Is it time to legislate against hate crimes?

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

A protest against racism in Galway in 2017

"She needs to be taken under control and dealt with once and for all.”

Against my better judgement, but with a morbid curiosity, last night I sat down to watch a live YouTube video from a former newspaper journalist who now sees herself as one of the leading lights of an “anti-corruption” movement in Ireland.

And, just over 11 minutes in, I heard her make this sinister-sounding threat against a Cork woman called Fiona O’Leary, who I have never met, but who I have known to be a campaigner on behalf of people with autism.

Fiona is a mother of five, including two autistic children.

Earlier yesterday, supporters of Gemma O’Doherty began sharing photos of her family home in rural Co Cork on social media.

During the YouTube live video, they also posted threatening messages against Fiona, the majority of them hiding behind anonymous accounts.

“A Syrian family needs that big house Fiona,” wrote one follower, who did not have the courage to go by his or her real name. “You and the assburgers (sic) will have to live in tents like the Irish people you racist!”

A little girl in Syria, which has endured more than eight years of war

How could anyone not be alarmed by such language?

How could any parents sleep well at night, knowing that they and their children have been targeted in such a manner?

Gemma, in case you have never heard of her, once wanted to be President of Ireland. She went all around Ireland late last year, trying to persuade members of various local authorities to nominate her.

She didn’t succeed in getting nominated and it’s doubtful that the few who championed her cause knew the full range of her political views.

But they should know about them now.

Fiona was singled out for abuse because she dared to contact her local hotel in Bantry to express concern that O’Doherty’s new political party, Anti Corruption Ireland (ACI), was planning to hold a meeting there. She wondered were they comfortable with far-right, anti-immigrant, and especially anti-Muslim views.

Fiona was definitely not the only one to do so, but she had the temerity to put up a short video on YouTube to announce that she had contacted the Maritime Hotel.

She recorded a short video to condemn racism and the “anti-vaccine” movement, before right-wing extremists posted photos of her home on social media.

She has long campaigned for the rights of children with autism, and against those who advocate for the use of a substance called MMS as a cure for autism.

And so she was seen as fair game for attacks on social media.

If you speak out against racism, you are now a target for the new “alt-right” in Ireland.

A version of this sign drew huge applause at the St Patrick's Day parade in Galway

Last weekend, the Sunday Business Post reported on an ACI meeting in Ashbourne, Co Meath, where about 180 people were given dire warnings about the growing Islamification of Ireland.

“There is a large Muslim community here now who the Government is bending over backwards to facilitate,” Ms O’Doherty told a meeting at the Pillo Hotel.

In her world view, immigration poses an existential threat to the Irish nation, so much so that she told the meeting that the Irish would become an ethnic minority in our own country by 2040.

Those of us who were shocked by the election of President Donald Trump in the USA in 2016 used to console ourselves that such things would never occur here.

People voted for him even after he claimed that Mexico was deliberately sending murderers and rapists to the United States.

They voted for him even after he called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, even though there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and the extremists of ISIS and Al-Quaeda only represent the views of a tiny minority.

Fascists on the streets of Charlottesville in the USA

My 20-year love of scuba-diving has brought me to places like Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, and Jordan. I have met so many Muslims who have shown me wonderful hospitality – the reality of their lives in places like Dahab and Hurghada, Egypt, and Koh Lanta, Thailand, seems so far removed from the terrible images portrayed on social media.

In Dahab, kind Bedouins used to invite me and my friends into their homes. In Koh Lanta, a Muslim island, I was one of the guests of honour at a Muslim wedding. Hatred tends to evaporate when you travel the world and actually get to know people.

We should no longer fool ourselves that fascism, hate speech and xenophobia have no place in Ireland; a country which should have a greater understanding than any place on earth of the desire of people to move overseas, escape oppression, and improve their lives.

Where would the Irish have been without the ‘coffin ships’ to North America when hundreds of thousands were dying of starvation under the British Empire in the 1840s?

How quick we can be to forget our own history, how keen some of us can be to dehumanise or demonise.

On Saturday, just hours after the terrible terrorist attack in New Zealand, O’Doherty made it clear that she was not grieving too much for 50 lost Muslim lives.

