Ellen Coyne’s Fringe: Women’s Coalition on Immigration Leaves IT Flummoxed 

If Ellen Coyne was trying hard not to sound startled this week then it clearly isn’t working.

The Joe.ie turned Irish Times corridor whisperer took to print and podcast to passively aggressively condemn the launch of Women’s Coalition on Immigration on the linkage between crime and violence against women.

With the feminist group earning the endorsement of three Oireachtas members, two women and a gay man for good measure, Coyne’s hatchet job against the Coalition was complicated by facts on the ground as well as the journalist’s tone which betrayed her ideological intent.

Half the airtime is spent with the IT’s Bernice Harrison circling the same conceptual cul-de-sac: the apparent inability to imagine that a feminist framework might be turned, however uncomfortably, toward questions of third-world migration. The result by the Tara Street duo is less a demolition than a vaguely irritated monologue, landing scant blows on its intended target.

Coyne, to her credit, has survived the Joe clickfarm embarrassment and neatly extricated herself from the Indo’s long, slow decline. But there’s an unmistakable sense that her radfem sensibilities are dating fast. One time penning articles about abortion access and now lamenting the decline of family formation less than a decade on, the progressive gloss that once tracked neatly with the Republic and Coyne’s Repeal-era certainties now looks a touch worn, as the mood shifts and the old orthodoxies no longer quite command the room.

This is precisely where the Coalition’s demand for the routine publication of disaggregated data on crime, including nationality and immigration status becomes awkward for Coyne and company.

While right-wing clickbait does have a habit of sensationalising migrant crime macro-European trends nevermind the shadow of Rotherham, Aisling Murphy nevermind the Sligo beheadings or Parnell school attacks present different stories.

This is the real difficulty for Coyne and her cohort. It is not that the arguments they dislike are being made, but that they are being made with a degree of institutional legitimacy that can’t simply be waved away. Once a line of inquiry acquires parliamentary footing as is the case with the Coalition, it ceases to be a whisper in the corridor and becomes part of the furniture.

The result for us IT readers is a curious lag: a journalistic ethos and tone still calibrated to an earlier moment, addressing a country that has already moved on. 

The old reflexes, sighing incredulity, procedural scolding, the gentle policing of acceptable thought now land with less authority than they once did. They read, increasingly, as artefacts. None of this guarantees where the argument will end. 

The broad Repeal-era coalition that once gave liberal Ireland its confidence was always more contingent than it appeared, and it is now showing signs of strain under the weight of newer, more divisive questions, from gender identity to migration.

But it does suggest that the terms of debate have shifted decisively, and perhaps irreversibly. The Republic appears to be entering a new phase, messier and more openly contested. And in that landscape, the corridor whisperer risks being left behind: still speaking fluently in the language of a settled era, while the conversation, louder and less easily managed, carries on elsewhere.

The truth is as crude as it is simple. Third world migration from the importation of Islamic populations to Sub-Saharan Africans reshape the threat analysis on female safety and while the populist right may pursue this point sloppily and even cynically such reality remains a reality no matter how much sighing goes into the Irish Times podcast.