Nally case reveals inherent racism of Irish: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2005/11/20 > Nally case reveals inherent racism of Irish

Nally case reveals inherent racism of Irish
Sunday, November 20, 2005 - By Vincent Browne
Our collective attention span is hardly longer than that of a gnat. A few weeks ago, the death of former Fianna Fáil TD Liam Lawlor obliterated all other news when the Sunday Independent reported that there was a “teenage girl'' who was “likely to be a prostitute'‘ in the crashed car.

A few days later, there was the Ferns Report, which was followed by Liz O'Donnell's exquisitely timed call for an end to state deference to the Catholic Church.

Then there was the six-year sentence imposed on Mayo farmer Padraig Nally for killing Traveller John Ward, the media response to that and now the departure of Roy Keane from Manchester United.

From week to week, we can barely remember the ‘crisis' of the previous week. Very little sticks, and there is very little follow-through, but that does not mean there is no harm done.

Certainly, there was harm done over the Nally issue.

Minds were poisoned, antagonisms deepened and hurts rooted.

What was most shocking about the Nally case - aside from the killing of a husband and father of 11 children - was the position taken by the leader of the second largest political party in the country and the would-be taoiseach, Enda Kenny.

His sole response, in an article published in The Irish Daily Mirror on Wednesday - the substance of which he repeated in an interview on RTE's News at One the same day - was that the law should be changed, not to protect people such as the man who was killed, but to give greater latitude to people such as the killer.

In doing what he did, Kenny was aligning himself with those who were protesting not just the sentence imposed on Nally, but his very conviction for manslaughter.

It is worth rehearsing the main facts of the case. Nally, a farmer living in a remote area near Cong, Co Mayo, became aware around 2pm on October 14 last year that a car with two men had driven up outside his house.

He got his gun and went outside. There was only one man in the car when Nally reached it. He asked where the second man had gone and was told he had gone to the rear of the house.

Nally went around the back of the house, saw a man at the kitchen door and fired a shot at him, wounding him. Nally then hit the man up to 20 times on the head with a thick stick.

“He was like a badger,” he said afterwards. ‘You could hit him, but you could not kill him.”

The man, John Ward, then limped down the road, away from the house. Nally went inside his house, reloaded his gun, went outside, followed Ward down the road and fired a shot into his head at close range, while Ward was crouched in front of him.

Nally then threw Ward's body over a hedge. Nally later acknowledged he had intended to kill Ward, even though at the time Ward posed no threat to Nally or his property.

The law as it stands gives quite a bit of latitude to someone protecting his property. It allows the use of reasonable force. It is not an objective test; the test is what is reasonable in the circumstances as perceived by the person involved, according to Section 18 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997.

Nally was entitled to use force to repel an intruder onto his property. He was entitled to threaten to shoot Ward if the man did not leave his property.

He was entitled to use reasonable force to remove Ward from his property if he refused to leave quietly, and Nally was entitled to shoot and kill Ward if he believed that his own life was in danger.

No court and no jury would have failed to uphold Nally's entitlements. If Ward had returned fire and Nally was convinced his life was in danger (even if, objectively, that was not true), he would not have been convicted either of murder or manslaughter.

But to go back into his house, load his gun, then emerge to pursue the already-disabled intruder down the road and deliberately shoot him in the head at close range is an entirely different matter.

It is hard to see how a jury did not find him guilty of murder.

The most salient feature of this case was the entirely unjustifiable killing of this father of 11.

Yet when the leader of the opposition and would-be taoiseach commented on the case, his focus was not on the brutal beating and killing of this man, a member of a community which has been discriminated against, vilified and belittled.

Instead, without even the ritual expression of ‘heartfelt sympathy' for the family of the bereaved, he demanded a change in the law to give further latitude to property owners to protect themselves and their premises, based on a recklessly false understanding of the current legal position.

It was part of the anti-Traveller bile that suffused newsprint and the airwaves over the last week, part of the ugly racism that is embedded in the dark recesses of the Irish psyche.

sbpost@iol.ie