Finlay’s fury takes away the victims’ real identity

THE St Vincent de Paul ad running on radio mentions offering your seat on public transport to an elderly passenger. Surely no one could object to that?

Well if Fergus Finlay, former Labour spin doctor is correct, the respected charity committed the cardinal error of describing elderly people as er... ‘elderly’.

Finlay turned his guns on the media this week for daring to describe the latest victims of savage attacks, some in their 80s and barely able to get around as ‘elderly and vulnerable’.

‘I hope, when they read or hear the media reports about the vicious attacks on them, they won’t feel that insult has been added to injury by the dismissive way they have all been labelled in the media reports of what happened to them,’ he thundered.

‘You take not just the identity but the face and the personality and urgency away from the issue.’

Hold the outrage Fergus and consider the facts. One of the most recent serious attacks involved a savage brute armed with a knife assaulting Mary O’Halloran and her brother Gerry and robbing their money. Mary is 84 and Gerry is 79. And as we all saw on the TV Mary can barely walk.

They are in fact ‘elderly’ and ‘vulnerable’. Far from taking their identity, the media humanised them, made them not just faceless statistics but portrayed them as they were, two citizens of Ireland who suffered a horrendous ordeal at the hands of a thug.

No doubt if he’s ever caught and brought to book for this appalling crime, we will all hear that he was a misunderstood, disadvantaged youth or some such nonsense.

Funny how some labels don’t attract the same degree of outrage isn’t it?