When does a crime against the individual become an assault on an entire nation? This is the harrowing question at the heart of the Riad Bouchaker case in Ireland. Found guilty this week of despicable violence against young children, Bouchaker did more than shatter innocent lives – his act of barbarism felt like a hate crime against Ireland itself.

Bouchaker is a 52-year-old Algerian national. He had been living in Ireland for 20 years. On 23 November 2023, armed with a foot-long kitchen knife, he carried out a frenzied attack at an after-school crèche in Parnell Square in Dublin. In a flash of monstrous violence, he stabbed three children, leaving one girl with permanent brain damage. He also stabbed childcare worker Leanne Flynn, who heroically shielded the kids with her body.

It was an atrocity that rocked the republic. It was followed by the worst riots Dublin had seen in decades. People stormed O’Connell Street. Buses were set alight, stores smashed up. There had long been smouldering dissent over mass immigration – after the bloodshed at the crèche, that fury exploded into public view.

When will we be allowed to talk about crimes against the nation?

Yesterday, Bouchaker was found guilty of three acts of attempted murder and numerous acts of assault. Amidst all the horrific details in his trial, there was one particularly chilling revelation. It was a witness’s account of what Bouchaker had been chanting on the streets of Dublin prior to his apocalyptic assault on innocents. ‘Shit Irish,’ he was saying. ‘Shit fucking Irish.’

The witness was one Patricia Byrne. She was in Dublin for a dental appointment. She encountered Bouchaker and described him as hollering ‘Shit Irish’ in an ‘aggressive’ fashion. Not long afterwards, this man who was insulting the Irish in their own land was visiting unspeakable violence on them too.

This changes things, doesn’t it? It suggests this was not only a crime of violence but also an act of anti-Irish hatred. If a man were to beat the streets shouting ‘Shit fucking Muslims’ or ‘Shit fucking lesbians’, and then launch a horrific assault against those very constituencies, we’d instantly clock it as a savage hate crime. So why not here? Why isn’t this horror being discussed as a crime against the Irish republic?

Ms Byrne’s evidence didn’t receive much coverage in the Irish media, despite playing a key role in establishing that Bouchaker’s actions that day were intentional. The Irish left, of course, is all but silent on what Bouchaker said and did. The kind of people who think it’s a hate crime to say ‘he’ about a man who says he’s a woman seemingly have nothing to say about an aggressive armed individual who poured scorn on the Irish before stabbing their children.

This case raises so many burning questions about immigration. There was an audible sigh of relief in Dublin’s chattering classes when it was first reported that the suspect in this barbarous assault had been in Ireland for 20 years and was a naturalised Irish citizen. ‘Phew,’ you could almost hear them say, ‘he wasn’t one of the new lot who live in migrant hotels.’

Yet that makes it worse, surely? It is extraordinary that a foreigner could live in Ireland for two decades, and even be gifted citizenship, and yet still be consumed by such a violent loathing for the ‘shit fucking Irish’ that one day he decided to locate a school and unleash hell on the kids assembled outside.

The Dublin elites want this atrocity to fade from memory, lest it further inflame working-class anger over Ireland’s broken borders. What they should be asking is why their project of integration has failed so catastrophically, to the extent that even a man afforded citizenship can seethe with disgust for the Irish and their children. Avoiding this question would be suicidal for Ireland’s rulers.

When will we be allowed to talk about crimes against the nation? It’s not only Ireland. Britain, too, has recently suffered atrocities that seem to cross the line from acts of criminal evil to acts of xenophobic bigotry against the kingdom itself. One thinks of the Sudanese ‘asylum seeker’ who shouted ‘Fuck England’ when he was sentenced last month for raping a woman in the park. Or the smirk on the face of one of the small-boat illegals who was found guilty of gang-raping a woman on a beach in Brighton.

Or, indeed, of the rape gang scandal. Consider Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale rape-gang ringleader who was released from jail this week. The judge in his case said he and his henchmen had treated white English girls as if they were ‘worthless and beyond any respect’. So they are racial crimes as well as sexual crimes, right? Acts of sexual tyranny motored by a burning disdain for England and her daughters?

What strange times we live in. The activist class sees hate everywhere but is blind to the anti-British, anti-Irish, anti-Western animosity that seems to motor some of the wicked men who come to our lands. It’s time to take seriously these crimes against us.