A VIDEO CIRCULATING on social media falsely asserts that several migrant men were convicted of a series of rapes and sexual assaults in Ireland over a six-week period at the start of the year.
The footage, first posted on TikTok by an account that regularly shares anti-migrant content, features a woman talking into a camera and listing names and convictions of men for sexual offences in Ireland’s courts.
It has since been re-shared on Facebook, Twitter and in far-right and anti-migrant groups on the messaging app Telegram.
“I have a list here, a list of court cases since January 6th up until the present day, which is February 19th,” the woman in the video states, after referencing the ‘Ireland for All’ march which took place in Dublin on 18 February.
A caption on the video reads “recorded unvetted attacks Jan 5th – Feb 19th 2023″, with a section caption lower down adding “rape cases in Ireland as reported on news paper [sic] and public records”.
However, none of these cases occurred in 2023 and none of the perpetrators were convicted this year: the cases and media reports that are referenced in the video date back over a period of more than 20 years. Most of them are from more than 10 years ago.
Furthermore, the time period it normally takes for reports of rape or sexual assault to be investigated, for suspects to be charged and for convictions to be secured in court is far longer than six weeks.
Over the course of five minutes in the video, the woman lists more than 25 cases of rape and sexual assault which she incorrectly claims have occurred this year alone.
The Journal looked into the individuals named and each of the cases described by the woman in order to ascertain which, if any, of them occurred this year.
We matched details of 17 individuals named by the woman or cases she described to media reports about them. All of those cases occurred between 2000 and 2017, and not in 2023.
In some of those cases, the woman in the video assumes that those involved are migrants or asylum seekers because their names are not traditionally Irish or Anglophone in origin, but there is no specific mention of the country they are from.
At points in the video, the woman also suggests that those arriving in Ireland should be “vetted” before being allowed enter the country.
But she lists cases involving men from European Union countries, such as Hungary and Poland. These individuals are free to travel to Ireland under EU law and could therefore not be ‘vetted’ before coming here.
In a small number of other cases, the details outlined by the woman were not specific enough to find in media reports, either for crimes committed this year or in a previous year.
This was either because she mispronounced the names of individuals, did not give any name at all, or did not give details of the alleged crimes.
However, no such cases matching the descriptions given or individuals with similar names could be found for 2023, when the woman claimed the crimes occurred.
Of the cases listed by the woman that we could find:
These figures represent a tiny proportion of the number of rapes and sexual assaults reported in Ireland in each of those years.
A total of 549 offences relating to rape and sexual assault were reported to Gardaí in the year 2000, according to figures from the force’s annual report for that year.
No figures could be found for the year 2002, but from the year 2003 onwards, CSO figures are available (which count rape, defilement of a child, sexual offences involving a mentally impaired person, aggravated sexual assault and non-aggravated sexual assault).
The CSO figures show that:
The video attempts to mislead viewers into thinking that such cases are more commonly perpetrated by non-white or non-Irish men.
There is no evidence for this, on top of the fact the most of the crimes described by the the woman happened in previous years, and that no evidence exists to support claims that the remaining crimes occurred this year.
What’s more, statistics and research regularly show that most women who are subjected to sexual crimes are targeted by someone known to them.
Recent figures released by the CSO reported that in the twelve months up to October last year, more than four out of five (83%) suspects were known to their victim.
This is not to say that random attacks don’t happen – most of the cases listed in the video are exactly that.
Rather, cherry-picking random attacks over a 17-year period masks the reality that such incidents are usually not random, whether the perpetrator is Irish or otherwise.
The timeline for securing convictions for serious crimes in Ireland, such as cases of rape and sexual assault, also takes years as opposed to a matter of weeks.
This is because of the time it takes Gardaí to investigate an allegation by gathering evidence, questioning suspects and interviewing witnesses, as well as the length of time before a case comes before the courts and the length of court hearings themselves.
Court cases are usually not listed for months after a prosecution is recommended by the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, while trials for serious crimes generally take weeks unless a suspect pleads guilty.
It can then take weeks or months again before a judge decides on an appropriate sentence for the perpetrator.
Marc Murphy, a practising barrister who specialises in criminal law who acts as a defence counsel in Ireland, explains that it generally takes well over a year for cases involving serious crimes to go to trial here.
“I’d say a rule as a rule of thumb, you could certainly be looking at 18 months, sometimes up to two years, between the Gardaí getting involved and the trial,” he tells The Journal.
“That depends on a number of things: how co-operative everybody is; whether the person that has been charged makes themselves available to the Gardaí or, alternatively if they can find them and arrest them; and a lot depends on what’s called disclosure.”
In the 17 cases listed by the woman in the video that we could verify, the length of time from the date of the reported attack to the date of sentencing varied from 361 days in the shortest case to four years and 60 days in the longest case.
The median length of time it took between the reported attack and sentencing of a perpetrator in these cases was two years and 64 days.
Even in the unlikely event that a rape or sexual assault was reported and fully investigated in the six weeks between mid-January and mid-February, it would be unheard of that the case would have gone to trial and been heard to completion with a sentence handed down.
It would be even more unlikely again that this would happen in the number of cases listed by the woman in the video.
Asked whether a serious crime such as rape could be investigated and go to trial in Ireland within six weeks, as the woman claims, Murphy says categorically that this would not happen.
“Absolutely no chance,” he says.
“In my experience, when a person is arrested for a serious crime like rape, it would take up to a month before they even appear in the District Court, let alone in the Circuit or the Central Criminal Court, where they would ultimately be tried.
“There’s absolutely no way that somebody would be convicted within a month for a serious offence.”
Although the woman in the video claims that the convictions occurred since 6 January, the courts had risen for Christmas at the time; they did not sit for the first time this year until 11 January.
It should also be noted that men convicted of rape are often not named in media reports to conceal the identity of their victims.
Occasionally, women agree to waive their right to anonymity to allow the perpetrator to be named, but this only occurs a handful of times a year.
So it would be similarly unlikely that as many women agreed to waive their right to anonymity in such a short period of time.
This anonymity is not limited to the media: the perpetrators would also not be named in publicly accessible court records, such as listings on the website of the Courts Service.
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