‘Their deaths woke no one up’: LGBT+ community speaks out a year on since the Sligo killings

Last week, as Ireland collectively celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, two families in Sligo and Roscommon quietly mourned their lost sons and uncles, while one man reflected on his narrow escape.

On Saturday, April 9, 2022, Anthony Burke was allegedly attacked and stabbed in the face by an assailant outdoors. He survived but was severely injured in his left eye.  

The next day, Sunday, April 10, 42-year-old Roscommon auctioneer, successful businessman, and popular Fine Gael activist Aidan Moffitt was killed in his home in Cartron Estate in the town. His body wasn’t discovered until the following evening, Monday, April 11. 

Just over 24 hours later, on Tuesday, April 12, 58-year-old retired care worker Michael Snee was also killed in his own home close to the town centre.

Low-key first anniversary masses were celebrated for both men in both counties. Sligo Pride declined to comment when contacted by the Irish Examiner. While the men’s deaths prompted a nationwide outpouring of support for the LGBT+ community at the time, it hasn’t materialised into meaningful change, according to Rooney.

“There was a great outpouring of empathy for the victims, but it didn’t massively wake Ireland up and shift Ireland to say ‘hang on a minute we need to take a step back here. We need to do something now, so this doesn’t happen again’,” she says.

“The only thing that I feel that it has done is empowered other people who hate our community to spread more hate while we continue to get killed and attacked.”

An Garda Síochána have recorded a 30% increase in reported hate crimes in 2022, with the LGBT+ community the second most attacked minority. Speaking about the 2022 statistics, Assistant Commissioner Paula Hilman, whose remit includes the Garda National Diversity and Integration Unit, accepted the “huge impact on victims” of hate crime but also pointed to the “significant impact on wider communities and society”. Even State bodies accept that hate crimes send a ripple of fear around the country.

“When the killings happened in Sligo, people started to check themselves again,” says Cork LGBT+ Pride Festival chairperson Clive Davis. 

“Will I be safe coming out of that venue at night time? On that street? People were being more aware of their surroundings, of having people to walk home with. It made us all look at the activities that we were taking for granted before that,” he tells the Irish Examiner. He adds: 

“The gay community has evolved from meeting in bars and clubs to meeting online but especially with AI now, you don’t know who you’re meeting [online],” added Davis.

“Sometimes when you’re scrolling online, the comments that you see underneath a post on social media, how people in the trans community are being treated at the moment, it’s always something negative. 

It saddens us, that we’ve come so far, we’ve had all these positive things in Ireland and yet we’re checking ourselves. 

"It makes you look over your shoulder, it makes you not want to hold hands with your partner,” he says.

“I have friends who always feel the need to be prepared for a fight because they never know what’s going to happen next.

“We also feel we have to have our defences up, essentially. It’s just the way it has always been for us, it never feels like it’s ever going to change,” she says.

According to NUIG psychology lecturer Chris Noone, the technical term for what Davis and Rooney describe is ‘minority stress’ — “a type of stress that can only be experienced by people who face oppression”.

“That’s exactly what the feeling was when these awful killings happened last year, the community was on edge as a result,” he says. 

It’s something that anyone who is straight, white, grew up in Ireland, in a fairly well-off situation, can’t really understand. It’s the knowledge that there is a wider homophobic discourse out there that’s providing a home for people who think this way.

“There’s more and more spaces now for people with homophobic beliefs to find community. We’re especially seeing that now with the rise of the far right in Ireland.”

New hate crime legislation is winding its way through the Oireachtas and it’s hoped The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill will be passed before the summer. However, LGBT Ireland sees the new law as “just the very beginning of a response” to the rise in hate crime.

“It has to be the start of a process and not the end,” says LGBT Ireland policy and research manager Pádraig Rice.

“We need to see training for the gardaí, the judges, the DPP," he says. 

"We need to see better reporting, better monitoring and data protection, more awareness campaigns, better victim support. 

"And ultimately we need to do more work around prevention —  which is down to education — to get to the root causes of the rise in hate that we’ve seen over the last number of months." 

Noone also sees education as key to protecting minority communities. “I’m sceptical of the value of concentrating on hate crime legislation first. I can see while it’s useful, the priority has to be education. This is where the battleground is going to be,” he says, and points to recent protests at a Dublin library against LGBT+ books.

Pride flags have been burned in Waterford. Bricks have smashed through gay bars in Dublin. Now libraries are being targeted. All the more reason for “a really robust response,” according to Rice.

 “We’ve been calling for a national action plan. So far that call has gone unanswered from the Government and we’d really love to hear from the Minister for Justice about what he thinks should be done and what the Garda Commissioner thinks because so far it’s kind of been silence,” says Rice.

Responding to queries from the Irish Examiner, a spokesperson for the Minister for Justice Simon Harris insists that “Government is committed to ensuring that Ireland is, and remains, a safe and secure place for all". 

The spokesperson says the rise in hate crime figures reported last year could be as a result of “increased awareness of hate crimes” which “may have encouraged more people to report such crimes to An Garda Síochána.” They also said social media companies would face “serious financial sanctions” for any breaches of new online safety codes under the Online Safety and Media Regulation (OSMR) Act 2022.

A brick thrown through Pantibar's window just now. No one hurt.
It says in Irish "FAIRIES (fags) OUT OF IRELAND"

But we are Ireland

Happy Pride everyone. It's going to be a great day tomorrow, full of Irish love and queer joy.
Be thankful for it, cos some people have neither pic.twitter.com/AQe2YwXpvY

— Dr Panti Bliss-Cabrera (@PantiBliss) June 29, 2018

Other actions to tackle prejudice and intolerance the Government plans to take include the Migrant Integration Strategy and the National LGBTI+ Strategy. Work is also continuing on reforms such as ‘Supporting a Victim’s Journey’ which aims to make the criminal justice system “more victim-centred.”

For trans women like Harper Rooney, Sligo feels no safer now than it did a year ago. 

“I feel the same. It’s no different. If someone’s going to attack me, they’re going to attack me, there’s just nothing I can do about that as a trans woman," she says.  

I was certainly afraid after the attacks had happened, I was quite nervous but it’s something that many of us, including myself, have just accepted.

“We accept the fact that going down the street someday somebody could give us a dirty look, someone can harass us, someone can attack us. 

"It’s just what happens.”

A 22-year-old man is currently before the courts in connection with the Sligo attacks.