“New Zealand has all the hallmarks of a classic false flag operation to incite fresh IS attacks, create chaos and fear, allow the globalists to take more control over people and remove freedoms a la 9/11,” tweeted O’Doherty last weekend.

“A professional job. The public are no longer fooled.”

No time to pause or to think of the terrible waste of human life, carried out by a so-called white supremacist – a terrorist – motivated by nothing more than blind hatred of people he knew nothing about, many of whom had escaped war zones or poverty to build better lives.

By all means, let’s have a meaningful debate about immigration or Ireland’s place in a European Union in which the bureaucrats in Brussels seem to be very detached from ordinary Irish people.

Let’s debate PESCO and whether our ‘neutral’ nation is about to be led into a European Army.

Let’s have a debate about the Direct Provision system and whether old, converted hotels in rural Irish towns are appropriate places to detain asylum-seekers, with no right to cook or privacy, for months or years on end.

But how can anyone engage with people who call for refugees, who may have escaped from a terrible conflict in Syria, to be burned alive inside their homes as one “brave” online troll posted just two weeks ago?

That’s not a debate, that’s hate speech.

Can't imagine why people have begun to hate Muslims ... ?

Once you start to demonise minorities, or target the homes of vulnerable people who happen not to agree with you, you are descending into a terrible world of anonymous online cowards, intolerance, and hate crimes.

We now live in a country in which the same few people interview each other online every night about the Islamification of Ireland and how immigrants are posing a threat to some idealised “ethnically pure” land which probably never existed in the first place.

The comments some of them attract to their live streams belong in a sewer.

By all means, question those in authority and debate the homelessness and health care crises which have fuelled so much anger across the land.

But some of these people cannot raise any issue without punching down, attacking the easiest, most visible, and most vulnerable targets and blaming them for all our woes.

It's far easier to blame the black family down the road for the housing crisis than the landlord who owns 50 properties and keeps putting up the rent while forcing ordinary Irish people out of their homes.

BlindBoy from the Rubberbandits once described the comments section of a prominent Irish news website as a "sewer". Many of those who follow these ‘alt right’ groups are guilty of appalling online abuse which should never be given a platform.

And nobody should have to tolerate that kind of abuse from anonymous, cowardly trolls.

If the tech companies won’t regulate themselves, isn’t it time the Irish Government legislated against hate crimes?



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--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world. 

People in Galway mourning the death of an American woman
who was murdered by a white supremacist two years ago.

Different strokes

In Irish politics, a "stroker" is a person who is able to carry out secretive, illicit or underhand deals. And this week it felt as though our whole economy was based on "strokes".

It’s not every Government that threatens to take legal action because it does not want to take up a €13 billion windfall.

Especially one that was in the midst of a grave recession just a few short years ago.

But, then again, the Irish Government does not seem to be the same as any other Government on the planet.

To judge by this week’s events, they don’t really believe in the long-term viability of their economy. A small island, on the edge of Europe, clearly needs to offer generous incentives if it is to attract big business.                                                                                        

So when the European Commission declares that Apple owes Ireland €13 billion in back taxes, the first reaction of the Irish Government is to express dismay. The second is to threaten legal action against the European authorities.

In the year in which we have celebrated the centenary of the Easter Rising, which ultimately led to Irish freedom, there is an awful lot of soul-searching going on.

Perhaps it’s time to take stock and to re-evaluate our rightful place in the world.

Saying 'no' to a €13 billion windfall:
Minister for Finance Michael Noonan.

What would the men and women who gave up their lives for Irish freedom make of it all if they could see the Republic right now?

It’s been one hell of a summer. Baffling and bizarre, as the nation of ‘Saints and Scholars’ suffered two major embarrassments on the international stage.

It took the Brazilians, the people who have just impeached a president, to teach us a thing or two about how to deal with corruption.

They arrested two Irish men for the type of “ticket-touting” which seems to be taken for granted at the top of some Irish sporting organisations.

Indeed, despite some heroics on the water, the Irish made more headlines for alleged corruption by officials than the quality of the athletes who represented the country at the Olympic Games.

Barely had the country recovered from the shock of seeing two Irishmen being taken to Brazilian jails when the European Commission exposed Ireland as a ‘dodgy’ tax haven which provided “illegal” State aid to Apple for the past 25 years.

It seems that Apple, with the full blessing of the Irish Government, set up a "ghost" company to avoid paying tax in a country which is already famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) for its low corporation tax rate.

