The Department of Justice is to spend €679,955 this year on advertising as part of the ‘Serious Consequences’ campaign to make the public aware of the legislation to prosecute people for sharing intimate images of others without their consent. The information was provided by Minister Helen McEntee in response to a Parliamentary Question from Rural Independent TD for Laois/Offaly, Carol Nolan.
While this is a serious issue, the public might wonder whether such expenditure on advertising is a truly effective measure, given wider concerns over the Government’s seeming lack of ability to tackle crime, including rising levels of sexual offences.
That concern and its connection to the Minister’s apparent regard for optics came to the fore following her walkabout in Dublin’s north inner city two days after a vicious assault on an American tourist on Store Street, close to the main local Garda station, on July 19. A flavour of that reaction has been revealed by Departmental files released under a Freedom of Information request by Ken Foxe of The Story.
The documents contain emails and one letter, along with replies from Department officials, that were sent between July 21 and July 31. An internal email from Gillian Burdon perhaps provides a succinct summary of the public pressure which the Minister’s walkabout in the company of her cabinet colleague Paschal Donohue and Assistant Garda Commissioner Angie Willis on July 21 had evoked.
One member of the public took the trouble to write in longhand and outlined their frustration and fear evinced by walking along Talbot Street and witnessing “addicts shooting up” and the “aggression in these gangs of feral youths.” The lack of a Garda presence was noted, as it was in most of the other correspondence, even in the days following the assault.
Another theme, expressed by the letter writer and others, was the lack of respect for anything, including “self respect, let alone respect for others,” and that this is connected to “the abdication of parental responsibility.” The Minister was challenged to “walk down O’Connell St alone at 8pm. I would happily do so if escorted by 2 uniformed gardaí & a male colleague.”
There is little evidence of any sympathy for those responsible or their “issues,”, and most of the emails were from people living in or with close connections to the north inner city. One irate writer stated that “These animals are not wayward kids that should be hugged and encouraged to do better. They need tough love and experience a life changing punishment as consequences!”
An elderly person, who had been on their way to meet friends who had formed a contact group during the Covid lockdown, wrote rather poetically in what might be a screenwriters note for a dystopian urban collapse movie, of how he/she had “observed a number of junkies in groups of four in pyjamas obstructing pedestrians and weaving into a shop and running out, This was at 10am.”
Several also claimed to have been strong supporters of Fine Gael but that they would no longer be voting for that party. One email referred to McEntee’s “recent focus on a Hate Crime Bill,” and contrasted that to her alleged “ignorance of the deterioration of the safety of our capital city.” One wondered what the political consequences might be:
Another person told the Minister that a person is “more likely to get arrested for not paying your Television licence than attacking someone.” There was also a claim that “I expect that if this was happening in D4, the necessary government attention would be given to the issue.”
Many people are clearly not happy about what has happened to parts of Dublin. The same would seem to apply to other parts of the state. No amount of PR will change that, unfortunately, seems to be the view of many.
