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My colleague Fatima Gunning sat through almost two weeks of often-harrowing evidence in the trial of Riad Bouchaker, an Algerian man living in Dublin who launched a ferocious, sustained knife attack on terrified small children at a primary school in Parnell Square.
Many of those who witnessed the horror on November 23rd 2023 found it deeply upsetting to remember and recount it more than two and a half years later in the court. It was the stuff of nightmares. A man wielding a 36-inch knife – the packaging was still in his rucksack – wildly slashing at screaming, petrified children.
We know from a witness in the case that Bouchaker had been seen muttering about “Shit Irish, shit f**king Irish” before he went to stab 5-6 year old children in Parnell Square. We know that he went looking for a school on a day when he was angry after he received a letter asking for documentation from the Department of Social Protection. We know that gardaí put it to Bouchaker during questioning that he had first visited a different school where the children were “taller, bigger, older than the ones you attacked”.
“You thought of attacking these children. I believe you were about to attack these children, but you believed that it was too risky, so you weighed up your options”, Detective Garda Gary Moran said to Bouchaker. “You believed this was too risky an attack, the children were older, and they were in the presence of adults, this is a thought process.”
Bouchaker’s own counsel acknowledged to care-worker Leanne Flynn that the weapon used “an utterly terrifying knife” and that “you could run that knife straight through the body of a five-year-old child”. Despite that, Ms Flynn didn’t hesitate. She launched herself at the attacker, desperately trying to save the children – some of whom had frozen in terror, as she screamed for help, and almost lost her own life in the process.
She was stabbed in the back by Bouchaker who then threw her across the pavement while he turned again on the children. Her injuries were severe: including a severed diaphragm, two collapsed lungs, having to have her spleen removed, and an injury to her stomach. She underwent two emergency surgeries, and has been unable to return to work. Yet even as her lungs were filling with blood, as she struggled to breathe, she tried again to stop the attempted murder of small children.
Warren Donohoe, an largely unsung hero, was the first to take the Algerian attacker down. Like the others, including Caio Benecio, who intervened, he had no thought for his own safety. Their actions would restore your faith in the world.
The most seriously injured of the children was left for dead by Bouchaker, who stabbed her in the heart in the frenzied attack. When Dr Michael Boyle, the head of the neonatal department at the Rotunda Hospital, rushed to the scene and saw the little girl “on the ground with grey skin and no pulse”, he thought she was, in fact, dead. She survived, but has been left with catastrophic injuries, cannot speak, cannot walk and has no control over her hands or arms, is tube-fed and left with a life-limiting severe physical disability. Her traumatised parents are caring for her and living with the horror of what was inflicted on their family.
Bouchaker is an immigrant to Ireland, and like so many migrants who come before the Irish courts, he has been living in this country for years claiming social welfare benefits and failing to contribute to Irish society – while the ESRI and the Irish media insist that we should be eternally grateful for their presence. (Matt Treacy’s takedown of that recent report from the ESRI which received such lavish media attention is required reading).
The Parnell Square knife attack presents a real problem for the media who are marching almost entirely in lockstep on the issue of immigration. At first they deny migrant crime, then they excuse it. And finally they tell us, when children are slashed and traumatised and slashed, we awful, violent, dreadful Irish are actually just as bad.
In yesterday’s Irish Times, Opinion Editor, Jennifer O’Connell wrote that there was “nothing un-Irish about the violence Bouchaker unleashed on Parnell Square that November afternoon”. But she is wrong.
The attack was unprecedented. A man has never attempted to murder random children in a primary school in Ireland before. It simply never happened prior to 2023 in this republic. It is “un-Irish”. But we have no guarantee now that it will not happen again. Yet instead of having a realistic, informed conversation about migrant crime, the media reaction is to accuse Irish people of being just as bad.
The beheading of two men in Sligo, Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, by a Muslim fanatic, Yousef Palani, who targeted them with “unspeakable violence” because they were gay, is also un-Irish. Yet the media tried to make that about the homophobia of Irish people, just as they tried to make the horrifying murder of teacher and musician Ashling Murphy about the misogyny of Irish men.
O’Connell pointed to three recent instances in Ireland where men had carried out appalling acts of violence against women and children, though in one of those cases involving a garda, the man actually has a Easter European surname. The same absurd argument was offered in the media when a Sudanese man was caught on video in a horror attack in Belfast, as if we can’t be upset about stabbings and near-beheadings by some migrants because some Irishmen are guilty of terrible crimes.
What kind of nonsense is that? First of all, at a time when we should be trying to tackling femicide and violence, how can it possibly help to import more of that sort of crime? And how can it help when we open the doors to cultures where women are treated appallingly and where rape is barely considered a crime?
And secondly, people become angry at especially vicious and unprecedented migrant crime precisely because it is the government’s failed immigration policies that have brought so many of said criminals here – and there are tens of thousands who have entered this country without a passport, not to mind our knowledge of their criminal records, or even if they have one.
In the meantime, the media keep calling people racist if they are upset, and are now telling us that random attacks on primary schools where innocent, terrified children are stabbed and almost murdered is not un-Irish. But is is.
Many people are coming to the inevitable conclusion that we can’t distrust most of the media enough. Maybe that’ll become an Irish thing. And the establishment media will only have itself to blame.
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