A Sudanese immigrant allegedly attempts to behead a Belfast man with a steak knife. 

Images of the attack, showing a black man sitting astride a prone, bloodstained body and waving a blade in the air, rapidly went global on social media. 

The police have a suspect in custody, and nobody has been tried and convicted of any related crime, but there’s nothing ‘alleged’ about the incident itself.

The victim has lost his left eye, and the whole world has seen footage of an assault of medieval savagery, and watched as a passer-by armed with a hurl most probably saved the man’s life.

Even in a city that has witnessed more than its share of violence and death over the years, these were images of unprecedented horror.

I did my time as a reporter during the Troubles of the late 1980s and 90s.

I covered IRA funerals, sectarian riots and all manner of disturbances.

On one occasion, I was actually on the phone to a bereaved family in West Belfast, attempting to arrange an interview, when I heard the gunfire that killed a mourner in their front garden.

But I have never seen a sight like that on this island before.

And yet, judging by the response from our betters in politics and much of the left-wing media, we are not allowed to be shocked by this incident. 

If we are backward enough to be angry and disturbed by scenes of an attempted beheading on an Irish street, it is our reaction to the incident, and not the incident itself, that is considered most troubling.

The debate that raged across the airwaves here, in the days since Stephen Ogilvie was almost decapitated outside his own home, has not been to consider whether there is reason for alarm about brutal knife crimes that apparently, allegedly, frequently involve immigrants from very different cultures.

Instead, the most pressing concern for our betters is whether we should be allowed to learn of these incidents at all. 

The real problem here, it seems, is the availability of social media to the hoi polloi, not the uncommon violence of crimes perpetrated by a small number of ‘new Irish’ in recent years. 

A gay Sligo man was beheaded, another stabbed to death and a third man blinded by a Muslim immigrant in 2022.

Last month, an Iranian mother was almost completely decapitated in another knife attack, and a Muslim immigrant is in custody over her murder.

In the past year, two young black men have been stabbed to death in the Grafton Street area of Dublin, the most recent just last month.

Ashling Murphy was stabbed to death by a Slovak immigrant in 2022. George Nkencho was shot dead by gardaí in 2020 after he threatened them with a knife.

But it seems that expressing concern about these crimes, and asking whether the prevalence of certain types of violent attacks has increased recently, is a ‘far right’ indicator. 

And social media is the real culprit for the explosion of unrest that followed the attack on Stephen Ogilvie, not the person with the steak knife, whoever he might turn out to be, who butchered an unarmed man in an entirely unprovoked attack.

That’s why several newspapers considered that the main story was the rioting in Belfast, and that burning buses were the main images to represent the incident in Wednesday morning’s headlines, and not the picture of the man with a knife straddling his helpless victim. 

The Irish Daily Mail alone prioritised that scene.

On radio and television, commentators and politicians discussed how the social media platforms should be censured and restrained in the aftermath of unhelpful incidents, so as to prevent ordinary citizens learning about such occurrences and responding in their primitive and unsophisticated ways in future.

According to one commentator, the people reacting with outrage to footage of atavistic butchery in their midst were ‘radicalised’ by social media and must be re-educated.

What we don’t know won’t trouble us, it seems. For the riff-raff outside of media and political circles – those privileged cohorts capable of interpreting events with insight and nuance before deciding how much we should be told – carefully curated ignorance is bliss.

Shaming, gaslighting and berating the public for having concerns about immigration will not make those concerns go away. 

Neither will burning buses and setting fire to innocent immigrants’ homes and businesses. 

But if people are persistently denied a voice, they will eventually find a way to make themselves heard.

I'm all in favour of making a show of entitled parents 

Andrew Scott, Rosamund Pike, Ralph Fiennes and Benedict Cumberbatch are among the actors who’ve stopped a play to call out audience members using mobile phones during their performances.

But what’s a star of stage and screen to do when the device making the racket is… a small baby?

