A 35-year-old Congolese shoplifter named Yves Sakila died after being restrained by security guards in Blanchardstown, Dublin, and before the post-mortem results were even dry — showing no signs of foul play and no visible injuries — an Irish senator had already convicted everyone involved on camera. The racial grievance industry has officially gone international, and Ireland is its newest franchise.

Because why let an autopsy get in the way of a perfectly good narrative?

Senator Eileen Flynn wasted no time. At a vigil in Merrion Square, she declared that "seven men" had "murdered a black man" and that Sakila would not have died if he were "white." No evidence. No trial. No conviction. Just a senator with a microphone and an agenda, doing her best Al Sharpton impression for the cameras. She even added that "Yves died a hero, his name will live on in legacy in this country." A hero. The man was shoplifting.

Let that sink in for a moment. The post-mortem found zero evidence of foul play. Zero visible injuries. And yet Senator Flynn stood in front of a crowd and called it murder. In any functioning society, that's called defamation. In Ireland's current political climate, it's called leadership.

The state-funded Irish Network Against Racism — yes, state-funded, your tax euros at work — piled on immediately. INAR released a statement claiming the incident "appears to have the hallmarks of a case of excessive use of force" and that "the death of a black man in such circumstances is extremely worrying." Appears to have the hallmarks. That's doing a lot of heavy lifting for an organization that apparently can't read an autopsy report.

As The Spectator's Michael Murphy pointed out, what we're watching is the Floyd playbook being imported wholesale into a country where the demand for racism far exceeds the supply. Ireland's political class and media establishment — led by state broadcaster RTE — are desperate to manufacture a racial reckoning, evidence be damned.

And the timing is no accident. Ireland's Taoiseach Micheal Martin and the political establishment have been pushing a progressive diversity agenda for years now. A dead black man restrained by white security guards is exactly the kind of incident they needed to justify expanding the racial grievance infrastructure. The fact that the autopsy doesn't support the narrative? Irrelevant. The narrative was set before the body was cold.

What makes this even more grotesque is what Ireland's activist class chooses to ignore. Murphy noted the case of Alexander Coughlan, a 37-year-old insurance worker who was murdered — and nobody marched. Nobody held vigils in Merrion Square. No senator called it a national tragedy. Then there's Yousef Palani, an Iraqi-Kurd who murdered two gay men in Sligo in 2022. And Riad Bouchaker, a naturalized Algerian migrant who attacked victims that same year. Where were the protests? Where was Senator Flynn's outrage?

Nowhere. Because those victims didn't fit the template.

That's the thing about the grievance industry — it doesn't actually care about victims. It cares about useful victims. Yves Sakila, a shoplifter who died with no visible injuries on his body, is useful. Alexander Coughlan, stabbed to death, is not. The selection criteria isn't justice. It's narrative utility.

Ireland's "racism tsar" Dr. Ebun Joseph and the entire INAR apparatus exist for exactly this purpose — to find racism where it doesn't exist and amplify it until the government has no choice but to respond with more funding, more programs, and more speech restrictions. It's a self-sustaining grift, and Sakila's death is the fuel they've been waiting for.

We watched this movie in Minneapolis. We know how it ends. Billions in property damage, cities burned, police defunded, and crime rates that took years to recover. Ireland is watching the same film and somehow thinks it'll have a different ending.

The autopsy said no foul play. The senator said murder. Guess which one the media ran with.