“This just goes to show how far we have to come yet on tackling homophobia in Irish society”.
That was a common refrain, yesterday, in the aftermath of the nasty and unprovoked attack on Mark Sheehan, a 26 year old gay man, in Dublin City on Sunday Night. Mr. Sheehan was on a Dublin Bus with friends when a gang of young people decided to have some fun by tossing homophobic slurs in their direction. Mr Sheehan chose to challenge them. He received a headbutt for his troubles.
Acres of column inches have already been devoted to this, relatively minor, assault. Calling it minor, by the way, is in no way an attempt to minimise it: It is minor not in its impact on Mr. Sheehan, but in the context of Dublin’s raging epidemic of scumbaggery and thuggery after dark. And most of those column inches have missed the point.
Calling it “homophobia” and suggesting that homophobia is the problem suggests that attacks like that on Mr. Sheehan could be prevented if the perpetrators were sat down and compelled to sit through a few seminars hosted by BeLongTo and Dublin Pride. It is true, as a friend on twitter said, that the attack will have been experienced by Mr. Sheehan as homophobia, but it is not true that homophobia is the root cause of this behaviour. If Mr. Sheehan had been fat, he may have experienced fat-slurs. If he had red hair, he may have been mocked for that. If he was a migrant, we may be hearing today about a racist attack instead.
The proximate cause is not homophobia, or racism, or fat shaming – though our NGOs are eager to highlight those things in order to secure more money to combat them. The root cause is an epidemic of lawlessness.
The people who assaulted Mr. Sheehan have no fear of getting caught. If they do get caught, they have no fear of prison. If the Gardai bring them all the way to court, chances are they may get suspended sentences. The practical consequences for behaving like a thug, as a young person in Ireland, are non-existent. The most we will do, as a matter of policy, is to give some money to another middle class NGO to focus on “education”.
Meanwhile, we had this, yesterday, from Fine Gael Senator Barry Ward:
However, Fine Gael’s Barry Ward, who works as a barrister and a senator, said that while crime certainly exists in Dublin, it is far safer than comparative cities.
“If you look at any metric of policing or the level of safety in a large capital city like Dublin, it compares incredibly favourably to any city in Europe,” Senator Ward said.
“I can’t think of any capital city in Europe that is as safe as Dublin is – which is not to say that Dublin doesn’t have problems, it’s not to say there isn’t criminality, it’s not to say that people don’t from time to time feel unsafe and with justification.
There are two things to say about that: The first is that it’s telling that “relatively better than Paris” is about the height of Fine Gael’s ambition for Ireland’s capital, in terms of law and order. It is not a whole lot of comfort to Mr. Sheehan, or other victims of crime, to be told that their assaults were statistically less common than assaults in Rome.
The second thing to say is that that the statistics in a way are less important than the cultural rot that Fine Gael is overseeing: It doesn’t matter to me – and I suspect it does not matter to other voters – if there are slightly fewer gurriers in Dublin than there are in Madrid. It does matter to me, as a law abiding citizen, that these people have been given, essentially, free reign to behave as they wish. It does matter to me, and to others, that very often it feels as if the entire apparatus of the justice system is on the side of the gurrier, not the victim. Mr. Sheehan – and I mean no offence to him by saying this – is just another assault victim. We would not know his name, I promise you, if he was straight. The media interest in his tale is connected entirely to the perceived hate crime element of the attack on him. Were he just another bloke punched in the mouth in a random attack in Dublin, journalists would not care.
And the Justice system would not worry, especially. We would still hear more useless calls for “early intervention” and “more resources” to tackle the problem posed by underprivileged young people. But the real problem is that these people should be facing the consequences of their actions, and they are not.
Dublin has a Gurrier, not a homophobia, problem. And my friend Jason O’Mahony was on the money yesterday, when he said this:
This is why FG are in trouble: their gut response is tell their core voters that it's they who are wrong. There is a massive opportunity for Sinn Fein to outflank Fine Gael on (deep breath) law & order. FG seem to be going full "Downfall" bunker on this issue. https://t.co/sXssEkdlRs
— Jason O’Mahony🇮🇪🇪🇺🇺🇳🖖 (@jasonomahony) August 16, 2022