Security for Ireland’s easy-access politicians dealt a blow
DUBLIN — A bare-knuckled attack on one of Ireland’s best-known politicians has the country questioning how much longer its leaders can go about their business without security.
A Dublin man was arrested Thursday for allegedly assaulting Michael Healy-Rae as the independent lawmaker drove out of the capital back toward his distant County Kerry constituency.
Police said they had recovered video footage showing a man approach Healy-Rae, 59, as he was sitting in rush-hour traffic Wednesday behind the wheel of his Skoda, which was emblazoned with the politician’s name and constituency contact details.
Healy-Rae had his window rolled down and was talking on the phone to his son Jackie, a Kerry councilman, as a man walked into the road and started punching the politician in the face. While the attacker fled on foot, police helped Healy-Rae reach a nearby hospital to have his facial wounds stitched up.
Prime Minister Micheál Martin said the attack on Healy-Rae — who had been a junior minister in his coalition government before his surprise resignation in April — could mark a watershed in how Irish politicians operate in public.
“We’ve never had this before in our society,” said Martin, who has represented the southwest city of Cork in parliament since 1989.
Reflecting the relative informality and openness of Irish political life, the prime minister spent part of this own week pressing the flesh with thousands of farmers at the National Ploughing Championships, one of the country’s perennial events featuring face-to-face contact with politicians from all parties. But there, too, Martin, faced an attempted assault and a suddenly beefed-up security detail.
“Our democracy is relatively unusual in the sense that our members of parliament, and indeed ministers and myself, can walk through our streets unhindered,” said Martin, who called the attack on Healy-Rae “a significant moment that we have to take very seriously.”
Healy-Rae, who was recovering Thursday at his Kerry home, issued a statement vowing he would “not be deterred” from politics.
The flat-capped Kerryman, whose family has built a legendary political machine based on door-to-door house calls, appealed for “a serious conversation about the growing toxicity directed towards politicians and public representatives.”
His son, who heard the assault unfold live on their phone call, said many months of social media attacks, particularly by anti-immigrant extremists, were fueling vitriol against his father — examples of which can be readily seen in comments on many of Healy-Rae’s recent social media posts.
“Unfortunately it’s becoming more normal,” said Jackie Healy-Rae, who added: “I do honestly believe that it is only a matter of time before an Irish politician will be seriously injured or killed in this country.”
Bloodshed once was a feature of Irish political life. Dozens of politicians died during Ireland’s 1919-21 war of independence from Britain and the resultant civil war of 1922-23, most famously IRA chieftain-turned-dealmaker Michael Collins. Three more politicians in the Republic of Ireland were slain as part of the three-decade conflict over the neighboring U.K. territory of Northern Ireland. But that threat ended with the region’s mid-1990s paramilitary cease-fires capped by a 1998 peace accord.
Ireland’s government has been struggling since 2023 with a rise in street-level hostility against politicians, publishing findings that found particular hostility directed online against female lawmakers. It introduced reimbursements of up to €25,000 for beefing up security at politicians’ homes and constituency offices, where many of the country’s 174 members of the Dáil Éireann parliament meet weekly with the public to field their complaints.
