I’m still haunted by the threats to my family while I was a minister
MUCH horror has been expressed about the worrying incidents at the homes of some of our ministers.
Just last week, there was the bomb threat at the home of Justice Minister Helen McEntee, forcing her husband and their two young children to leave their home while safety checks were carried out.
And the previous week there were the sinister protests outside the home of Integration and Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman, when videos showed a gang of up to 12 masked men outside his home with banners and placards festooned across his front gate and railings.
Most politicians – led by Taoiseach Simon Harris, who referred to the targeting of his own home back in 2019 – have rightly condemned these gatherings. But questions have been asked about why the gardaí didn’t intervene to stop the harassment.
Detective Garda Mark Ferris, of Blanchardstown Garda Station, maintained that videos that were posted online of the incident outside Mr O’Gorman’s home were an example of ‘disinformation’, in that they were ‘not a true and accurate reflection’ of the incident.
Disinformation
He said ‘no arrestable offence’ had occurred while gardaí were present, and that protesters took down banners when directed to do so by gardaí.
One way or another, it was a nasty incident for Roderic O’Gorman, not to mention his friends and neighbours.
Masked and hooded ‘protesters’ outside anyone’s home, acting in a menacing way, must be dealt with robustly.
Gardaí were put in a very difficult position in evaluating how to deal with the gathering.
They claimed most gardaí do not have the training to deal with such situations.
And certainly the recent riots in the centre of our capital city appear to bear this out.
On that occasion, the response of An Garda Síochána shouldn’t have depended on the ‘sense of duty’ of individual gardaí.
And vital communication between on-duty gardaí as they went about co-ordinating a response to the violent riots on our streets should certainly not have been reliant on WhatsApp.
The Taoiseach expressed his ‘frustration and concern’ about the rise of protests outside politicians’ homes, saying: ‘This is something that has been festering for a number of years.’
He referred to the targeting of his own home and the homes of Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and other politicians. He said these gatherings were a relatively new phenomenon.
But these gatherings have not just sprung up in recent years. Around 2010, so-called ‘protests’ started to appear outside my own family home.
And while I served in the CabiIt’s net, most of my fellow ministers reported similar gatherings in and around their family homes.
There were weekly gatherings outside my home. I rarely witnessed them myself because I tended to be away on Government business when they happened. The only people affected were my family and immediate neighbours. Although I sent messages asking protesters to desist, and to divert their focus to my constituency office, organisers insisted they would continue to gather outside my home ‘for long as it takes’.
One particular day will remain in my memory and that of my family. It was a Sunday, and I was attending a crisis meeting at Government Buildings that lasted more than 10 hours. Around midday, a woman called to our home to ‘advise’ my wife and my children to leave.
She explained she was a partner of one of the protesters, and had overheard plans to ‘storm’ our home that afternoon.
The woman didn’t agree with this tactic, and decided to warn us. She pleaded with us not to disclose who gave us the tip-off and we immediately alerted the gardaí. Throughout the day, I had to keep texting my wife to check that everything was okay.
Later that evening, around 10.30pm, as Mary Harney and I were leaving Government Buildings, a car driving down Merrion Square swerved and mounted the footpath to try to prevent us from getting into our cars.
Death threats
The driver tried to attract protesters further up the road by continuously beeping the horn. On-duty gardaí quickly stopped and apprehended the driver.
When I eventually got into my car to go home, my driver informed me there had been an incident earlier that evening when my two daughters, who had been returning to their college accommodation in north Dublin, were badly verbally abused by someone who came out of a neighbouring house.
These very upsetting incidents happened all in the space of one day. But throughout my political career, particularly because of my involvement in the peace process, my family and I grew well used to being cautious about security around our family home.
In the late Eighties, a loyalist paramilitary letter bomb campaign forced me to stop all letter and parcel post being delivered to our home.
I was also subjected to death threats from both loyalist paramilitaries and republican dissidents over the years.
The fact that I lived so close to the border, especially during the Troubles, increased the threat level and I often received strong advice from gardaí to enhance the security around our home. Despite this, as a family, we were determined not to turn our house into a fortress.
But I have to say, the gatherings outside our home turned out to be far more upsetting and disruptive for my long-suffering family than they were for me.
During the past decade or so, there have been many well-publicised incidents near politicians’ homes. And many others have gone unreported.
Yet all we’ve had is inertia from the powers that be.
I’ve written in this column before that something needs to be done to prevent these so-called ‘protests’ from occurring. And yet virtually nothing has been done by the current crop of legislators.
true that Fianna Fáil senator Malcolm Byrne has initiated a Bill purporting to stop these types of gatherings outside elected representatives’ homes. But this Bill has languished somewhere deep inside Leinster House, with little or no effort to pass it into law.
Our legislators seem reluctant to advance the legislation, perhaps for fear that they might be seen to be curtailing the right to protest.
But what is often overlooked is that rights are not exclusive. They come with duties.
The right to protest exists side by side with the duty to do so in a way that does not interfere with the rights of others.
The right to protest does not allow those involved to break the law. And political representatives and their families are entitled to the right to privacy.
Most politicians are well used to the ‘slings and arrows’ of public life – but their family members are not. They should not have to bear the brunt of these bully-boy tactics. And our laws and law enforcers should reflect this.
Thuggery
Since the incident at Roderic O’Gorman’s home, there has been much discussion about whether our current laws are robust enough to deal with situations like that.
I believe they are sufficient to stop these crimes. An Act from 1994, dealing with public order, states that it is a criminal offence for any person to engage in ‘offensive conduct in a public place. Such conduct is defined as ‘any unreasonable behaviour which, having regard to all the circumstances, is likely to cause serious offence or serious annoyance to any person who is, or might reasonably be expected to be, aware of such behaviour’.
Surely this can be applied to most of these recent ‘protests’, including those outside the homes of politicians.
Some gardaí say they have ‘no clear guidance’ on how to deal with these incidents. I can fully appreciate that it is not easy to handle these situations and that each one is different.
But as these gatherings are becoming more and more sinister, they can only be dealt with by a robust response. And, for that, we need both a tightening of our laws, and the proper training and resourcing of our gardaí to address this threat.
Since the foundation of the State, the gardaí tried to police our country ‘by consent’. Unfortunately, some of the recent events cannot be dealt with in a softly-softly fashion.
As has been shown from the alarming disturbances in Newtownmountkennedy last week, our gardaí cannot simply stand back while thuggery and harassment are happening, whether outside the home of an elected representative, at a proposed asylum-seeker centre, or anywhere else.
As a nation, we must fully back the defenders of the peace. Otherwise our democracy will be undermined.
We have been warned.