Just over a year ago, Ashling Murphy’s family and her boyfriend, Ryan Casey, unending grief and sorrow etched on their faces, gave their victim impact statements to the court after Josef Puska had been found guilty of murder.
Puska, who had told what counsel described as “contemptible” lies to the court, was unanimously found guilty by the jury of stabbing the young teacher and acclaimed musician eleven times in the neck in a violent assault that left the country reeling – her loved ones left devastated and utterly heartbroken at the inexplicable loss of a talented and beautiful young woman with so much to give to the world.
Ashling’s mother Kathleen said that her heart broke when she heard Ashling was murdered. “My memory, motivation and drive for life is gone forever. I can’t bear it. I am no longer able for big crowds or small talk. There is such a void in our home. I’m barely existing from day to day.”
Amy Murphy, Ashling’s sister and her lifelong partner in traditional music, said that Puska had stolen Ashling’s life and robbed her of her voice. “Our love for Irish music was intertwined with a special bond, we could read each other’s mind when we played together,” she said, speaking of her “kind and gentle” sister and her “big, friendly smile” – a person who had enormously enriched their lives and was a “huge, shining light” in their community.
“Up until 12th January 2022, we saw the best in humanity, now we are cautious and nervous. Now, we look over our shoulders everywhere we go and are suspicious of strangers. It is so very difficult to trust people now. To open our door, to welcome people in,” Amy Murphy said.
She said that her family “were blissfully unaware that we were living amongst total evil and he was right under our noses in our community – practically on our doorstep in fact.”
Addressing Puska she said “crossing a national border does not automatically instil a moral code in a person. You were given an Irish welcome and supported by the state to allow you to reside here. You repaid this by brutally murdering a beautiful talented girl who contributed so much to society.”
Ryan Casey, who had met Ashling Murphy first when they were both just 15, said that they had planned to marry and build a home together. “I’d smile to myself thinking, ‘I cant wait to marry that girl’,” he told the court. “Every single plan I had for life is gone and cannot be brought back. I’ve lost everything; the pain of losing someone so important is indescribable.”
But a key part of the message of this bereft, heartbroken and courageous young man was censored by the Irish media – Ryan Casey’s profound concern for the changes in Ireland and for the safety of our people.
“It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years… over 10 years… never hold down a legitimate job, and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form … can commit such a horrendous evil act of incomprehensible violence on such a beautiful, loving and talented person who in fact, worked for the state, educating the next generation and represented everything that is good about Irish society,” he said.
“I feel like this country is no longer the country that Ashling and I grew up in and has officially lost its innocence when a crime of this magnitude can be perpetrated in broad daylight. This country needs to wake up, this time things have got to change, we have to once and for all start putting the safety of not only Irish people but everybody in this country who works hard, pays taxes, raises families and overall contributes to society first,” he added.
“We don’t want to see any other family in this country go through what we have gone through and are continuing to go through. I myself have a little sister and honestly, just the thought of her walking the streets of any village, town or city in this country alone makes me physically sick and quite frankly absolutely terrifies me as this country is simply not safe anymore! This time, if real change does not happen, if the safety of people living in this country is further ignored, I’m afraid our country is heading down a very dangerous path and you can be certain that we will not be the last family to be in this position.”
There was, according to reports, an audible intake of breath when Ryan Casey gave this part of his statement. Most media reports, as if by an unspoken collective agreement, initially either ignored or excised his compelling and hugely important words.
They didn’t want the public to hear them because all and any criticism of the government’s irresponsible immigration policies are seen as troubling to the establishment media, ever-ready and eager to describe the perfectly reasonable concerns of people around the country as ‘far-right’.
Indeed, Kitty Holland, the Irish Times journalist, actually had the gall to describe, on BBC’s ‘The View’ programme, the entirely true and heartfelt comments of Ryan Casey as “incitement to hatred” and say he was being “held up as a hero to the far-right”.
It was utterly despicable, but it was also part of the media’s ongoing gaslighting of the Irish people in relation to migrant crime.
Ashling Murphy was murdered in broad daylight by a Slovakian who had come to live in Ireland, yet the media insisted that the only issue that was worthy of discussion was the misogyny and evil nature of Irish men. Everything from Catholicism to Irish mothers was to blame for this – and almost every debate ignored the elephant in the room: if Josef Puska had not come to live in Ireland, he would not have repeatedly stabbed Ashling Murphy as she was going for a run, and she would not have been murdered on that terrible January afternoon.
Women are murdered in Ireland, too often and with rising frequency, but a woman being randomly stabbed to death in a violent attack by a stranger was never a common event in this country. Surely Ryan Casey was absolutely correct in saying that this was an issue that needed to be examined?
Instead he was attacked by a leading journalist, while the rest of the media played that endless distraction game whenever someone who has immigrated to this country commits an unspeakably violent crime.
