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Showing posts with label Ashling Murphy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ashling Murphy. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre ✒ From reading the reports, it sounded like something from a military funeral in the US being picketed by the deranged charlatans of Westboro Baptist Church.

The scripture squawkers from Westboro were venting their hatred of gay people which they seemed to believe the US Military should be shooting rather than commissioning into its ranks.

It is not just gays that religious zealots have in their sights: women too are frequent targets for the hatred of the religious, in particular those who assert women's rights in the face of clerical opposition.
 
Since the brutal killing of Ashling Murphy last week vigils have taken place all over the country and beyond in tribute to the dead primary school teacher. From what I have observed the vast bulk of people turning out are women. At the weekend, a Stand For Ashling Vigil was taking place in Limerick’s Bedford Row. Some of those behind it were feminist activists from the group known as ROSA, asserting the right of women to live free from the threat or fear of femicide. Perhaps that is what enraged the religious male mob known as the Men’s Rosary Group who assembled nearby and decided to pollute the street with the noise from the chanting of their rosary. As women tried to speak at the vigil the god squad increasingly pumped up the volume on their electronic sound system. While Stefanie di Croce was reading out the names of murdered women "the PA seemed to be growing louder and louder. It was shocking." According to the Sinn Féin TD Maurice Quinlivan the rosary was amplified each time a woman moved to address the vigil. Hardly unintentional or pure coincidence.

The religious of course should be allowed to pray, even in public so long as it does not disrupt the daily lives of others. There is a worrying trend in UK universities where devout Catholics are being institutionally pilloried for holding viewpoints at odds with the secular consensus, at times being the target of cancel culture. This ignores the crucial democratic and secular concept that freedom of religion is as crucial as freedom from religion.

However, the Limerick rosary rant seems to have been more about preying than praying. The Rosary group has been meeting at a different location in Limerick since 2017 but on this occasion, seemingly, the attempt to steal a bit of the thunder from Fred Phelps’ Hate Theology proved irresistible. Ominously, it came against a backdrop described by the Guardian:

Even as thousands stood against gender-based violence over the past week, a Men’s Rosary group tried to drown out female voices at one vigil, a female journalist received a threat warning her against soliciting “negative comments about men”, a man is reported to have masturbated at an online vigil, and male “patriots” with links to the far right stoked xenophobia over the potential nationality of the killer.

Labour Party councillor Conor Sheehan said he recognised:

about 70 per cent of the same faces (in the Rosary group) from the recent anti-vax protest organised by the Irish Freedom Party in Limerick. The people on Saturday had no compassion for the women who were trying to speak about their own experiences or what happened to Ashling Murphy. One of the speakers was a very shocked fellow student of Ashling’s. They just continued louder and louder with this demonic chanting of the Hail Mary. It was the most un-Christian act I have ever witnessed.

Why the councillor should describe such behaviour as un-Christian is puzzling. Hate Theology has come to be part of the staple diet of many evangelical Christians. And while I may find the sight of adult bead babblers risible, Mary Cahillane, is probably closer to the mark in her observation that "at a time when men are supposed to be listening to women's fears about their safety, they just say the rosary to drown you out."

And when they can't drown you, they burn you. As Dan Foster wrote, "There is No Hate Like ‘Christian’ Love."

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Pump Up The Hate Volume

Anthony McIntyre ✒ There had been gatherings of the same type in Drogheda before. Two years ago this month, Droghedians assembled in West Street to protest the brutal slaying of a local teen, Keane Mulready-Woods.

Ashling Murphy
Friday's vigil was an act of reaching out beyond the confines of Louth. It was  part of a nationwide act of revulsion against the murder of young schoolteacher Ashling Murphy, slain as she went about the most innocuous and unprovocative of activities – casually jogging along a river path, having just completed her working day teaching infants. It was a vigil overwhelmingly composed of women. Most of those males I could see were in my own age range. I am sure there were younger men in the crowd but they were not conspicuous. Many of us had brought candles as advised by the organisers. The anger was such that many might have felt it better to bring a torch as an expression of a primordial preference to burn the predator responsible for killing Ashling Murphy.

That so many of this week's vigils took place on popular river walks captured the symbolism of the circumstances pertaining to the death of the young victim. The location for the Drogheda vigil was a spot known as the Ramparts, situated between the River Boyne and a children’s playground. Often the source of gaiety and laughter, a sombre quietude had descended on the vicinity on Friday, like a fog: our candles in some small way emblematic of the community's determination to overcome the fading of the light. What children were there looked on in subdued silence, their thoughts not shared. They may have been there as pupils. I went along as a citizen but also as a trade union member. I felt it important to acknowledge the role of the murdered woman in society. Out of work a mere hour, and her life was snatched from her.

Drogheda Remembers
I walk the same Boyne River path where we had converged frequently with my dog. On the way I often come across lone women, walking, running and cycling. There are bushy recesses en route that could easily conceal a predator. Something I have long paid no attention to but which now makes me shudder. My daughter walked it frequently, sometimes alone. She has also walked the bank of the canal in Dublin close to where she attends university. I know it well, having made use of it myself on numerous occasions. As with the Boyne walk, I have met many women along the way. It being somewhat removed from the beaten track I have felt - unlike the Boyne walk - not so much the presence of menace but the potential for it. 

Three years younger than Ashling Murphy, I have often told my daughter never to walk along the canal at night in Dublin, where she studies, no matter how much it might shorten her journey. I urge her to stick to main roads and well-lit streets. The Offaly killing makes me think just how limited that advice is: predators will prey night or day.

