In the wake of the conviction of Josef Puska for the murder of Ashling Murphy on January 12, 2022, it is perhaps worth recalling some of the reaction to that horrific event. For, while most people were appalled by the taking of her life, some sought to use the murder for other purposes.
Some of those people and organisations would prefer not to be reminded of how they attempted to use her killing as another weapon in their relentless onslaught on Irish society. “Our society,” as one of the participants in last night’s RTÉ Prime Time described it. Others have taken up the very same theme again in the wake of Puska’s conviction.
The extent to which the murderer, who required an interpreter and whom Gardaí described as a “waster” and a “complete sponge” who came to Ireland and was then claiming disability benefit and given a house, is part of “our society” is not questioned by those who have helped to create what it has become. Nor will they.
These things are only of interest to them when they can bend them to their own purpose. When a victim is a migrant, the motive of racism is inevitably implied, even when the perpetrator might be another migrant. Sometimes, both can be victims in the looking glass world of the Irish liberal.
At the time of the murder, there were many only too quick to claim that Ashling Murphy had not only been the victim of a random thug, but in some way the victim of Irish society – or at least the one they imagine they are in eternal combat with. A society that, to employ their own simplicities, is represented by many of the traditional cultural values clearly held by Ashling Murphy’s family and community.
The National Women’s Council of Ireland, within days of the murder, focused on the Irish education system as though either that was somehow responsible for moulding Josef Puska, or that he was in some strange way a product of that system.
Some people ran up the same flag when two .gay men were murdered in Sligo by another member of “our society” about how their deaths were the responsibility of us all, and not some individual who is the product of an entirely different culture. Apart from being evil – and therefore not the responsibility of every other person of Islamic background.
The NWCI have decided to ignore most of the facts surrounding the motive for the murder and the person who was responsible for the murder. They have opted instead to focus on “banter” as in some way connected to what happened. In case you missed that, they hash- tagged Ashling Murphy’s name to their statement. Did Puska have an interpreter for his sexist banter?
Some politicians were not slow to jump on the same bandwagon in January 2022. Fine Gael TD Alan Dillon spoke of the need for “all of us as a society to commit to lasting change.”
In a debate on the National Maternity Hospital, Galway West TD Catherine Connolly – having stressed that she wished to avoid “politicising” Ashling Murphy’s murder – went on to imply that the hospital and the murder were in some manner both related to us “not emerging from the patriarchy.”
During statements that were taken in the Dáil on January 19, 2022, the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee made the point that Ashling Murphy’s funeral was “distinctly Irish.” She referred to the music and the part that it played in the life of her family and in many other families and communities. It is something that the Minister herself, who comes from a well-known GAA family in Meath, no doubt intensely feels.
Yet there were others, and there are others, who used and continue to use the murder of Ashling Murphy and those of Aidan Moffatt and Michael Snee to attack those foundations of family and community. These commentators are people and groups of whom it is no exaggeration to say that they despise very many of the aspects of Irish culture that were clearly central to the lives of those three victims.
The victims were innocent men and women killed by men who have no connection at all to Irish culture, and indeed who clearly find themselves at odds with that culture, to the extent that they engaged in extreme violence against some of our people.
Politicians and NGOs spoke of a “culture” that had contributed to Josef Puska’s decision to murder Ashling Murphy, for no discernible motive other than he thought that he could and even believed that he had a good chance of not being caught. He knew people who seemingly were prepared to assist him in evading detection. And yet some people’s public declaration that they as people with power would no longer “tolerate” a culture in which this was possible are the same people who seem to cry powerlessness to take steps that might lessen the chances of it happening again.
People, including ministers, spoke of the need to “educate boys” about their behaviour, and it was implied by others that the education system was inculcating attitudes that if you read and listened to what was said in the context in which they were written and said clearly implied that part of the blame for Ashling Murphy’s murder lay in the Irish school system for boys. Especially within “single sex” schools.
None of that, in fact, had any remote relationship to why someone from a clearly dysfunctional background and indeed a culture that is completely alien to the culture of the Irish people did what he did.
Similarly, the Catholic Church and even the GAA and “male sports” were smeared in the course of the ideologizing and self-serving sermons from certain quarters, without any real basis for the context of their claims.
Very few TDs actually referred to practical measures such as increased sentencing. The sort of thing that politicians can actually influence but too many of them prefer grandstanding. Many of them in any event instinctively oppose tougher policing and sentencing, and oppose stricter checks on who comes to live in the state.
Of those who blatantly sought to use the murder for political purposes, Mick Barry the communist TD deserves particular mention for trying to use the murder in support of abortion and that it be used as the focus for far-left political agitation, “including strikes”.
Is nothing sacred, you might ask yourself? The answer, as we know all too well, is that nothing is sacred to those whose open and stated intent is the destruction of Irish society in order to further a political agenda that has led to countless millions of deaths through terror and starvation over the past century. Perhaps proper education on that, and not just for those in school, might not go amiss.
There are many reasons why people do evil. Most of them relate to individual nature and will and are not simplistically related to any “cultural” reason, although they clearly play a part in shaping individuals. Some cultures are, however, more violent and more violent towards women and indeed gay people.
Ireland, despite the hyperbole, has not been such a society, or at least not until recently. It is also worth recalling that there were very few murders of women, or indeed of anyone else, when the Irish state was supposedly under the iron heel of repressive patriarchal Catholicism.
In common with many of the other symptoms of social dysfunction, they are in large part the consequence not of the imposition of order, but of the loosening of the familial and community ties that underlay that order.
That is not unique to Ireland nor to any other Catholic or Christian based European society, all of which are under similar assault. To expect our deracinated and stupendously insular and parochial and historically ignorant “elites” to understand that is obviously pretty much a lost cause – like much of the social norms they have and continue to assiduously undermine.