Gavan Reilly: Helen McEntee will survive… so long as she tells the truth
Back in the good old innocent days of… two years ago, those planning a protest outside Leinster House would call up the Gardaí at Pearse Street. ‘We are organising a protest for this date,’ they might say; ‘just to let you know, in case we need to do anything in advance, if you need to send some more bodies down.’ ‘No problem,’ the Gardaí would say in reply, ‘thank you for the notice.’
That old genteel system doesn’t quite play out any more – not when the majority of protests outside Leinster House these days are organised by far right ideologues taking issue with Ireland’s broadly permissive rules on immigration. Yet, the Gardaí generally do a reasonable job of getting organised at short notice to deal with a perspective gathering. The group who protested outside the gates of Kildare Street in mid-September - remember, the ones with the fake gallows, intimating a desire to execute some of the most senior public figures in Ireland? - didn’t ring Pearse Street in advance to give polite notice of their intentions (after all, by merely enforcing the laws, the Gardaí are allegedly part of the problem). Instead, some influential far-right organisers merely announced their plans in their channels on the messaging service Telegram, which is favoured by far-right types because it has little or no oversight and moderation.
The fact the Gardaí mounted full barriers outside the Dáil gates so quickly was evidence of how they do keep an eye on the messaging channels of those far right agitators. Indeed, in the course of my professional life, I’ve come to know how keenly the Gardaí supervise certain channels as a thermometer for fringe grievances.
All of that is to say that the despicable events of Thursday night in Dublin city centre should have surprised precisely nobody – not least the same police force responsible for maintaining public order.
The aftermath of the sentencing of Jozef Puska has seen a plainly evident uptick in the concentration of bile among some. Much of this is fueled by the mistaken claim that Puska already had a criminal record before arriving in Ireland (he didn’t; rather, he was cautioned for his own sexual activity before the age of consent) - which has now the subject of a Chinese Whispers-style disinformation campaign, alleging Puska was a convicted sex offender, yet allowed to settle here under purportedly generous immigration laws.
Yet the truth is that events like the despicable murder of Ashling Murphy make the headlines precisely because their circumstances are so relatively rare: the vast majority of cases of femicide in Ireland are carried out at their home, by somebody immediately known to the victim. Statistically, the vast majority of cases are of native Irish women being killed by native Irish men.
Nobody introduced a racial or xenophobic element to the discussion about the murder of Ana Kriegel, born in Russia and adopted by a French father. Indeed, nobody was arguing that the 14-year-old who murdered Urantsetseg Tserendorj – a Malaysian woman murdered in Dublin’s north inner city on her way home from her job as a cleaner – was somehow an exponent of a savage culture incompatible with civilised western living. Yet that is the unspoken contention of those who instigated the disorder in Dublin, simply because the alleged perpetrator of one violent crime happens to be an immigrant.
The aftermath of the Puska sentencing has seen a plainly evidence increase in xenophobic chest beating – the sort that only needed some fresh trigger point to spill over into grave real world disorder. So it has come to pass.
Helen McEntee is, of course, not responsible for the behaviour of thugs on the street, but she is responsible for the political oversight of a garnish corner. It is certainly false for Drew Harris to contend that there was little to indicate the severity of Thursday’s night riots – even his own subordinates monitoring Telegram content could tell him that. For that reason, questions about his own position are entirely legitimate. It may be that, if his position is still in question this time next week, it might be the case that Harris’ ongoing incumbency is a distraction that stops the force moving on. (Then again: when An Garda Síochána is struggling to hire assistant commissioners, filling the top job might be impossible.)
Helen McEntee will probably survive longer than that. This isn’t her first rodeo: she has already come through significant scandal, over the appointment of the Government’s own attorney-general Seamus Woulfe to the Supreme Court, and lived to tell the tale. But she does herself, and the public, a disservice by labelling last week’s disorder as being somehow small scale, marginal, or physically isolated. Objectively, it was none of those three.
Nor should she and the government try to talk up the actions they will take in response. We have heard immediate references to allowing Gardaí use bodycams – legislation that had virtually passed all stages anyway, and will finish up this Wednesday. We have also heard references to the use of facial recognition technology – something McEntee’s interim replacement, Simon Harris, had wanted to include as a last-minute addendum in the same bill. It was already coming anyway.
The moral inferiority of those who caused such damage in Dublin is that their version of events, and their understanding of the world, is unmoored from reality. The worst thing that anyone in government could do now - much less the Minister for Justice - is to repeat the same mistake.
- Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Columnist for the Meath Chronicle - Column first appeared in last Tuesday's paper.