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When three young children were stabbed on the streets of Dublin last November, the authorities very quickly managed to focus the narrative away from the attacker.

Horror gave way to condemnation of the reaction to the horror.

A 5-year-old girl was left with life-changing injuries and remains in hospital as of the latest report I can find in May this year, when she was described as “non-verbal.”

In that May report, her mother used the one in-depth interview she has given not to condemn the man who critically maimed and nearly killed her child on Nov. 23 on Parnell Street, but to condemn the men and women who took to the streets of Dublin in the wake of the attack to protest at the evil of it.

“We do not want hate to be the narrative of what happened to our daughter,” the girl’s mother told the Irish Examiner.

But hate was what happened to her daughter. When someone stabs a defenseless child, he does not do so with anything other than hatred, and even if you want to argue the insanity defense, it is still a hateful act by any impartial measure of the word.

This poor mother, ironically, is from South America, and the child’s father is from Eastern Europe. They came to Ireland legally, got jobs, did the right thing. Then their daughter was stabbed at her after-school crèche while they were at work.

Riad Bouchaker, 50, of no fixed abode, appeared in Dublin District Court in December charged with the attempted murder of three children, assault of a crèche worker, and possession of a 36cm kitchen knife. He spoke only to the Arabic interpreter during the short hearing.

In the aftermath of the attacks, there was an attempt in Ireland that bordered on the sinister to downplay the original outrage and emphasize the rioting as the real problem.

Some 500 members of the public rioted, and they looked like ordinary Irish men and women to me, but police said they were “led by far-right individuals with anti-immigration views.”

Leo Varadkar, then the Irish Prime Minister, was at the forefront of attempts to denounce the rioters, hinting at plans to bring in draconian new incitement to hatred laws, to the extent that this became the story. It was almost impossible at one stage to get updates on how the little girl was doing.

Whether or not the government had a hand in shaping the mother’s eventual interview we cannot know. I find her choice of words, referring philosophically to “the narrative,” a little strange.

But broadly, we have to take her word for it that this is how she feels. The woman, who cannot be named, said her child was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Yes, she was in Ireland, at the time of sudden onset multiculturalism.

Now she is spending her young life in and out of pain management wards, communicating by moving her eyes.

It makes me mad as hell to think of how that child is suffering, so I can well imagine how it makes a working-class father feel, and how that might make him want to smash a few things to say enough is enough, because he’s damned if this is one day happening to his kid. What I cannot quite understand is how the girl’s mother speaks of it, but maybe that’s just me.

According to some reports at the time, the attacker should have been deported six months earlier.

According to the authorities, this was “misinformation.” It was either a “random attack”—so that makes it better, does it?—or the knifeman had a connection to the injured people or the school, security sources said, clutching at all the straws. They are quite brazen in the way they try to cause deflection.

At one point they insisted he was an Irish citizen, originally from Algeria, and had been living in Ireland for many years. So, all fine then?

All I would say is that we know he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English during the court hearing when he used an interpreter.

To control the hysteria, the government relied heavily on the argument that because a Brazilian Deliveroo driver was one of those who intervened to fight the attacker, therefore it followed that all was well with immigration.

Yes, but another guy who fought the attacker very bravely was an Irishman. Disgustingly, he was airbrushed from history and his wife had to take to Facebook to tell the world that she was proud of him for risking his life.

The authorities were not going to commend him, you see, because he was a boring old Irishman. Not exotic enough for heroism. He had no use to the government narrative.

It’s insulting, it’s horrifying, it’s shameful. And it’s the same story over and over, and currently the story is playing out in Southport, in the north of England, where a knifeman murdered three young children, injured eight more, five critically, at a Taylor Swift dance workshop on Monday.

These are the dead children’s names: Bebe King, aged 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged 7, and Alice Dasliva Aguiar, aged 9.

I write them because we must never let the authorities airbrush their names away in favor of concern over the concern at their deaths.

Rioting broke out afterward, as it was blindingly obvious it would do, and instead of doing the proportionate thing by saying they quite understand this reaction while appealing for calm, the authorities, backed by the weedier elements of the mainstream media, shifted the narrative to condemnation of the rioters, who stabbed the sum total of nobody, as usual.

You see the way this goes? It’s not the stabbing of children we need to worry about, in the view of our governments, it’s our reaction to the stabbing of children.

It’s not the hatred inherent in the slashing of an infant we need to preoccupy ourselves with, it’s the hatred of that act, according to the authorities. We need to calm down, be a bit more philosophical about the narrative—that is our leaders’ view.

The knifeman in Southport, a 17-year-old who has been charged, is not having his actions interpreted or explained in any way by the authorities, although we await the inevitable mental health defense and the hand-wringing excuses.

All we know is that false claims at first spread online that he was an asylum seeker. He was born in Wales, it then emerged, possibly to a family who sought asylum.

No doubt it will be a “senseless tragedy,” a random attack and not at all “terror”-related, even though it caused terror, by any measure of the word. We will be stupid to accept the official response.

These are preventable crimes. These are acts of terror, because they terrorize. And shame on anyone who will not call the stabbing of children an attempt to terrorize society, because it plainly does when in the aftermath of the stabbings schools and nurseries put out alerts about security arrangements and issued new instructions to parents.

And what about the undoubtable fact that in recent years children have been the target of a rising number of shocking attacks specifically on them, from the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester in 2017 to the Dublin attacks last year and now Southport? Are we meant to ignore that trend? Why must we always be persuaded these things are not patterns, but random and coincidental?

The wider impact of the authorities silencing right-minded—not far-right—people who become restive when children are killed is that it is extremely demoralizing to all of us.

Living in Ireland in the days after the Dublin attacks, I felt desperate about it, watching the weirdly edited news. The trauma of such attacks is felt so deeply by so many people and compounded, I think, because of the macabre news blackout, and the attempt to make us feel a certain way about them. We are being gaslighted.

We are being gaslighted because becoming red-hot upset when kids are slaughtered cannot define what makes someone “far right,” and mass demonstration is a more morally correct response to children being murdered than, say, not reading about it or questioning it because the authorities order you not to.

In church where I live in West Cork the weekend after the Dublin attack, our parish priest gave a long speech in which he did not utter one prayer for the little girl cut to bits, but rather ordered his congregation not to consult social media where we would find only “lies.” He claimed the attacker had mental health difficulties. (Oh, ya think?)

He told us we had better not go down the route in our minds of the Dubliners who rioted, because that was racism. He did not cover what moral redundancy lay in the act of knifing a child. That bit he completely glossed over. I have not been to mass in his church since.

And now Southport mourns, and burns. And so does Hartlepool and Manchester, and London, in empathy. And the rioters are not “right-wing activists,” as is claimed, they are ordinary people defending innocent victims.

And innocent people in ethnic communities who have nothing to do with extremism are victims too, being caught up in it all.

Like the Dublin child’s mother, they came to this part of the world for a peaceful life and had a right to expect one. They need to demand answers.

When Keir Starmer visited Southport to lay flowers, mothers shouted their anguish at him. That is as it should be. Lay this at his door, and let him find the answer—although, so far, all he’s come up with is the idea of banning the all-but-defunct English Defence League. The problem with that approach is that the EDL hasn’t stabbed any children, so how would banning them help?