Irish Examiner view: A violent week’s harsh lessons

Violent, family tragedies are writ all too large across this week

Flowers placed at the entrance to the O'Sullivan family farm at Assolas, near Kanturk, Co Cork, where a father and his two sons died in what is believed to be a dispute over plans around a land bequest. Picture: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision

Violent, family tragedies are written all too large, and all too worryingly across this week. A father and his two sons died on their farm on Monday in what is believed to be a dispute over plans around a land bequest in Co Cork. That no-one other than the victims was, it is, believed involved adds incomprehension to heartbreak in that harrowing situation.

In Dublin, the bodies of a mother and her two children were discovered in their Ballinteer home two days later. Concerned neighbours had alerted gardaí. There have been suggestions that the three bodies may have been in the home for up to four days after apparently being strangled. The age of the victims — 36, 11, and six — darkens that tragedy.

The scale of these two events is exceptional though the courts offered evidence this week that violence is all too
common in this society.

A Central Criminal Court trial in Cork sent mother of two Rita O’Driscoll to jail for life for the murder of her former husband after she stabbed him 28 times in a row at her brother-in-law’s Macroom home.

In Dublin that court yesterday found an electrician guilty of murdering his partner of four months, whom he strangled in her bedroom after a “binge” drinking session. Seán Nolan, aged 36, faces a mandatory life sentence next week.

Yesterday’s events in France, though the result of a very different kind of motivation, show that this society may be no more violent than any other.

Three people died in a knife attack at a church in Nice. French president Emmanuel Macron denounced the “Islamist terrorist attack” at the Notre Dame basilica. The Nice mayor spoke of “Islamo-fascism” and said the suspect “repeated endlessly ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is greatest]”. He compared the attack to the murder of teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded close to his Paris school earlier this month. Yesterday’s murders follow days of protests in Muslim countries triggered by President Macron’s defence of the publication of cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed.

It does not diminish the impact all these tragedies have on those directly involved to say that they might have been less likely to happen in societies that made a conscious effort to educate people about violence and the nihilism behind it.