Poor old Kenneth Branagh had to endure a cooing and gurgling infant all through the first half of The Tempest in Stratford-upon-Avon, recently, but if he was too polite to object, audience members were not. One who’d made a six-hour round trip and paid £400 (€465) to see the performance complained that it was ‘completely ruined’ by the disturbance, and others queued at the interval to voice their anger. The mother and baby were duly removed to watch the second half on a monitor, and proper order too.

Like those entitled parents who let their kids run riot in restaurants, these people need reminding that not everyone is as charmed by their offspring as they are.

 How Swiftonomics could soon make millionaires out of clued-in Lilywhites

THE annual list of new words to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary already includes ‘nudification’, the practice of using an app to remove someone’s clothes in a picture. It’s quite alarming that we’ve got to keep expanding our language to take account of disturbing behavioural quirks driven by smartphone use. The latest example I’ve come across, just this week, is the ‘gamblification’ of modern culture.

It seems people are using ‘prediction platforms’ to bet on events like Taylor Swift’s wedding later this month, using their knowledge of TayTay as if they were savvy traders playing the stock market, and thus avoiding restrictions on online gambling.

Millions of dollars have been staked on predictions about the wedding with some fans betting $230,000 (€199k) the bride will be pregnant when she walks down the aisle, while others have gambled $300,000 (€260k) on the chance of Gracie Abrams being on the guest list.

And that begs the question as to whether Gracie’s boyfriend Paul Mescal will make the cut. Taylor has reportedly banned ‘plus-ones’ for single guests, unless they’re selected celebs in high-profile unions… Certain Kildare folk with insider knowledge could make a real killing.

 Some of us love you Mikey, No Matter What

Like most people who watched that Boyzone documentary last year, I was troubled to see how his experience of youthful fame had affected Mikey Graham, right, and it was hard to blame him for vowing never to take to a stage again. Fair play to him, then, for joining his surviving bandmates, Ronan, Keith and Shane, for a few numbers during their London reunion show at the weekend, surely knowing that the trolls would have a field day over his weight gain – especially as the other three appear to have been miraculously spared the effects of gravity and middle-age spread. I presume that those who piled on to taunt 53-year-old Mikey for looking his age and having a few hard-earned battle scars are all paragons of physical perfection.

 No guilt trips for telling porkie pies

So much for ‘guilty pleasures’ – according to a new survey, most of the behaviour that causes us pangs of guilt isn’t really much fun at all. In fact, the research by a cruise company found that we beat ourselves up about the most humdrum of transgressions, rather than doing fun stuff to regret.

Some 70% of respondents felt guilty about taking more than an hour a week of downtime, throwing away even tiny amounts of food, not phoning their parents often enough, failing to answer texts promptly, or calling in sick to work even when they were genuinely ill.

And when it came to real pleasures, some folk seem far too easily guilt-tripped.

More than one in five said they felt bad about ordering a Friday-night takeaway instead of cooking, taking a slice of cake or, get this, having ‘two biscuits instead of one’. Right.

Clearly none of these people felt the slightest bit guilty about lying to the researchers, then.

 Declan's Irish mammy shows off his real roots

HE MIGHT have decided he’s no longer an Irishman, after jumping ship from the Irish international team to the English side some years ago, but Declan Rice retains one particularly Irish trait – the ability to turn lobster-red at the first hint of strong sun.

At a photoshoot for the English team on the eve of the World Cup, he seemed to be the most sunburnt of all the players, with his face and arms glowing like a brake light. As he explained, ‘coming from England where it’s all different types of weather, coming here and it’s always 30C – it really does hit you in the face’.

Not if you’re wearing sunscreen, though, as his mother apparently reminded him.

When she saw those photoshoot pictures, he said: ‘My mum was killing me.’ A mammy who rings up to give out to her football star son because he forgot his Factor 50? It sounds like Declan is even more Irish than he thought.