When I got a call late on Wednesday night, 7 November, from a contact telling me about a woman who had died in hospital in the west of Ireland – having been miscarrying an unviable foetus and having asked repeatedly for a termination – I suspected it could be a big story. If it were true, the political and constitutional implications for Ireland were enormous. What I was not prepared for was how the death of this young Indian Hindu woman would cause consternation across the world.
Abortion is absolutely the most emotive, divisive issue in Irish society, cleaving not only political parties, but workplaces, groups of friends and even families. Successive governments have avoided confronting it, avoided its reality in Irish society – more than 3,000 women a year leave Ireland to have an abortion, usually in England – and avoided acknowledging it through the provision of legislative leadership. The death of a woman in such circumstances was probably inevitable given the lack of clarity about when an abortion is or is not legal here. Savita Halappanavar's death has been explosive.
These were the words of Kitty Holland in 2012, when she had broken to story of the death of Savita Halappanavar, who died of Sepsis due to Ireland’s broken health system.
The health system got none of the blame of course, the Catholic Church did, unborn children did and eventually the 8th Amendment, which guaranteed a right for mother and child to live. It was then removed by a hysterical public which had been convinced that the 8th Amendment was the cause of every grudge that anyone had ever held.
The Repeal of the 8th Amendment was supposed to herald a bold new era of post Catholic utopia, instead it has ushered in a dystopian authoritarianism where free speech is banned, emigration is encouraged and social cohesion is completely eradicated.
On 23rd November, that hollow ‘victory’ was exposed for the emptiness that was within.
Schoolchildren in Dublin were stabbed by an Algerian immigrant, what ensued were incensed riots by Irish people who had grown sick of the current regime.
One cause of anger in wider society that has been forgotten about has been the refusal of Irish journalists to report on a speech from the following week from Ryan Casey, the boyfriend of murdered teacher Ashling Murphy. You can read the full statement here.
Murphy’s murder at the hands of unemployed Slovak migrant Jozef Puska shocked the country, with journalists originally reporting a ‘strangling’ only for it to transpire that she had been stabbed in the neck almost a dozen times.
Despite her death being a significant story followed by an unprecedented outpouring of grief, Casey’s jaw dropping statement was ignored by Irish journalists, who are always reluctant to print anything critical of the government. Casey was even subjected to harassment from left wing activists, one of whom tweeted that someone should have told him to ‘shut his racist hole’.
In the wake of the attacks in Dublin last week, Savita journalist Kitty Holland appeared on British television and revealed that Irish journalists thought it was ‘incitement to hate speech’ and associated it with the ‘far right’.
The video is horrific, but it is a summation of the past 5 years and of the growing elitist authoritarianism that is being committed against Irish people by the government, the media and others in authority.
Perhaps with each stabbing attack, each riot, each call from politicians to shoot civilians in the head, people will question what happened in the past 5 years and seek to change course in the coming 5 years.
