Murder Most Foul in the West

Ireland Calling with John Spain

Murder Most Foul in the West

October 19, 2007

By John Spain

Apart from the gangland assassinations, most of them are really manslaughters rather than murders. In other words, the killings are accidental or unintentional.

Certainly they are not planned. They just happen when violent situations develop.

So we have got used to killings being reported in the media here and we are harder to shock these days. Irish society is not what it used to be, even outside the criminal circles.

These days it is more violent and the violence is more frequent, more unpredictable, and more extreme. And we have got used to that.

But in spite of us becoming hardened to killings in our society, we can still be horrified and outraged by a violent death. The murder last week of a girl in Galway, a Swiss student who had just arrived here to do an English language course, is an example.

It’s what everyone here has been talking about in the past few days. It’s become a kind of watershed event that has ordinary people asking each other what has gone wrong in Ireland. How can such a horror happen?

Any death like this is tragic. But the poignant circumstances of this murder made it particularly sad, and that is what has caught the country’s attention.

Manuela (Mani to her friends) Riedo was an only child, the apple of her parents’ eyes, who lived with them in a small suburb of the Swiss capital of Berne. She was a clever student, a bright, popular teenager just a few weeks short of her 18th birthday.

Mani was an energetic, good-natured youngster, with a great love of life. Her teachers say was always happy and brightened up their classes. In her spare time she took dance classes and was good.

She also worked at a rehabilitation centre for inmates at a prison in nearby Fribourg where she had started attending the Fribourg Business School. She was, in short, like so many bright young Irish teenagers, a lovely girl with her whole life in front of her.

Or she was until she came to Ireland just over a week ago, on Saturday, October 6.
The irony is that she came here to do a two-week language course with a group of 40 students from Fribourg because their teachers had decided that Ireland — and Galway in particular — would be a safer, more friendly place than somewhere like London.

She arrived on the Saturday for the two-week English course at the Galway Language Center, and like the other students in the group was staying with a local family in a Galway suburb.   She settled in on Sunday and on Monday morning she and her fellow students had half a day’s classes at the center before being given the rest of the afternoon off. It is known that she spent some of that time in the shopping area in the city center.

Later that evening she set off from Renmore Park where she was staying with the host family to travel into Galway to meet up with others in the group at the Kings Head pub, a well known traditional style bar with open fires and pub grub that is popular with students and tourists alike. She never got there.

On part of her short journey from Renmore Park, she walked along an isolated pathway that runs through waste ground beside the railway line near the main Ceannt Station. It was there that she was attacked, strangled and murdered. She had been in Galway at that stage for just one full day.

It was that more than anything else that shocked people here, the fact that she had been here such a short length of time. So much for the Ireland of the Hundred Thousand Welcomes. So much for the traditional friendliness of the west of Ireland, the charm of Galway City and Connemara beyond.

This delightful young Swiss girl had been in Galway for just a day and a half before she was brutally murdered. A sickening feeling that was a kind of collective guilt seemed to settle over the country.

People contacted radio talk shows to vent their feelings, a mixture of rage and sorrow. Within a few days the entire party of Swiss students had canceled their course and gone home.
Mani’s parents, heavily sedated to cope with shock and grief, decided not to go to Galway where a packed memorial service was held. There was no point.

They waited in Switzerland for the body of their beloved only child to be returned to them. Expressions of sympathy from the people of Galway, heartfelt and sincere though they were, could not lessen their pain.

And so the mood here turned to anger and to a determination to find the killer. Much attention has been paid to a recent spate of attacks on women in the town of Athlone, halfway between Dublin and Galway.

Was there a link to the murder of Mani in Galway?   Both are college towns with lots of students where young women walk home at night after being in bars or clubs.

In Athlone, three women have been viciously attacked in recent months, one of them being sexually assaulted. From the descriptions of the attacker, Gardai (police) seem to believe that the same man has been involved in each attack.

He is tall and powerful and may be from Eastern Europe, based on his accent and facial characteristics. He is very fit and therefore a military background is possible.
After the last attack in Athlone two weeks ago, Gardai circulated a photofit picture of their suspect with requests in Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian for help. People here are now speculating that the attacker moved to Galway after that publicity.

