Gareth O'Callaghan: From Charlie Kirk’s death to Simon Harris’s threats, politics is crossing a deadly line

Charlie Kirk said last April that a few gun deaths every year were an acceptable cost for being able to own firearms. File picture: AP/Ross D Franklin
There's fine line between criticism and hatred. The intention behind it makes all the difference.
The sight of Charlie Kirk’s three-year-old daughter running towards him with her arms outstretched on the set of Fox News six weeks before his killing last Wednesday will stay with me.
That cherished moment is part of an unspeakable legacy his family will carry forever. They were watching him this week as he was shot.
Charlie Kirk found his feet in politics and quickly became a national figure, establishing Turning Point USA, a conservative youth movement, when he was 18.
Donald Trump, who said he
believed Kirk would be a future president, called him a “giant of a generation” this week.
And he was — no matter what your views on politics are. Very few activists had that sort of rallying influence on millions of college students and young voters.
Kirk had his critics
Not everyone loved Kirk. His critics claimed that he thrived on inflaming tensions and spreading misinformation at his rallies.
He made a lot of enemies as a result of his devout right-wing perspectives, and his tendency to draw out his opponents as not just being wrong but dangerous. It was free speech, as he saw it, protected by the First Amendment.
Several controversial statements Kirk made in recent times on issues such as Gaza, Islam, and gun laws only served to add to the groups who might wish him ill.
Last May, during a debate at Cambridge University, he justified Israel’s two years of war on Gaza. He also said last April that a few gun deaths every year were an acceptable cost for being able to own your own firearms.
When free speech sullies the truth, then what does it become? Inciteful threats come to mind. Elon Musk this week called Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom”.
One student described him as “a political icon for people my age”. Local mayor David Young described the shooting as “so foreign for our community”.
Closer to home
As I watched the sad commentary on Kirk this week, I was thinking about the situation much closer to home.
Simon Harris has been on my mind a lot lately. The threats that have been levelled at him are the stuff of horror films. I am genuinely worried for his health and his safety.

I’m not sure if my concern puts me in a minority, or if my words speak for the majority. If they don’t, then society has reached composed indifference — a level of media desensitisation and an attitude of “If it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care”.
I hope not. Its consequences don’t bear thinking about.
I don’t know Simon Harris. He strikes me as a likeable and decent family man who adores his two children. Politically, I would have issues with his party’s agenda.
That said, I have a problem with Irish politics in general. There is no
accountability.
However, there’s a world of difference between being critical of a politician’s track record or his party’s policies, and hating his guts so much that you wouldn’t have a problem murdering him or kidnapping his children.
This is the new reality, if we’re prepared to face up to a dark truth that is seeping through society like a moral
sepsis.
Let’s not sugar-coat the issue; such a possibility is right there — the threat is tangible now.
Two questions to ponder: How have people reacted to the threats against Simon Harris? Do people find such threats acceptable?
It’s almost 10 years since British politician Jo Cox was murdered. Thomas Mair, a right-wing activist with links to the neo-Nazi organisation National Alliance, shot her three times and stabbed her 15 times close to her constituency clinic in Birstall, West Yorkshire. She left behind two children aged five and three.
She was driven by her belief that a fairer, kinder, and more tolerant world was possible.
Her party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said after her murder: “We will not allow those people that spread hatred and poison to divide our society.”
Division and hate
But people are spreading hate and poison because they are invisible. Division and ideological indoctrination are their primary objectives, apart from the hate that consumes them.
Ten years ago, up to the point Jo Cox was killed, such a crime against a politician would have been unthinkable. But that has changed.
Slovak prime minister Robert Fico suffered life-threatening injuries last year when he was shot multiple times. Fico had just left a meeting and was shaking hands with locals when a man in the crowd shot him at close range with a handgun.
Hours after Fico’s shooting, former Garda commissioner Nóirín O’Sullivan said that a collective effort was needed to combat the risk of an Irish politician being killed.
But how?
We live in the age of guns for rent, while knives are almost as common as mobile phones.
In October 2021, Micheál Martin called for a review of security for politicians in light of the murder of David Amess, a British Conservative MP.
Amess was fatally stabbed on his way to a constituency office by Ali Harbi Ali, a British citizen and Islamic State sympathiser.
Ali was convicted of murder and “the preparation of terrorist acts” and sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
In his autobiography, published just months before he died, and writing about the murder of Cox, Amess said fears of similar attacks “rather spoilt the great British tradition of the people openly meeting their elected politicians”.
Martin said “no one wants an intrusive or over-the-top sort of security presence around politicians. It’s part of our ecosystem in politics to have clinics, to have that interaction with people on the ground”.
This writer wonders what an “over-the-top” security presence would look like.
Surely if it takes extreme measures to shield a politician from someone who is capable of murder, then so be it. But how?
Abuse in politics 'harrowing'
Last week, I spoke to a number of elected representatives from different backgrounds. Their concerns are harrowing.
When you no longer feel safe in the supermarket, or having a drink in your local.
When you no longer take your children to school because you don’t want strangers to know who their parent is.
When your phone rings in the dead of night and the voice on the other end calls you a c*nt.
Former Fine Gael TD and minister Paul Kehoe stated last year that the abuse he received on social media played a part in his decision to retire from politics.
In the aftermath of Amess’s murder, Kehoe said: “I have no doubt what happened in the UK is only a step away from happening in Ireland.”
Some people get their kicks from making others suffer. If we become indifferent to what they do, then it’s only a matter of time before they become capable of far worse.
Charlie Kirk had no idea that an assassin was taking aim at him as he spoke to students at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. There was no advance threat.
It happened in a moment that no one could have accounted for — the moment where that fine line between criticism and hatred is crossed, and made a shocking reality.

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