Una Mullally: The murder of Ashling Murphy changed Ireland, but violence against women is relentless

Only one person knows why he did what he did on January 12th, 2022. And only he knows why he dragged Ashling Murphy’s family through a trial, having already confessed to gardaí that he killed her. He is guilty. But he is alive.

The murder of Ashling Murphy on Grand Canal way, Cappincur, Co Offaly, in the depths of winter last year, changed Ireland in some ways. It has to have. It brought people out into the streets. It expanded the space for women to tell their own stories of fear, threats, violence. It hopefully also created an opening for men to listen to how gendered women’s daily experiences are. It brought home the fact that no matter how often we’re told that it is much more likely for women to face violence at the hands of partners and exes rather than strangers (a cold non-comfort), someone they’ve never met can still enter a seemingly mundane scene in their daily life and wreak devastation.

In closing statements, the prosecution spoke about what they characterised as this killer’s “contemptible lies”. He is a liar and a murderer. He left a family without their daughter and sister, a classroom without its teacher, a friends’ gathering without a pal, an emptiness at a party, a vacuum on a livingroom couch, a hole at a kitchen table, a silence in a WhatsApp group.

It was meant to be a turning point. But how many turning points do we need before we acknowledge that without a profound cultural shift, we’re going around in circles? We are told that there’s a “zero tolerance” approach to gender-based violence. Is that so? Is that working? Where are the preventive measures that are proving effective?

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“Not one more” was the sentiment at some of those painful, powerful, peaceful vigils. Thousands of women and men gathered outside Leinster House. The vigils happened in her hometown, around Ireland, and in other countries too, in villages and cities from Ballina to Brisbane, Longford to London. But the grim reality is that there will be one more. There was one more, then two, then three, then a dozen. 13 women and girls were killed in 2022. These acts of violence visited upon women kept happening, before and after.

They happened in Balinteer, the killing of Seema Banu and her two children, Asifra Riza and Faizan Syed in 2020. In Finglas, Jennifer Poole, stabbed to death in her home by her ex-boyfriend in 2021. In Lixnaw, where Eileen O’Sullivan and her son, Jamie, were “unlawfully killed” by her partner in 2021. Nadine Lott was killed in December 2019. Her ex-partner Daniel Murtagh launched an appeal against his murder conviction last year.

Skaidrite Valdgeima was killed by her partner in June 2019. Cathy Ward was murdered by her husband at home in Clondalkin in 2019. Elzbieta Piotrowska was murdered by her son in Ardee in January 2019. Amanda Carroll was murdered by her boyfriend in her apartment in Cabra in October 2018 – his appeal subsequently failed. Ingrida Maciokaite was murdered by her ex-partner in Dundalk in September 2018. His attempt to have it overturned also failed.

I could go on. But can this go on? What is wrong? Are we to take such wreckage as an inevitability? Are we really and truly doing enough in our society to stop violence against women? We don’t just need “awareness”, we need radical social transformation.

My late teenage years existed, in part, in the shadow of the murder of Raonaid Murray in Dún Laoghaire. I didn’t know her personally, but what happened changed the whole place. When someone is taken in this manner, what occurred doesn’t go away. Of course the pain exists most profoundly in the hearts of those closest to their loved one, those for whom a person was an essential presence in their own lives.

[ Who is Jozef Puska? From anonymous father-of-five to notorious killer ]

[ ‘We have evil in this room’: Judge tells Jozef Puska he will have ‘day of reckoning’ for murder of Ashling Murphy ]

Yet murder has something of a geographical aura. It’s as though the site of violence itself gets stained. Who running that canal path since Ashling Murphy was killed doesn’t think of her as they go? Maybe they pause in reflection. Maybe their pace quickens. The desolate fact that her running route was named after Fiona Pender, still missing, still a crime unsolved, felt like some sort of grim poetry, a grotesque rhyme. I thought of Pender’s family often in the aftermath of Ashling Murphy’s killing. I cannot imagine the pain they’re still traversing.

After the outpouring, the outcry, do we think women feel safer as the nights draw in now, as any woman looking to exercise outdoors keeps their eyes on the weather app to note the time of sunset? Maybe they go back to an old gym membership, because you can’t run in the dark when you’re a woman. In this case, a young woman with her whole life ahead of her couldn’t even jog along the canal in the afternoon as the winter sun slowly sank. Anything could happen. And something did. A nightmare was realised before dusk. Do we see her death as a one-off abhorrence? Or do we understand the killing of one woman to be connected to all kinds of violence visited upon women?

In the aftermath of the verdict, outside the court, Murphy’s brother, Cathal, spoke about how “our Ashling was stolen from us”. He spoke about how people in Ireland and Irish people abroad showed solidarity “to condemn gender-based brutality with visceral repulsion”. He said: “Ashling was a vibrant, intelligent and highly motivated young woman who embodied so many great traits and qualities of the Irish people and its communities… She was the epitome of a perfect role model for every little girl to look up to and strive to be.” Her family’s dignity in the midst of their grief is so admirable. I don’t know where they have found their strength.

I hope they know that Ireland, the way it is, with its emotional connections tightening with proximity, feel their loss, the outrageousness of it, the needlessness, the torment of traversing a trial that, given the evidence, only ever had one conclusion. Grief is a lodger that never moves out. Sometimes it abates, but it’s always there. Sometimes it’s right at the surface. Sometimes there are moments where it departs briefly. Sometimes it’s a suffocating weight.

I don’t know if the national bearing of its load is any consolation to the Murphy family. I only hope they know that although the vast majority of people can’t come close to comprehending what they’ve experienced, there was and is an attempt to carry their pain collectively.