaughter.

The domestic policing of the poor and the global policing of the oppressed are two fronts of the same war. The Garda Public Order Unit in Ballyfermot and the Free State’s facilitation of US imperialism abroad are not separate issues. They are the same system, capitalism in its imperialist stage managing its contradictions through coercion at home and abroad.

And what of the fake left? The Social Democrats, Labour, the Greens. They name disadvantage in speeches, express concern and call for more cops on our streets. But when disorder erupts, their practical programme becomes indistinguishable from Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. More Garda presence, more taskforces, more enforcement. They acknowledge the wound and prescribe a heavier boot.

Their betrayal is not only domestic. The fake left in Ireland refuses to challenge imperialism. The controlled opposition are currently calling for “active neutrality” but accept EU foreign policy and dominance over Ireland. The Social Democrats, Labour, the Greens, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin—they all cosy up to the EU’s imperialist project while posturing as progressive. They are social imperialists, pro-NATO, pro-Ziolensky, managing the contradictions of capitalism at home while aligning with US-EU imperialism. They cannot liberate Cherry Orchard because they are absolutely committed to the system that produces Cherry Orchard.

And listening to all of it reminded me of my own area. Here too, kids have been pushed out and even taunted for similar behaviour, making bonfires on greens. The gentrifiers, via residents’ committees and the local clean-up group, were activated, and this was how it was managed. Another tool of the state dividing and conquering working-class communities. Many community clean-up, tidy towns groups are led by compliant people who are carefully selected, appointed/annointed exactly because they will not challenge local authorities.

They arrive with their litter pickers, their Facebook groups, their high-vis vests, and a vocabulary of moral superiority. They are a “community-led” solution that is anything but. They do not organise to demand a youth centre, a playground or a future for the kids they deem troublesome. They organise to clean up the evidence of the state’s failure. The bonfire is extinguished, the burnt grass is re-seeded and the children are pushed further to the margins, their energy, their protest, their very existence rebranded as a “nuisance” to be managed.

The clean-up group, with its unspoken rule of not challenging the local authority, becomes a perfect instrument of social control. It turns neighbour against neighbour, the homeowner against the young person, the “good” citizen against the “bad.” They hold their coffee mornings and their community clean-ups, creating a performance of civic virtue while the actual power brokers like the developers circling the area, the council officials with their regeneration plans that mean displacement remain unchallenged. The gentrifiers watch from a distance, their work of softening up the community done by the very people who live there, their clean-up group a beachhead for the eventual transformation of the estate into a desirable postcode.

This is division and rule in its most intimate and insidious form. It does not need a Public Order Unit to wield the baton. It has the retired teacher with a clipboard and a stern word for a “disrespectful” teenager. The ostracism of families deemed “not our sort” is enforced not by the state, but by the community itself, trained in the colonial logic of anti-social policing. The sociability of the poor is criminalised, the young are dispossessed and the working class is fractured into the “deserving” and the “undeserving.”

So the struggle in Cherry Orchard is not distant. Maybe that’s why I kept listening and didn’t switch off the radio. It is the struggle in my own community, echoed in the glint of a broken bottle on a cleaned-up green. The fake left, with its call for “more gardaí,” betrays us here too, offering a heavier boot for our own children while refusing to name the system that stole their future. The anti-social behaviour of the state is writ local in the clean-up group’s agenda and global in the Free State’s facilitation of empire. The fight for a green to play on, and the fight for a world free from imperialism, are the same fight.

Liberation cannot be handed down from above. The people of Cherry Orchard do not need another public-order unit, another politician’s condemnation, or another politician’s sympathy. They need the resources, dignity, and power to shape their own community, and they need to link their struggle to the anti-imperialist struggle.

· Abolishing the conditions that produce despair, and not policing the despair itself.

· Breaking Ireland’s complicity in imperialism, from ending US military use of Shannon to rejecting and leaving the EU.

· Rejecting the fake left, and building a revolutionary workers’ and students’ movement that refuses to manage capitalism at home or imperialism abroad.

So while RTÉ and Leinster House focus obsessively on the anti-social behaviour of young people in deliberately deprived areas, we must name the anti-social behaviour that rarely makes the 6 o’clock news. The anti-social behaviour of politicians and puppets in Leinster House, their addiction to bourgeois power, their facilitation of US imperialism through Shannon, their acquiescence to London, Brussels and Washington, their management and betrayal of the working-class masses.

That is the behaviour we should be organising against. The struggle for Cherry Orchard is the struggle against imperialism. The struggle against imperialism is the struggle for socialism. There is no liberation from above, not ever. There is only the organised power of the working class, at home and abroad, naming the root cause and changing it from the burnt grass up.