Sally O'Reilly

@IrishTimes shame on you. This isn’t journalism, it’s narrative management. Any serious article on this subject should acknowledge why the UK, Sweden and Finland all changed course. Pretending that evidence doesn’t exist isn’t reporting.

Jamey Carney and Ann Widdecombe are two women who were murdered in recent weeks. Politically, they couldn’t have been further apart and I probably would’ve disagreed with both of them on most things. But one thing their deaths have in common is the reaction. Jamey was allegedly murdered by her partner, who was an asylum seeker. She had “F**k ICE” in her bio. I’ve seen people saying it was her own fault, that she only has herself to blame and every other disgusting thing you could think of. Ann spent her life on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Now people who hated her politics are celebrating her murder too. One man said, “I hope she died screaming.” What the hell has happened to people? You don’t have to agree with someone politically to recognise they’re a human being. They had families, friends, people who loved them. They were more than their political beliefs. I genuinely don’t care whether it’s coming from the left or the right. If your first reaction to someone’s murder is to celebrate because they vote differently to you, you’ve lost the plot altogether. Politics has absolutely melted some people’s brains, and it’s depressing. We all go on about the state of political discourse, but this is the state of it. People aren’t even in the ground yet and strangers are celebrating their deaths because they didn’t like their politics. Rotten.