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Ireland Weeps for the Beautiful Girl Murdered in Broad Daylight
The country is shocked and angry, but one thing is missing from the public debate.
Her name is Ashling Murphy. At twenty-three, she was a gifted violinist, a primary school teacher, and a beloved family and community member.
She went for a run on January 12th, on a popular trail beside the canal, in the small Midlands town of Tullamore. At 4 pm, a stranger attacked her. After fighting for her life with keys, Ashling lost the battle and died by strangulation.
The guards charged Jozef Puska, a 31-year-old Slovakian man with murder.
His arrest was on the same day as her funeral, where the country watched as her family mourned a young woman killed in her prime.
“The killing of Ashling Murphy in broad daylight, while out jogging, highlighted to us all that there is no behavior that women can change to make us safer, and that it is men’s behavior and ultimately our culture that must transform,”
Orla O’Connor, director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
Gender-based violence affects women of all ages and backgrounds, including migrant women like Mongolian national Urantsetseg Tserendorj, who died at the hands of a 15-year-old boy, and Irish national Nadine Lott, killed in a horror attack by her former partner in 2019.
Consider that 236 women aged between 18 and 25 have died violently in the Republic of Ireland between 1996 and 2020. And Covid had a devastating impact on vulnerable women, with Women’s Aid highlighting a 43% increase in contacts with its services during restrictions.
Ashling’s murder: a sad link with another missing woman
The area where Ashling was killed is known as ‘Fiona’s Way’ in honor of 25-year-old Fiona Pender, one of eight missing women who disappeared in the nineties within a (roughly) 80-mile area outside Dublin, dubbed the vanishing triangle. Heavily pregnant, she disappeared…