A year and three months after Ashling was murdered, Yousef Palani, one of a Iraqi-Kurdish family who had come to Ireland in 2006 under a UN protection programme, embarked on a brutal and gruesome killing spree in Sligo. He inflicted what the judge at his sentencing described as “unspeakable violence” on Aidan Moffit and Michael Snee, two gay men he had contacted through a dating app with the intent of killing them, and seriously injured a third.
Palani decapitated one of his victims, and mutilated the body of another, actions driven by his hatred of gay men, police said. This was a hideously barbaric crime, but instead of a discussion around the potential of a creeping rise in extremism possibly driven by importing cultures very different from our own the media decided it was a time to lecture Irish people on homophobia and our supposed dark and troubled past.
One of Palani’s victims, Anthony Burke, said that the murderer had a kill list of at least twelve people. Palani pleaded guilty, which meant the court – and the public – never questioned him about what sort of extremism drove him to such violence, and the media moved on, ever-anxious to turn the public’s gaze away from the evidence of their own eyes which told them that this was unprecedented.
No one had ever before been decapitated in Ireland for being gay, yet when a member of an immigrant family acts more in common with the dictates of Islamic extremism than of our own country, that factor of the case was, apparently, not of interest. We ignore these factors at our peril.
Within 18 months of Palani’s murderous spree, another unprecedented, horrifying attack took place – this time on innocent primary school children in Parnell Square in Dublin, which left two little girls and a little boy wounded, and a heroic woman badly injured.
As I wrote at the time:
This has never happened before in Ireland, never. Small children coming out of school into the sunshine have never been subjected to a random, frenzied, knife attacks. Much like the Ashling Murphy murder, it doesn’t feel real: this further slippage into a society which seems less safe by the day.
Yesterday, two women from a nearby créche which provides after school services went to collect children from Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire on Parnell Square East. They were to walk with them the few hundred feet between the school and créche in the busy north inner city as they always do. It was just an ordinary day.
As they came out the door, these 5 and 6 year old children, they were suddenly and violently attacked by a man unknown to them, who starting slashing towards their faces, their necks, their little bodies, with a long knife – maybe ten inches long, one witness said.
Three children, two little girls and one little boy, were stabbed. One little girl, aged 5, was badly wounded and remains in a critical condition at Temple Street Children’s Hospital.
One of the women, who desperately threw herself between the attacker and the children, was also stabbed several times. She “defended those children with all her strength” one report said, and she is currently in a serious condition.
If it wasn’t for her heroism, and the incredible bravery of a passing Brazilian delivery worker, followed by the courage of others who stopped and restrained the knifeman, many more might have been injured or killed.
As it was, the medics who rushed from the Rotunda and from ambulances were met with the screams of hysterical, petrified, children who had been stabbed and terrified as no child should ever be.
It is unimaginable, horrifying, sickening. If this is our much-vaunted change, we are better without it.
But within hours of the attack Dublin was in flames, and the next morning the papers and the airwaves were full of angry headlines and vivid, stark, blown-up photos and heated discussions, and their focus had shifted, away from the stabbed children and onto the riots that followed.
That deliberate shifting of focus away from the fact that the man who was later charged with attempted murder of these children was an Algerian national, Riad Bouchaker, still continues. We’ve had endless chatter about the supposed ‘far-right’, even though Gardaí acknowledged yesterday that much of the rioting and looting was opportunistic, and as little discussion as possible about migrant crime.
While most people who come to work and live in this country are good and decent people, it is a fact that three of the most horrific crimes over three years were committed by foreign nationals, but it is anathema to even suggest that this warrants a discussion. Instead we have blanket denials from senior politicians that the surge in immigration we are seeing might have any bearing on rising rates of crime.
In fact, what most people don’t realise is that the state purposely doesn’t keep the kind of data which would allow such a fair, open and honest discussion. We produce no statistics on the nationality of those tried and convicted of crimes, whether in relation to minor offences or those of the most egregious and sickening nature such as beheading another human being, stabbing a woman going for a run, or the attempted murder of small school children.
Instead we get told that immigration has no impact on crime, despite the evidence of our own eyes, the experience of other countries, and the mounting concerns of communities like Ballaghaderreen where, like the rest of the country, locals have learned to speak in code about an increase in crime due to an “influx of people living in the area”, and the fact that there are “too many crimes”, including crimes that “no-one talked about”.
So the authorities continue to promote astroturf ‘For All’ groups and insist it is racist to say that transient populations can be more unsettled, and that a failure to integrate seems to make said populations more susceptible to criminality and anti-social behaviour. As I have said before, that applies to transient populations in general – the issue is not the colour of a person’s skin, or their country of origin – and the constant, shrill denials that there might be a problem actually leads to distrust and anger and the growth of actual racism.
The fact is that the media and the political establishment are literally gaslighting us on this issue. The ballot-box is one place where we can tell them that we’ve had enough.