How the murder of Ashling Murphy prompted one town to try and end misogyny
(Left to right) Denis Finnerty and Marney O'Regan of Choose Respect Nenagh in their local restaurant the Pantry Café where their sign is displayed on the counter. Picture: Dan Linehan
You cannot enter a business, school or sports club in the town of Nenagh without encountering a strong message about consent and inappropriate behaviour.
The town in Tipperary has become a first in collectively striving to stamp out misogyny in all its forms by coming together as a community to “Choose Respect”. The remarkable town-wide action was born out of the distress and anger that followed the brutal murder of Ashling Murphy almost two years ago.
“I was inside in Denis Finnerty’s pharmacy and his staff had put up a beautiful image of Ashling with candles around it,” said 62-year-old Marney O’Regan who spearheaded the movement.
“You know the expression: ‘Somebody should do something,’ I said to Denis: 'This is our moment, we’re the somebodies who should be doing something,” he said.
From there, Mr O’Regan and Mr Finnerty hosted a town meeting which had residents, businesses and schools present in an effort to get the entire community on board. “From the very outset, we saw this sense of community,” he said.
Along with the campaign having a strong presence throughout the town, Mr O’Regan gives regular workshops to local sports clubs and schools.
“The most important thing at the moment is that people have awareness, and we have all of these signs around town, but secondly that there will be moments when they say: ‘Somebody should do something’ and maybe they’ll realise that this is their moment.”
The town has seen a cultural shift since Choose Respect was launched over a year ago with Mr O’Regan saying local pubs not only have posters in the bathrooms, but bar staff have found themselves observing customers “a bit more”.
While Mr O’Regan’s talks cover a wide range of topics surrounding respect and consent, there is a newer focus on inappropriate jokes or images in group chats.
“We’ve got to change what’s become normal language and behaviour—the comments on appearance, the sexist comments and jokes and the sending of explicit images—it’s become normal.
“It’s not acceptable in the school, the club, or the business and it’s not acceptable in our community,” Mr O’Regan said.
Having applied for financial support early on to set up a website for the project, Mr O’Regan was denied and told by the lender that it was “just another poster campaign”. However, more than a year on, the project is expanding through various partnerships and breaking new ground and audiences with plans to expand its social media presence, using TikTok in particular.
In addition to that, the town’s project will be the subject of a case study carried out by University College Cork (UCC) lecturer and director of the university’s Bystander Intervention programme, Louise Crowley.
Dr Crowley, who provided advice and guidance on the long-term project, said there is “huge potential” in recreating it across the country and internationally.
She hailed it as a huge success, one which has enacted “true cultural change” and may be the key in creating a new normal. “Over the last 18 months, it has just gone from strength to strength,” she said before adding: “It’s genuinely an all-community effort. It has infiltrated the town.”
She said the whole-community response is the essence of affecting change, with bystanders no longer afraid to speak up as they know they are not alone and in time will “drown out” inappropriate behaviour.
“Then you’re left with a very tiny minority because it becomes socially unacceptable,” she said.
Dr Crowley said silence not only allows inappropriate behaviour to continue but also to escalate.
“The problem is that people who are so inclined will escalate their behaviour because they feel a sense of social permission to behave in this way if they’re not called out,” she said adding that escalations can manifest in “far more serious ways”.
Dr Crowley recalled a conference on gender-based violence in Florence in August during which she mentioned Nenagh’s Choose Respect campaign.
“As the conference closed, the person hosting finished while talking about Nenagh saying maybe this is what the future looks like. They couldn’t believe it and these are some of the best international scholars dealing with gender-based violence.
“I think if we can capture what Nenagh did, it would be a way of moving forward on a community basis with people taking their towns back, their cities back and starting a new normal,” she said.
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