The attack on Mani came less than a week after the Gardai appealed for help to the local immigrant communities in the Athlone case. Of course it may well turn out that the attacker is not an immigrant at all.

But the Gardai now seem to be certain that someone in the region is deliberately targeting young women, usually students, and that he is a serial attacker. After the death of Mani and assuming a connection, the concern is that the individual may become a serial killer.
If it does turn out that the killer is an immigrant, then a lot of questions will be asked here about aspects of our immigration policy. A lot has been swept under the blanket of political correctness here, not least the fact that no attempt has been made to monitor immigrants from Eastern Europe here or to do any kind of checking on their backgrounds.

We all know that there are lots of charming Latvian girls working at the checkout in the local stores here, or Lithuanian girls picking mushrooms or Estonian guys working on our vegetable farms. We’ve all met the Polish plumbers and painters and gardeners who are decent, honest people who do the job for half what Irish workers demand and just want to earn money and send it back home to their families.

But there is another, much less appealing side to immigration here. The collapse of the old Soviet block left behind it a tendency to criminality across Eastern Europe, a world in which an aversion to normal work and a familiarity with Mafia-style gangsterism was the norm.
The cynicism that existed across the old Eastern Europe about the corrupt regimes that were there under the Soviet umbrella fostered this. Why be honest and work when robbery, extortion, violence, people smuggling and prostitution can pay far more?

The fact is that a significant number of young men with this kind of attitude — many of whom have been brutalized by army service — are among the majority of honest immigrants who have ended up in Ireland. You seen them hanging around particular pubs and congregating in certain areas of our cities. They don’t work and have a very macho attitude to anyone who tries to find out too much about them.

Whatever the outcome of the Manuela Riedo case — and it is very possible that it is a local nutcase who is involved rather than an immigrant — this aspect of immigration has to be tackled here before it is too late. One case like this involving an immigrant could spark a backlash here that would affect immigrants across the country.

Last week here also saw a move which at last is going to give the Gardai the means to take on armed criminals in Irish society wherever they come from. As readers of this column will know, we have been plagued here in recent years with a massive increase in the use of guns.
Now under a new plan, each Garda region will soon have a permanent armed response unit to deal immediately with armed criminals. Up to now local Gardai had to wait for the armed Emergency Response Unit to arrive from Dublin.

What is being proposed is proportionate, reasonable and responsible. Each Garda region — there are five outside Dublin — will get a 24-member armed unit to provide 24-hour cover. The units will operate like normal unarmed Garda patrols until there is an incident involving guns.

When that happens they will transform themselves quickly into SWAT-style teams, changing uniforms and unlocking their guns from their specially adapted vehicles.

This is the right way for us to proceed here and for that reason it is to be welcomed. But it is a welcome people here will give with a heavy heart, since it means moving further away from having an unarmed police force. However, most people here do see the change as inevitable and one that could not be postponed any longer.

The trouble is that Ireland has got to the stage where the use of guns by criminals has become commonplace. The fact is that the Garda Siochana –- the guardians of the peace -– now have to operate in a society that is anything but peaceful.

We have become used to guns being routinely used by the drug gangs in shooting wars and assassinations. But more recently that trend has taken on an even more sickening character.
These days guns are being used with a casual abandon that is almost sub-human. There was the pitiless shooting of a young plumber some time ago because he happened to be in a house outside Dublin where a gangland assassination took place and therefore was a potential witness.

Just a few weeks ago there was the deliberate blasting of a motorbike Garda because he had the temerity to follow a car being driven by criminals. What was shocking about that was that the young criminals clearly did not care whether he lived or died or that he was an unarmed traffic cop. And there have been many gun incidents that have been equally disturbing.

So the time had come when the Gardai had to be given the means to tackle armed criminals as a matter of routine, rather than as something that only occurred on rare occasions. It’s all part of our changing society.

That and the fact that an innocent young foreign student can come here and be murdered two nights after arrival.

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