Irish Examiner view: Black November is a wake-up call for Ireland

While shopkeepers and store owners restored their premises for what should have been one of the busiest pre-Christmas days of the year, the consumer bonanza which is known as Black Friday, schools in Dublin were closing for the day

The havoc of Thursday night  was of a different and sinister order of magnitude, and has reverberated around the world to our discredit. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA

In his dark and foreboding Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Prophet Song, the gifted Dublin writer Paul Lynch envisages an Ireland which is inevitably transmuting into a fascist state. Under the disquieting and authoritarian influence of a new police force, the Garda National Services Bureau, the country is riven by riots and arrests.

The nation is still divided into the Republic and the North, with the latter fulfilling the safe space function that is provided by Canada in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic A Handmaid’s Tale. In that novel, it is women of child-bearing age who are fleeing. In Lynch’s bleak future history, it is young people attempting to avoid conscription.