This morning, my daughter, now in Austria, sent me photos of her enjoying a skiing holiday. I thought of the things that Ashling Murphy has been denied, the keepsake images that a parent will never receive. 

The death of Ashling Murphy has evoked memories of the recent murder in London of Sarah Everard, kidnapped and killed by a police predator serving with the Met. It too brought huge numbers of women onto the streets, only for some to be battered off them by the same force to which her killer belonged.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris seeks to assure women that Ireland is still a safe society for them. It probably is relatively speaking. But predators still lurk in the shadows, just as they did fifty years ago. Only the other night I watched a documentary about the 1971 murder of Una Lynskey. Her killer was never caught. Then An Garda set about arresting innocent people. They did that on this occasion too. Fortunately the reputed motto of the Saigon police if they are innocent beat them until they are guilty was not the interrogators' modus operandi as it was in the Lynskey case, where it led to wrongful convictions. This time, the unfortunate Romanian was quickly freed and eliminated from inquiries. Thus far no result. Nevertheless, the real killer cannot hide behind a miscarriage of justice, free to strike again.

Despite the assurances of the Garda Commissioner the names of other women come to the surface without as much as a google search. Jastine Valdez, kidnapped in broad daylight by yet another predator, before being murdered. Sophie Toscan du Plantier, whose killer has yet to be brought to account; Elaine O'Hara, Bridie Gargan, Rachel Callaly, Siobhan Kearney. There are many more, some still literally below the surface, their bodies never found.

Ireland will be a safe society for women when no one can recall from living memory the name of a murdered woman. That is a long way off. 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

A Candle For Ashling Murphy

Andrea Redmond ✒ The tragic murder of Ashling Murphy, a vibrant, talented young teacher who was killed while out for her daily jog, has brought a groundswell of anger from people across Ireland.

It reminds me of the same response after the unnecessary death of Savita Halappanavar.

Sadly sexual and domestic violence kill women in Ireland on a weekly basis and their faces and stories are quickly forgotten. But for most women, the deaths remind them of their own vulnerability. So many of the women of Ireland have been through some sort of sexual and/or domestic assault: witness the Me Too Movement, where women across the Globe came forward to relate stories of sexual abuse.

We women have had these movements before. In the 1970s I was one of those women who participated in the Take Back the Night Marches, where women protested about the violence and murders of women. The marches began in 1975 after the death of Susan Speeth, a microbiologist who was stabbed to death while walking home at night. The year I was studying for my Bachelor’s degree, a sexual predator was targeting women students at night and attacking them. Women devised strategies themselves to keep safe. My sister Lauren and I attended classes together, walked at night through a poorly lit campus to our car after class. The University did little, the local women’ group set up self-defence courses. I was 7 months pregnant with my oldest son Pearse and felt particularly at risk. No woman walks or runs during the day or night without the thought of her safety. We all feel vulnerable and that fear never goes away. That fear often comes as threats from those we love within the home, meaning that for many home is not a safe place. In Europe one woman in three, aged 15 or above reported having experienced physical or sexual violence (one in six boys).

Domestic violence has been called a “shadow pandemic” before the outbreak of Covid, and cyber violence is a growing issue with ordinary women, particularly those in public life - journalists, politicians experiencing disproportionally higher rates of gender based online violence, with the impact on their abilities to express their views.

When I first moved to Belfast in 1983, I was stopped along Beechmount Avenue, on my way home to Cavendish Street, by a British Army patrol. I was brought into the enclosed garage and threatened with rape and other acts of sexual violence. I have no memory of getting to the top of the street such was the horror of the incident. That wasn’t my first experience of violence or the last, and sadly I am not alone. During the Troubles women suffered at the hands of both the security forces and those we loved. Actors of the State in uniform have used sexual violence as a tool of war and colonization for millennia.

Male dominated institutions like the Catholic Church have been actors in violence and abuse against women and girls. The depths of abuses caused by clerics across the globe and the further abuse by the continuing cover-ups by the church hierarchy in the deaths of First Nation Children in Residential schools in Canada and the horrors of The Magdalen Laundries, is indicative of the misogyny of power and state.

In recent years we have seen incidents of women being murdered by police officers in the Met. Sarah Everard was walking home when abducted and murdered by Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021. Sportsmen stand accused of rape and the numbers of women and children murdered or sexually abused is growing, with perpetrators suffering little in the way of stiff sentences. Victims largely don’t report due to stigma and shame and a lack of confidence in the State and judiciary to support them.

I had hoped through my years of working in a Rape Crisis Centre and women’s groups that it would help it get better for my daughter and now granddaughter, but sadly it hasn’t.

The issue itself is societal - we all have a responsibility particularly as Republicans in seeking a just society. This means we need to collectively face that there was abuse and violence perpetrated by our Comrades and we need to support the survivors who have had the courage to come forward, such as Mairia Cahill and Aine Dahlstrom. We need to acknowledge there was often negligent handling of their cases and things should have been done much differently. The continuing maligning of Cahill, in particular, from some quarters in the Movement must cease immediately.

In the wake of Savita’s unnecessary death the country mobilised to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Constitution to legislate for women’s right to bodily integrity. We must all mobilise once again in Ashling’s name to create change and we as Republicans must be there.

⏩Andrea Redmond is Feminist-Republican holding a PhD in Anthropology. She is the only female Republican Belfast women's muralist and community artist. A member of Sile na Gig she is now an artist living in Donegal and is volunteering in Community Development in the village of Doochary.

Ashling Murphy ✑ The Spectre of Murderous Violence Against Women

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