A troll’s sick and sinister message forced me to go to the gardaí

Inadequate reaction to cyber bullies is dangerous

Twitter pithiness has made monsters out of malcontents

IN THE end, it was all about sending messages. Judge Anthony Halpin said the courts had to ‘send the message’ that public representatives had the support of society and to warn people not to send abusive comments. He delivered this message not by text, tweet or email but by imposing a sixmonth suspended sentence on Stephen French for the messages he had sent to Senator Lorraine Higgins two years ago, releasing him back into the community and onto his computer without so much as a fine or a second of community service.

French had taken a more direct and impactful route in delivering his messages. Over a five-week period in the summer of 2015, he sent abusive email after abusive email, dispatches in which he threatened to shoot and kill then-senator Higgins. ‘I will put bullets up your f ****** a*** and watch you bleed like a river,’ he wrote in one. In another, he promised to fill her ‘rat’s mouth with lead’. ‘I’m going to blow your f ****** big Jew nose right off,’ said another. Perhaps more chillingly, French told Higgins in another mail that he’d ‘passed you in the street, I’m so close it’s unreal’. Another: ‘I was training with my Blaser r93 [hunting rifle] in the borderlands at the weekend, making sure my aim is at its peak.’

Understandably, Lorraine Higgins was terrified by these messages. In her victim impact statement, the former senator said she ‘rarely left the confines of Leinster House’ while she was in Dublin and she seriously considered leaving politics as a direct result of the vile threats. ‘At that point, I realised I was paying a rather large price to be a public representative,” she said.

I will skip over the messages that 28-year-old French dispatched through his solicitor in court concerning remorse and contrition because, like the suspended sentence he received, they are completely worthless. They’re only words. And as we learned in the Dublin District Court this week, words have little impact or value in our criminal justice system.

In the end, words like ‘bullets up your f ****** arse’, ‘f ****** big Jew nose’ and ‘fill your rat’s mouth with lead’ have as much impact on the courts as ‘inexcusable’ and ‘regrettably conveyed’. In that context, it’s scarcely worth mentioning that the only words spoken aloud by French to the media, as he left court, concerned his victim. ‘She’d do anything to keep herself in the paper,’ he said. But sure look. Only words. What harm?

The corrosive power of social media is scarcely news anymore. While nobody disputes the potential for positive outcomes and community support offered by new media – the #metoo campaign shines out – increasingly, Twitter in particular has become a vicious bear pit populated by pitchforkwielding reactionaries. In creating the world’s most powerful social forum more than a decade ago, I wonder if Jack Dorsey and his colleagues foresaw the inevitable lurch towards extremism that limiting posts to 140 characters would involve. It might have seemed like a cool way of obliging people to be succinct and interesting, but the trouble with 140 characters is that it does not leave any room for nuance or debate. Nobody has ever tweeted, ‘on the other hand’. Instead, everything has become black or white, left or right and – crucially, love or hate.

AT ITS more innocent end, this move towards emphatic extremism and its spread to other forums is mildly amusing. Go to the comments on the Facebook page of the RTÉ Today Show and you’ll find that the outfit Maura Derrane wears each day is either ‘beautiful!’ or ‘HORRIBLE!’ You either LOVE!!! Saoirse Ronan’s Golden Globes dress or HATE it.

But at the more dangerous end of the spectrum, pithiness has made monsters out of malcontents. Reading the comments sections on those news sites that have persisted with the facility can feel like bathing in slurry. The Irish Independent had to close down its comments facility – a service that had the rare achievement of being able to ruin a perfectly good day – last year. People who once muttered darkly over the pages of OK magazine are now hiding in the plain sight of social forums, where their invective and bile now has the power to destroy reputations, livelihoods and lives. Cyber bullying is no longer just a crisis among teenagers, it has spread its slimy tentacles into every walk of life. Increasingly, what we used to think, we now tweet or email. And unless legislative action is taken against this toxic trolling, loose lips will sink us all.

Last summer, I wrote a column about the worrying number of overweight people in the audience at the Robbie Williams concert at the Aviva. I expected a robust response, and while it’s never pleasant to receive abusive emails, I largely ignored them. But one correspondent persisted in bombarding me with messages, becoming – to my mind – fixated on my teenage son, who I had mentioned in a different item in the column. When he wrote: ‘I hope your son doesn’t get a disease and die,’ I went to the gardaí.

WHILE they noted my complaint, I felt they didn’t take the issue very seriously. Yet if a stranger had said it to me in a pub, they might have. And if Lorraine Higgins’s troll had repeated his vile, terrifying threats to her face, I have no doubt that he would be facing into jail time right now.

Judge Anthony Halpin was right. In the Lorraine Higgins case, the courts had a real opportunity to send a strong message about how people communicate and behave when their toxic weapon of choice is a keyboard. Instead, they sent out a vague dispatch of Down With This Sort Of Thing. Stephen French should be behind bars. That such a punishment doesn’t even feature in his own arsenal of extreme responses means he deserves nothing less.