A little girl – a ten year old child – has allegedly been the victim of a serious sexual assault in Citywest by an African asylum seeker, and already the media are pivoting to make the story about a “significant Garda” presence being required to deal with the locals who dare to protest or be distressed and terrified at an outcome they knew, and they warned, was inevitable.
Just as with the horrendous murder of Ashling Murphy, and the slashing of terrified small children in Parnell Square, they will scramble to make this about anything other than the violence that has over and over again been shown to be associated with transient populations and clashing cultures. Expect lots of talk about the mental health issues of the murderers and rapists, and warnings about the dangers of the far-right. The political and media establishment are utterly disgusting.
I’ve thought a lot since last Friday about Vadym Davydenko, the 17 year old Ukrainian who came to this country and was placed in asylum care operated by Tusla and who was then, within four days of his arrival, murdered after being subjected to an extremely violent “frenzied” stabbing. A Somalian youth, also an asylum seeker and described as a minor, has been charged with his murder.
Vadym was stabbed more than 100 times, with multiple wounds to his face, head, eyes, hands and chest and the “post-mortem took over seven hours to complete due to the sheer number of injuries sustained”. I keep thinking of his mother and father learning that about their boy: the agony, the anguish of knowing that he was killed so savagely.
This is his photograph. He was a handsome boy with his life ahead of him. His family and friends described him as as “bright and kind”. The crime reporter Paul Reynolds said that many Ukrainian teenagers who were approaching their 18th birthday had fled Ukraine in order to avoid being conscripted to the fierce fighting in the war. He may have fled to Ireland to avoid almost certain death. Yet death found him here.
But it is not an Irish man who is charged with killing Vadym. The fact that the person charged with his murder is an asylum seeker illustrates a deeper systemic failure: people are being admitted into the State without reliable identification or vetting, and then placed into accommodation settings with no meaningful oversight. Whatever the outcome of the trial, this case has exposed how the asylum system now operates as a trust-based entry mechanism with no safeguards for the communities expected to absorb the risk. And so many are drawn here by our reckless and unsustainable asylum policies, and the knowledge that this country will not only let you in without a passport or identification, but won’t check to see if you have a criminal background, a failure that NGOs and politicians then misled the public about.
You’ll be housed and minded and given a medical card and lots of free stuff for years at cost to the Irish taxpayer, even if you have come from a safe country or passed through other EU countries seeking – and being refused – asylum there.
You can always pretend to be a minor, as the State is aware that’s been happening for years but have done nothing about it except to allow even more fake asylum seekers in and house them amongst fearful communities who the agents of the state have arrested, pepper-sprayed, and beaten down if they protested, while the media vilified them as racists and bigots.
It’s racist and far-right, you see, to think that maybe, just maybe, a giant asylum centre hosting hundreds of strange men in a small village is a threat to the safety of the people who live there. The people of Saggart told a packed meeting held to oppose the continued use of Citywest as a IPAS centre this summer that they had been “victims of harassment, stalking, violence”, with one woman saying that she had “been chased by a group of men home and filmed” and that when she went to the Garda station, her complaint wasn’t recorded.
Where was the “significant” Garda presence at Citywest yesterday morning when a child was being sexually assaulted? Where are the angry, passionate statements from the National Women’s Council or from the TDs and Senators at the inevitable outcome – the horror – of the disastrous policies that they all cheered? Will this be a question on RTÉ’s Presidential debate tonight? Where is the apology to the people of Saggart who never wanted to be proved right, and who are sickened and upset and angry and fearful at the attack on a 10-year-old girl in their previously peaceful, safe village?
They peacefully protested and signed petitions and held meetings and disrupted traffic and expressed their legitimate concerns and did every right, and not only were they dismissed and ridiculed, the government – having given the owners hundreds of millions for accommodating what we know are mostly economic migrants pretending to be asylum seekers – decided to actually buy Citywest at the inflated price of €148 million so that the situation could continue permanently.
That’s the level of disrespect and contempt the Irish political establishment has for its people. Lots of hot air about our “international obligations”, but the actual obligation of government to its own people matters not a damn. This should no longer be a issue that divides along political lines, along left and right, or other increasingly irrelevant factions. Identity and culture and history and connection are all vitally important considerations in regard to migration and population change, but surely a basic, fundamental right of every person is to be safe, not to be stabbed as we go for a run, not to have our 10-year-old daughters sexually assaulted in the grounds of an asylum centre run by the government.
But instead of outage and condemnation today from the government and the opposition we’ll have the insistence that we are imagining the never-ending parade of court appearances by asylum seekers and migrants – sometimes only in the country a wet day – accused and found guilty of rape or sexual assault or violent crime. We’ll have the usual muted coverage from RTÉ and then a long interview from some appalling, self-righteous NGO apparatchik lecturing us about “disinformation” or some other bullshit. We are increasingly expected to ignore the evidence of our own eyes.
The vigil for Vadym Davydenko heard that “we will not forget” and that “we will not be silent. His story must be heard so that no other child suffers the same fate”. But that will only happen if we push back. The media wants you to forget, in the same way that the children stabbed in Parnell Square were taken off the front pages for a story that better suited their narrative; just as Ashling Murphy’s brutal murder by a Slovakian became a moment to denigrate Irish men.
Ryan Casey, Ashling’s beloved boyfriend spoke for many when he posted last night: “What is happening to our country…a 10 year old child…..Our women and our children are not safe in this country anymore! They simply do not feel safe! This is utterly heartbreaking, infuriating and completely unacceptable! How can they allow this to happen?”
We don’t know the identity of the little girl who was allegedly sexually assaulted by a monster – because men who sexually assault children are monsters – and we never will for obvious reasons. What is known is that an individual currently charged with allegations of sexual assault was accommodated here through the asylum system. Whatever the outcome of that case, the fact that unvetted adult males are being placed into residential facilities beside families and children is a policy choice – and it is a policy that repeatedly creates risk. How many more warnings does the State intend to ignore before it accepts responsibility for preventing harm instead of reacting after it occurs?
We know this will keep happening until radical and necessary change occurs. How many more victims do we need before we say enough is enough?