The Monotony of Murder in Modern Ireland

It’s not that there’s more of it. It’s just it shocks us less.

When you write about Ireland for a living – or even for fun – one of the persistent challenges, particularly at this time of year, is to find something “new” or “fresh”. Which means that I spend a greater portion of my time than most people scanning the newspapers for stories.

One of the side effects of that activity is that you become more attuned to just how absurdly violent Irish society has become. A quick scan of today’s Irish Independent, for example, turns up the breaking stories “Man dies from ‘catastrophic’ injuries after being struck in head with shovel in Dublin business park brawl” and “Man (21) jailed for life for murder of Cork postman who was beaten to death with golf club”. There’s a new one of those most days, sometimes two or three, like today.

Not all of them are foreigners, either. Today’s split of senseless murder victims is a one-all draw between the natives and the newcomers.

What the stories have in common, however, is a particularly senseless level of violence. It’s easy to romanticise the past, but it certainly seems to me as if there was an era, not that long ago, when both of the victims in those two cases might have been alive because the weapons used in brawls or assaults were fists. Not shovels, golf clubs, and increasingly, knives.

There’s a danger in writing about this stuff that one descends into a state of priestly preaching about the new culture of violence in Ireland and nonsense pieties about a kinder past. In fact, per capita, we have fewer murders in Ireland today than we had at the turn of the millennium. It’s just that the ones we do have often seem particularly senseless.

What’s more, it’s that they seem routine. Perhaps it is just me, but what I think has changed significantly in Ireland is not how often we encounter serious crimes against the person, but our attitude to it when we do. It’s as if getting bashed to death with a shovel or a golf club is now roughly on a par, in the news agenda, with tax cuts in the budget (not that there are ever many of those).

There was an era, of course, in this country, of censorship. I do not romanticise it, but one of the theories behind it was that if the poor innocent people of Ireland were exposed to things like sex or violence, they would shift their attitudes in favour of sex and of violence. That in essence, if they saw someone on the telly getting their brains bashed in, it would become less shocking and stigmatised when someone in the country actually did get their brains bashed in. Or that if they saw some harlot having it off with three different men, being such a harlot (or more commonly, the male equivalent) would become more accepted.

I think that was right, broadly. You might not defend censorship, but there was a logic to it that seems to me broadly unimpeachable. There’s a reason that regimes like North Korea make sure no news from outside gets in: That reason is that what you see can give you notions.

I recall once, as a young and stupid twenty something, deciding that courage and respect for life I must watch one of those snuff videos – you know the ones – produced by some cohort of Osama Bin Laden wannabes demonstrating how little they respected western non-Muslim life. I got sick shortly thereafter. But I think if you watched a hundred of those videos, you would very quickly become accustomed to them. You would find it less shocking.

This phenomenon, of course, is widely already recognised with porn. The more of it people watch, the more extreme their sexual tastes become. Younger women in surveys increasingly report the consequences of that trend, with some horrific percentage of them now reporting being strangled or otherwise hurt by their young boyfriends or partners.

On balance, then, is there a case for censorship? Is there a world in which it actually makes sense simply not to show people certain things? To let violence be implied and horrifying, rather than an increasingly comic-book orgy of blood and guts that’s supposed to shock us, but actually does not?

I don’t know, but part of writing is thinking out loud. And I just don’t think that in 1960’s Ireland, bad as it reportedly was, that you would get those two headlines this morning in a newspaper without some sense of national outrage, rather than boredom.

Then I suppose most of us have no reason to care. After all, the chances of ever having your own brain bashed in with a golf club or a shovel remain comfortingly low. If it doesn’t really affect us, and it’s none of our business, why should we care? That sentence, really, sums up modern society. It has some good consequences. And also some bad ones – just like the old regime.