Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
Observers of mainstream media among you may have been astute enough to note the rapidity, and forensic detail, with which the Irish mainstream media has been covering those charged with incidents related to protests at asylum accommodation centres.
Names, addresses, and even photographs of those charged have been published, at no small cost to the media organisations who have made an editorial decision that these cases deserve the highest level of coverage and scrutiny.
In the case of the protest at Ballyogan, the media clearly prioritised the case, giving significant coverage to those who have been charged in relation despite those people having been charged, for the main part, with fairly minor offences.
In almost all of the cases before the court, those accused do not face serious charges. It is fairly typical for protesters, convinced of the validity of their cause, to impede an entrance: think of pickets placed on workplaces in labour disputes, for example. And protesters also typically fail to obey a garda order when that order would effectively bring their protest to an end.
These are not charges which arose because of violent conduct then, yet the system moved at lightning speed to have these people before the courts, and the media duly obliged by making a major news story of their alleged minor transgressions.
Of course, court reporting generally reveals names and addresses of those charged. Fewer reports use photographs of the accused because there are many cases before the courts and no one platform could possibly cover them all. Let’s just say it’s an editorial decision to use the services of a court reporter and photographer to give the kind of comprehensive report we saw this week on minor alleged offences at this stage in the process, and it might be possible to infer something from that decision.
Yesterday, RTÉ carried a report which provided the names and details of nine persons who appeared at Dún Laoghaire District Court having been arrested at a protest outside a new accommodation centre in Ballyogan, in south county Dublin. They were all charged with public order offences – and one man was further charged with possession of a Stanley knife.
The public order offences, as reported, involve “impeding the passage of a person and vehicles in a public place, as well as failing to comply with garda directions.” Eight were granted bail while the person charged with possession of the knife must await a decision on his application following Garda objections to all nine being granted bail.
RTÉ also reported on the charging yesterday of four other persons who had been arrested at the protest on Wednesday afternoon and who appeared yesterday evening at Dublin District Court. They were also charged with public order offences including impeding the passage of a person or a vehicle and failing to comply with a Garda order to leave the location.
RTÉ and the Irish Times helpfully added photographs of the four men charged on Wednesday evening. Good enough for the ‘far right’ was certainly the verdict of the far-left if comments on social media are anything to go by. Similar coverage – and reaction from the left – was seen in regard to the Newtownmountkennedy protests.
One cannot help noting the irony of lads and lasses whose profiles would indicate that they are Well Hard revolutionaries now being on the side of “The Man” and the “Pigs” when it comes to this. Lads and lasses whose iconography is replete with the likes of Ché and – in the case of those keeping alive the flame of the “undefeated army” (they just gave up rather than got beat; I know, I was there) – Bobby Sands and other ghosts of a long gone revolutionary past.
Mind you, they have a reason to be pleased. The far-left and the not-so- far-left invest considerable resources – quite a lot of it on the taxpayer’s tab – to monitoring political enemies. The purpose of this is what is known as “doxxing.” Doxxing is where someone collects personal and identifying information on a person and then publishes it without their consent on social media.
The real purpose of doxxing by the left is often to try to get the person’s employer to sack them. Sometimes the social media doxxing is accompanied by the direct sending of the information to the employer or whoever it is that the doxxer wishes to form a poor opinion of the target with the optimal aim of having the person sacked or otherwise inconvenienced. Where the far-left has a recognised paramilitary faction, as it certainly does in Ireland, then doxxing might even lead to a physical attack on the target.
I am not accusing RTÉ and others of having any such motives, of course, but questions surely must be asked about their alacrity and thoroughness in supplying the details of persons arrested and charged with incidents related to protests against accommodation centres, when resources would be stretched in providing such details on many others who have been charged with other offences.
Charged, remember, not convicted. The 13 persons arrested at Ballyogan have not been convicted.
Indeed, the coyness of the mainstream media as we know extends also to persons who have been convicted where it is felt that such details might possibly aggravate the audience or conflict with the narrative. We know that from the reporting of a high profile murder trial that did result in a conviction last year.
That’s without getting into the sort of sub-Prague-1958 code that you must be able to decipher when you read headlines that deal with crimes committed by recent immigrants or transgender persons. A headline saying, for example, that a “Dublin woman” has been convicted of a crime could mean an Irish woman has committed a crime, but it can occasionally mean a foreign man, who happened to be transgender and living in Dublin, has.
And yet the same intrepid reporters will bravely let the country know the names, ages, addresses and likenesses of persons charged because they were arrested at a protest.
A protest, by the way, which the organisers claim was peaceful: and of which video footage might suggest that the protestors are not the only ones with questions to be asked about their conduct.
This will close in 10 seconds