Ireland is now known throughout the globe as the country where Apple should have paid €13 billion in back taxes, but where the Government does not want this sudden windfall which could pay for the Republic’s health service for a year.

The country is now known as the place where a global multinational corporation was able to take advantage of “incentives” or “tax breaks” which were not available to others.

The company paid just €50 in tax for every €1 million in profit it made after setting up a HQ in Cork.
According to the European Commission, Apple owes the Irish €13 billion because it has evaded paying tax under two agreements which date back to 1991.

That’s a lot of money for a country in the midst of a homelessness crisis, a hospital waiting list crisis, and where refugees are living in inhumane conditions for months or even years on end.

€13 billion would go a long way towards building social housing, taking patients off trolleys in overcrowded A&E departments, or tackling the mental health crisis which has seen so many of our young men take their own lives.

The Government should be ecstatic, you’d imagine. And yet they have spent more than €670,000 in legal fees to try to stop the EC from awarding it this €13 billion windfall.

Apple employs 5,000 people in Cork and has plans for a massive new data centre in Athenry, Co Galway.

It’s no wonder our Government wants to keep the company happy, in a country which has relied so much on FDI (foreign direct investment) to get over the recession.

There are 200,000 people employed in FDI companies across Ireland and Government Ministers are clearly spooked by the prospect of multi-nationals moving out of the country if they were faced with demands for back tax or a stricter tax regime.

Apple, hit with an unwelcome €13 billion tax bill

The EC ruling has caused some uproar, particularly among those who believe that there is one set of laws for the rich, or for global corporations, and another for the poor in the Emerald Isle.

In February of last year, for example, a young single mother from Co Donegal was awoken from her bed at 7am on a Monday morning and transferred to Mountjoy Prison for the terrible crime of not paying her TV licence.

She had not paid the €160 fee which state broadcaster RTE collects from every householder who owns a TV across the country.

The payment is compulsory, to fund a TV station which lost €2.8 million last year, despite a funding model which includes advertising revenue and the annual licence fee.

In contrast to the single mum, RTE employs a chat show host who earns €495,000 per year and a radio presenter who rakes in €416,000 to moan on behalf of the “little people” on national radio every weekday.

The single mum had managed to repay just under half of the €450 fine which had been imposed on her at Letterkenny District Court, but she found herself being hauled off to jail – by taxi.

She ended up spending just three hours in jail.

Countless people like her around the country must be baffled this week, that a corporation can get away with paying 0.0005% in tax while people who are struggling to pay the bills can be whisked off to jail for owing the State just over €200.

The message is simple, really . . . If you don’t pay your taxes you will go to jail, unless you’re a multinational corporation!

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The gathering of the Tribe

My website

When I took voluntary redundancy from my local newspaper almost a year ago, my head was full of plans to cut loose again and travel the world.

Having enjoyed the best year of my life far from the “safe harbour” in 2010, when I took a 12 month career break, my mind was buzzing with potential projects in far-off, sunnier climes. Another winter in Galway was definitely not part of my plans.

But sometimes fate works in mysterious ways and health complications – I picked up the MRSA bug in my local public hospital – put paid to my dreams of a radical change. 

The Galway players line up at Croke Park

Instead of volunteering in Nicaragua, guiding scuba divers in Thailand, or teaching English in Spain, I was confined to the safe harbour for seven months as a team of wonderful public health nurses set about healing my wound.

I had too much time to think, but I also began to appreciate the gentle beauty which us natives can often take for granted in the West of Ireland.

Not for nothing was my home town voted the “friendliest city on earth” just last week. But I must confess that, for much of my life, I was too busy or too preoccupied by perceived problems or injustices to revel in the delights of the people around me.

A scuba diving instructor in Egypt once told me that the best thing about Ireland was the people, when I complained about returning home to another wet and windy winter in the City of the Tribes. Sabry had never been to my country, but he had met enough Irish people through his job to appreciate the friendliness, easy-going nature, and hospitality of the people.

My long illness brought on some unwanted anxiety and uncertainty, but it also helped me to appreciate the simple things. Like the people in the clinic’s waiting room, who would share tales about their lives. Many of them had returned home after years spent working in England. Or the nurses, who went out of their way to accommodate me with early appointments when I had to reschedule during a digital marketing course.

