Today’s traumas, yesterday’s news

County View
John Healy

Looking back on the year just ended, one is struck by the number of heinous crimes visited on the innocent and blameless, crimes which stunned the nation and which for weeks and months dominated the media headlines. And then the clock moves on, and some other abhorrent incident takes place, and the first story becomes yesterday’s news.
Perhaps it is that the constant cycle of violence, the gratuitous infliction of pain and suffering, has inured us to a new level of brutality. Maybe our tendency to be shocked has been dulled by the repetitive accounts of commonplace, mindless thuggery.
The year 2022 had scarcely begun when the country was stunned at the murder of Ashling Murphy, a young teacher and musician who was killed in broad daylight as she enjoyed a canal side run near her home in Tullamore. The nation grieved with her family and her community and her school colleagues as the sheer awfulness of the egregious murder dominated screens and headlines. Vigils to her memory took place in every town and city as the nation recoiled in horror at the random taking of an innocent life. It was as if the country came to a halt, unable to comprehend the recklessness of a young life ended without explanation or reason.
For days and weeks, Ashling Murphy’s story was the story of the nation. And then, inevitably, the captains and kings departed to leave her to her family and their private anguish. The news cycle moved on. But not for long.
Within a few weeks, a mild bachelor farmer, living on his own, was beaten into insensibility in rural County Sligo by a gang of intruders who attacked his home. Tom Niland of Skreen eventually managed to crawl his way out on to the adjacent roadway where his battered body was discovered by his neighbours. From that day to this, the quiet inoffensive man has lain in intensive care, unable to move or eat, his life a shell of what it had once been, awaiting the final call or - improbably – the miracle which might regift him his health.
And worse was to come. Inside three months, in Sligo town, two men were brutally killed in their own homes within twenty four hours. Aidan Moffitt was 41, Michael Snee was 58; they lived within a stone’s throw of each other; a 22-year-old suspect is awaiting trial for both killings. As in the other cases, the capture of the perpetrators is poor comfort to those who grieve the loss of the innocent. And when the world moves on to the next tragedy, broken lives will be left to mend on their own.
For those of us on the periphery, our empathy in times of such calamity has, of necessity, a short span. The Creeslough accident of last October, in which ten people were killed, fades from memory once the last headline has been written. The catalogue of intra family murders during the year leaves us numbed and shaken, but only for so long. Parents killed by their children; eight-year-old twins in Tallaght, with their eighteen-year-old sister, killed in their home by a sibling; two small children burned to death in the car driven by their mother on a Westmeath side road; all appalling incidents which make us pause and empathise, but not much more.
It is understandable if our reaction to violent crime is to cocoon ourselves against danger, to double lock our doors and windows, to clasp our children that much tighter. But if the horrific stories of the last twelve months are anything to go by, then there is something deeply at fault in Irish society which calls for a much deeper analysis.