By Conor Humphries
DUBLIN, May 21 (Reuters) – Hundreds of people protested outside Ireland’s parliament on Thursday to express outrage at the death of a Congolese-born man after he was restrained outside a Dublin department store in an incident some compared to the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Yves Sakila was detained by security guards on one of the capital’s busiest shopping streets last Friday in connection with an alleged shoplifting incident, police said. He became unresponsive at the scene and was later pronounced dead.
A video of the incident widely shared later on social media showed Sakila being pinned to the ground by at least five men for almost five minutes as bystanders watched.
Two of the men held his face to the ground and at one point one of them appeared to kneel on his head or neck for a few seconds.
“We call this a George Floyd moment,” said David Kaliba, a 35-year-old physics student who went to a north Dublin suburban high school with Sakila, referring to a Black Minneapolis man killed by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for several minutes during an arrest in May 2020.
VIDEO HAS SHOCKED NATION
Floyd’s death fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and sparked protests across the country against police brutality and racism.
“I can’t believe it happened in America in 2020 and happened in Ireland in 2026,” said Kaliba, who like Sakila moved to Ireland from the Democratic Republic of Congo at a young age.
He described his former classmate, whom he said worked in IT before becoming homeless more recently, as a quiet and shy person who was not aggressive.
“When you look at that video, it literally is like a reenactment of what happened to George Floyd,” said Yemi Adenuga, a spokesperson for Black Coalition Ireland.
Adenuga, a councillor for the governing Fine Gael party who became Ireland’s first elected Black female politician in 2019, said the government had failed to put provisions in place to properly integrate the country’s rising number of immigrants and that this was “a recipe for chaos, anarchy and apathy”.
There has been a sharp rise in anti-immigrant protests in Ireland in recent years. Anti-immigrant activists helped trigger large-scale rioting in central Dublin in 2023, close to where Sakila died.
The video of his death has shocked the nation and been described by lawmakers in parliament as “distressing” and “disturbing”. Prime Minister Micheal Martin repeated calls on Thursday for a thorough investigation and said the manner in which Sakila died has caused huge concern across society.
The protesters outside parliament chanted “no cover up, no delay”. Some held signs saying “Justice” and “cead mile failte (the Irish phrase for welcome) is for everyone”.
Police said on Thursday that a post-mortem examination had been completed and that the results are not being released for operational reasons.
(Reporting by Conor Humphries; Writing by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Chiara Rodriquez)
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