An attack on our Liberté.

I prepare to write this blog based on my experiences of the previous week and around events and meetings that I may have attended, which I feel the readers would be interested to read my commentary on. My blog is also a reflection of my weekly article in one of Waterford City's local newspapers. 

So, last week I was going to write and express my views on my attendance at the recent plenary session of Waterford Council, in Dungarvan, and, of course, the debacle that was the Broadcast Centre roundabout on the ring road, which on Friday afternoon was miraculously reduced to one lane at the apparent insistence of the National Roads Authority, as part of some “continental style” traffic management experiment.

However, as I watched the Bosnia and Herzegovina versus Ireland qualifier, on a foggy night in Zenica, social media started to light up and flash reports of gun attacks and bombings taking place across the whole of Paris.

As the news started to filter through it became very apparent that Paris was once again under attack and, for the second time in 2015, there was a Multi Pronged Terrorist Attack (MPTA) taking place across the capital city of France. No one could have imagined that only ten months on from the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks that we would once again be revisiting all the horrors associated with a coordinated and heinous attack on the City, the nation and the people that live by the motto “Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité”.

By now there have been thousands of words written about last Friday’s MPTA and perhaps more worryingly for all of us is that this latest attack was not aimed at one organisation but unmistakably targeted a nation and its people. Worryingly, this latest attack targeted more than just the French nation as it also targeted Germany and the USA. The German football team were playing in the Stade de France and a US band was playing in the Bataclan Theatre, and if it was not for an observant security guard a suicide bomber would have accessed fans in the Stade de France!

We are now beginning to see a new type of terrorism that can coordinate and operate multiple near-simultaneous bombings and shootings and questions have to be asked if our Western security forces can cope with and prevent such coordinated attacks in the future. I fear that the determined terrorists we are now facing will always manage to evade security forces, as these can never be 100% secure, and inflict their own perverted style of justice on our Western world.

The future of free border access across Europe, which were created in 1985 with The Schengen Agreement, must now to be reviewed as evidence emerges on how the terrorists were able to travel freely crossing borders in cars weighed down with weapons, bombs and ammunition.

If we are to protect the very freedoms that allow us to write commentary in the printed media, post opposing observations on social media and permit us the opportunity air our own views, and argue these robustly in public, then we must be prepared to protect these fundamental rights.

Friday 13^th November will change Europe forever and, unlike the events in Paris of 7^th January, last Friday’s events will alter our views and our perception of just how safe our society is. As European nations begin to pick through the evidence that will eventually trace the origins of this monstrous attack, we must hope and trust that a global solution will now be found and implemented.

ISIS is a growing threat to the very way we lead our lives and we have to find a consistent solution that protects us in our own free society. We cannot allow terrorist organisations to dictate our liberty just because they fundamentally disagree with our way of living. We must jealously protect those freedoms and perhaps, just perhaps, we need drop our PC mumbo jumbo rhetoric and start some straight talking as how to best look after OUR hard fought societal freedoms.