Thomas Niland is 73 years old. He lives alone in a “quiet” part of rural Ireland, near Skreen, in County Sligo. By all accounts, he is a quiet and decent man. To the people who attacked him, all of these things made him a soft target. On January 18th, they forced their way into his home, viciously and violently assaulted him, and tied his shoelaces together so that he would be unable to move fast enough to raise the alarm. Mr. Niland managed – on a cold and wet night – to crawl, on his hands and knees, to the nearest roadside, where he lay until somebody noticed him, and was able to raise the alarm.
All of this happened four weeks ago, today. Nobody has been apprehended for the attack on him, which yielded, of course, only a small sum of money for the thugs who carried it out. Mr. Niland remains in hospital and there are now – according to the Irish Times – grave concerns for his life.
All of this happened six days after the brutal murder of Ashling Murphy. As is right, Ms. Murphy’s murder horrified the nation, and sparked one of Ireland’s patented “national conversations”. In a sensible and just world, what happened to Mr. Niland should do the same.
After all, much of the coverage of the Murphy murder rightly focused on how vulnerable women are, and feel, when they are outdoors, alone. We heard many of the fears women have – footsteps behind them on a pavement, carrying keys, or some other makeshift weapon, in case the worst happens. Always having to make sure somebody knows where they are, or where they were going, in case they do not return.
There has not, though, been much in the way of discussion about the fears of elderly people living in isolated parts of rural Ireland. Every year brings with it multiple stories like Mr. Niland’s: The brutal assault on an elderly, vulnerable person, who cannot defend themselves, carried out in their own homes.
Many of us, of course, have relatives who live like this. Older people, perhaps widowed, or people who did not marry to begin with, living in old houses passed down by their parents, whose closest relatives are nephews and nieces living in cities, miles from where they are.
These people, too, live in fear. They fear the people who knock on their doors in the middle of the day, offering to fix drains, or sell them gates, or tools, or clean their windows. They worry that they might come back, later that evening, having scouted out their circumstances. For much of the last two years, many of them have feared covid, and the risk to people of their age, and lived in a kind of self-enforced isolation, with only the national broadcaster for company, warning them of more, and more, threatening variants. Many of them have circumscribed their social lives: given up mass, or their weekly bingo game, or their Friday night in the local pub.
The plight of the rural elderly does not command as much attention as the plight of the young, urban, female: It is decidedly less sexy. It provides decidedly fewer opportunities for virtue signalling. There is not much that one can muster, by way of lecturing the public to “do better”.
There are, however, things that can, and should be done.
We are, for example, in the process of providing extensive, and expensive, grants to people to refit their homes for more efficient energy. If we can afford that money, then we can surely afford to provide grants to older people in Ireland to install wireless CCTV covering the main entrances to their properties. Cameras are not expensive, and can be installed with relative ease, even in areas with poor wireless connectivity. They would act as much as a deterrent as an aid to investigators.
We could, and should, also beef up rural policing. The large rural area where this writer lives, for example, has one small garda station, with no more than a single patrol car to cover an area of several hundred square miles, which is home to many elderly people living alone. They are ably supported by a local community alert scheme, with regular texts going out to the public about suspicious vehicles, and so on: It is all very well intended. But ultimately, the local gardai themselves will openly say that they have too much ground to cover, and insufficient manpower to cover it.
And finally, we should, at minimum, reform sentencing. It would be wrong to speculate on what will happen to the attackers of Mr. Niland, if and when they are ever apprehended and convicted, but 18 months in prison is not an uncommon sentence for assaults on pensioners. It is, however, gravely insufficient. People who carry out such crimes have always planned in advance to invade the homes of, and attack, people weaker than them. The penalty should be amongst the most severe we can impose.
Most of all, though, we should be more upset than we perhaps are, by cases like these. Ashling Murphy had her whole life before her, and had it robbed. That horrified the nation. Thomas Niland has most of his life behind him, but he had – and has – every right to dignity, and respect, and safety. The image of an elderly man crawling on hands and knees to find help, his shoelaces tied together in an act of horrible cruelty, should have us determined to change something. Alas, for the moment, there is no sign that it does.