Sometimes it feels as though there is a deep sadness in the West of Ireland, brought about by melancholic weather and the generations of people who have been forced to move overseas in search of better lives.

But the sense of community, the sense of place, is something to be revelled in; the way people will pause for a chat on the street or spend hours interacting with strangers in pubs is something we should never take for granted, because you don’t find that in many parts of the world.

On an emotional weekend in Dublin, I got to really appreciate my tribe. Galway, the Tribesmen, had reached the All-Ireland hurling final and I had friends and family home from the UK, Spain, New York, and even Australia.

We dared not dream of winning a first All-Ireland title in 27 years against the raging hot favourites, but we didn't want to miss the event just in case ... When we saw how muted the Kilkenny celebrations were, it was painful to imagine how wonderful the party would have been had the underdogs defied the odds.

There is nothing like an All-Ireland weekend to heighten the emotions, as we recalled past battles, defeats and victories, and the sheer heartbreak of following a team who have come close so often only to fall at the final hurdle.

The Galway hurlers break our hearts, but let nobody say that Galway people are not passionate about the game.

In the capital's pubs before and after the game, we swapped tales about games we had witnessed (or where we’d watched them) down through the years.

I was a young student squatting in London in 1988, the last time Galway won the All-Ireland. I was having too much fun to come home for the final and never thought I’d wait at least 27 years to see them win again. I have been to all six finals they’ve lost since then.

In 1989, I was on the Hill with my younger brother for the semi-final clash with Tipperary when there was a poisonous atmosphere in the air after the ‘Tony Keady Affair’. A year later, he watched the final in the Bronx, on the day Joe Cooney produced a master class but still ended up on the losing side against the Rebels.

In 1993, after we'd lost to Kilkenny, an old man on the train home said he’d never see Galway win another All-Ireland. It’s the kind of fatalism we share with Mayo football fans and I knew exactly what he meant. Defeatism and negativity can be traits of those of us who grew up among the stones, the drizzle, and windswept fields of Connacht.

It took us eight years to get back to Croke Park in September and Tipperary ruined our plans in 2001. Four years later it was Cork’s turn and Kilkenny, the game’s dominant modern force, blew our dreams to smithereens in 2012 and again this year.

Celebrating the semi-final win over Tipperary

To add to the torture, our team even managed a draw against the best team in history three years ago. We could have, and should have, beaten them to end the famine that afternoon.

When the hurlers beat Tipperary in last month’s semi-final, I suddenly felt pangs of regret that I was no longer involved in writing about them for the newspaper. There’s a giddy excitement about the build-up to an All-Ireland final – unless you’re from Kilkenny, where it’s probably just another annual event like Christmas or St Patrick’s Day.

On Saturday, my sister took the ferry home from London. She refused to miss the final. It cost her a fortune she could hardly afford, but as she headed back on Monday morning she said it was all so worthwhile.

From the singing in the pubs, to the chats with fans of all ages who had made the trip to Croke Park, there is something truly special about the All-Ireland weekend.

The way the supporters of the opposing teams mix and share their passion for the game is unmatched in any sport. There were over 82,000 people in Croke Park with no need for the kind of segregation I’ve seen following Liverpool to Champions League, UEFA, and FA Cup finals.

My cousin flew in from London, too, to see his team get beaten yet again. He doesn’t even remember his team winning an All-Ireland, but he had to be there, as did the old musician friend home from the Canary Islands.

We lost, but we celebrated all that is good about being Irish – and the West of Ireland in particular – in the crowded bars along Dorset Street on Sunday night.

These are the things that dreams are made of, even if our dreams were shattered yet again last weekend.

Galway people love their hurling and we should remember that there are passionate fans in places like Laois and Carlow who would love to see their team take part in just one All-Ireland final at a captivated Croke Park.

I’m so glad that the team got a rousing reception when they returned home. 

They reminded this cynic about so many of the good things associated with life in the West of Ireland, whether it's pucking a ball against a gable wall or spending hours talking about the game we love.

I could have been lying in the Nicaraguan or Spanish sunshine on Sunday, starting a new life, but it just felt right to be in the middle of my crazy, passionate, wounded Tribe, as we learned to cope with the pain of defeat once again. Sure, that's life!