Abuse on the campaign trail: ‘They were using very gendered language, they were saying slut and tramp’

The local and European elections are taking place in less than two weeks’ time, on Friday June 7th.

Since the start of the campaign, there have been several concerning incidents where candidates have faced intimidation, harassment and abuse while out canvassing or hanging up election posters.

Two members of Social Democrats local election candidate Ellen O’Doherty‘s team were subjected to verbal abuse and threatening behaviour this month while putting up posters in Dublin’s north inner city.

“They were calling the Social Democrats ‘Nazis’, they were calling me a traitor, they were using very gendered language, they were saying slut and tramp,” O’Doherty says on the latest episode of The Irish Times Women’s Podcast.

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The men demanded O’Doherty’s posters be removed, shouting at the two female campaigners, “you can’t put that here, who told you you could put this here, this isn’t allowed”

One of the men “made motions to grab the ladder” that Doherty’s team member was standing on, before brandishing a knife in an attempt to take down the poster himself.

“[The team member] was up the ladder trying to take the poster down and was just becoming increasingly flustered and more upset and she was really struggling to get it off the poles… her hands were shaking”, she says.

Green Party candidate Janet Horner has also experienced threatening behaviour on the streets while hanging up election posters.

Horner says on the night in question, she was met by an aggressive individual who made repeated threats to kill her and her friend and who claimed “Dublin 1 is for the far-right”.

However, the Green Party councillor says it is not just around election time that she is subjected to abusive behaviour. Receiving online abuse is unfortunately a frequent occurrence.

“Take a look at my Twitter feed,” she says. “Anytime I tweet anything, it doesn’t even have to be controversial… I once tweeted about the deposit return scheme for bottles and [received] fierce racism back in the comments in response to that,” she explains.

“You want to return bottles, but you don’t want to return illegal immigrants,” was one of the responses to her tweet about the recycling scheme. “And then they’re responding to each other and they’re all inflaming each other and then it goes on and on,” she adds.

In this episode we also hear from Lisa Keenan, Assistant Professor in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, who recently contributed to the Taskforce report on Safe Participation in Political Life.

Keenan explains how the abuse of politicians is widespread, problematic, and targeted disproportionately at women and minority groups.

“This is not just an assault on representatives in their personal capacity. It’s an assault on Irish society and Irish democracy… and that’s why it’s so important for these things not to be minimised,” she says.

You can listen back to this episode in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.