nightly violence on dublin's luas tram system

For the third time in my life I rode the Luas, Dublin's white elephant tram system, this evening.
The Luas will one day be remembered as the high water mark of Irish delusionalism.
Our governments paid billions of dollars to their supporters in the construction industry to build it.
Its two tram lines crater the city, making a vast feeder network of roads useless for cars, vans, and lorries.
Instead, a city that desperately needs to do business has been all but paralysed by an outmoded transport shibboleth that does nothing except make the now defunct Green Party feel good about itself while facilitating heroin addicts on their nightly forays in and out of the city from Fatima Mansions.
I kid you not.
I boarded the tram around 8pm well before dark.
The carriage seemed peaceable and hushed.
One stop after I boarded, a family group of people exited.
I had not noticed them.
They had been assaulted.
The man was wiping blood from his bald pate.
He had a gash in the back of his head.
So that's why the carriage was hushed when I boarded.
I'd missed the action but arrived in time for the aftermath.
At the next station to the one where the blood spattered family exited, four Luas security staff stood gallantly on the platform, veritably preening in their finery.
Their black flack jackets were shiny and unstained.
Not a drop of blood on them.
I couldn't resist staring at them a tad pass remarkably.
I was thinking: You people should be standing in these carriages not on the platform.
One of them saw me.
With the superb unerring instinct of an Irish law enforcement professional, he leaned into the carriage and demanded of no one in particular: "Everything all right here?"
I was thinking: "You're a bit late mate."
But I said nothing.
A Dublin man told the shiny happy flack jacketed security men, all four of them, that someone had been assaulted and had exited at the previous stop.
The tough but untested and eternally idle, security men essayed interest.
The train moved off.
Still no security men on board.
A brawl broke out a little further up the carriage.
Beside me a woman spoke into her mobile phone: "They're fighting again."
Her voice sounded as dead as Ireland's legal system.
The brawling youths spilled onto the platform at the next station.
A few more youths got on.
They stood in the aisle, talking loudly and aggressively.
I moved up the tram.
Ireland is going under before our eyes.