She has planning permission for social housing, but no construction work has actually taken place. In fact, her plans for the site are not known. When in 2017 he was acquitted of the false imprisonment* of then-tánaiste Joan Burton and her assistant in 2014, who for three hours had been trapped and traumatised by a jeering mob at a water protest – with Murphy having been filmed leaning against the incarcerating car – he used his Dáil platform* to accuse gardaí of “lying under oath” in a co-ordinated way that implied “an agreement to commit perjury”.Ĭlearly what offends Murphy’s pompous ideals is that Dr O’Connor may sell the property back to the council “at a profit”. If it is indeed an “indictable offence”, why has nobody called the guards? And if mainstream media are so shy of this story, how come Murphy’s intention to take a complaint to the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) was headlined for days in all media? Complaints to Sipo are part of the parliamentary quotidian and normally receive scant attention in media.īut Murphy, as a parliamentarian, has never shied from weaponising its institutions. Given all this, Paul Murphy’s fulminations about “an indictable offence under section 177 of the local Government Act” seem mystifying. TD Niall Collins has addressed the Dáil in relation to the purchase of a vacant site in Co Limerick by his wife in 2008. What did women fight for all these years if not for autonomy, for their own agency and that they not be judged by their relationships with men? It was a shocking moment, as if we were back in the days before feminism exploded on the world a time when sexism in society limited women’s opportunities and, as Betty Friedan wrote, “the problems were buried, unspoken. Starting with Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns, who didn’t seem to appreciate that to identify a woman by her husband is to diminish her, it reached fever pitch with Paul Murphy, who wallowed in the “wife” word at least half a dozen times. Last Thursday it reached foaming fury in Leaders’ Questions. For weeks now the phrase “Niall Collins’s wife” has been storm-tossed on the barbarous seas of Dáil Éireann. The misused woman is Dr Eimear O’Connor, who is married to Niall Collins. And mainstream media, on discovering a story is inaccurate, corrects, withdraws or apologises.

Mainstream media is certainly moderated by the need to establish the facts to the best of its ability before publishing. The straw man – the grossly exaggerated argument posited in order to then oppose that exaggeration – that swept social media was that “mainstream media” avoided the Niall Collins story.

The public discourse of the last week, the “Niall Collins’s wife” saga, has been a struggle between a straw man and a publicly misused woman.

Chocolat harris