A man has been found guilty of the attempted murder of three children in Dublin. The attack, which occurred in November 2022, has once again brought the fragility of our shared space into sharp focus. The perpetrator, a 40-year-old with a history of mental instability and a fixation on violent fantasies, forced his way into a home and stabbed two girls, aged seven and four, and their five-year-old brother. They survived, but the scars—physical and psychological—will endure. The courtroom heard chilling testimony: the man believed he was on a mission from God.
But let us not pretend this is an isolated act of madness. It is a symptom. A symptom of a society that has lost its moral coordinates, where the secular priesthood of therapists and social workers has replaced the old certainties with nothing but a fog of understanding. We are told to empathise, to comprehend the 'root causes' of such violence. Yet in doing so, we risk normalising the abnormal. The man was known to authorities; he had been sectioned, released, monitored. And still, three children were nearly butchered in their own home.
This tragedy arrives as the UK government trumpets its border vigilance. The Home Secretary has made much of new measures to 'secure our borders' from illegal immigration and potential threats. But what of the threat that already festers within? The Dublin attacker was an Irish citizen, born and bred in the same country where he committed his atrocity. The border did not fail him; our collective cultural and institutional rot did. We obsess over the stranger at the gate while the wolf is already inside the walls.
The comparison to the Fall of Rome is overused, but not inapt. The late Empire was not conquered by barbarians at the gates; it collapsed from within. A loss of civic virtue, a reliance on a bloated state apparatus, and a creeping sense of decadence sapped the will to defend what was once sacred. Today, we see the same decay. Our institutions are increasingly bureaucratic and secular, devoid of the moral language that once gave them spine. The family unit fractures, community bonds weaken, and the public square is flooded with noise instead of wisdom.
What, then, is to be done? Not merely more surveillance, more CCTV, more police. Those are the tools of a dying order. We need a cultural renewal. A reassertion of the idea that some acts are simply evil and cannot be explained away by socioeconomic factors or mental health diagnoses. We need to reclaim a sense of shared identity, one that is not based on the lowest common denominator of 'tolerance' but on a robust conception of the good life.
This will be decried as reactionary, simplistic, even dangerous. Let it be. The alternative is to continue on this path, where we are surprised each time a deranged man attacks children, and we wring our hands and promise to do better. But we will not do better until we admit that we have been doing worse. The Dublin horror is a mirror held up to our own society. Do we have the courage to look?
