Image of the newly-developed square outside the Opera House, where the attack unfolded. Vlaamse Opera – Google Maps
Six people were stabbed during a Kurdish demonstration near Opera Square in Antwerp, Belgium, on Thursday night, according to Antwerp-based Dutch-language newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.
Four of the injured were found at Opera Square itself, Het Laatste Nieuws reported, while two others were discovered on nearby streets before being evacuated to the hospital for medical treatement.
“Two of the victims are in critical condition,” Antwerp Police Spokesperson Wouter Bruyns was quoted as saying, noting that four suspects had been arrested.
The demonstration was organized by the Belgian Kurdistan Communities Democratic Council (NAV-BEL) in support of Kurds in Syria‘s Rojava region, who, according to Het Laatste Nieuws, called the attack “terror-motivated” in a late Thursday statement.
“This is no different from jihadists who specifically attack civilians in the streets, at Christmas markets, or other public places. The Belgian government must acknowledge that Kurds, even in Antwerp, are victims of hate speech and racist and jihadist-inspired violence.”
Scotland Yard has stopped a Ukip march from going ahead in east London over fears of provoking the local Muslim community.
The demonstration, titled “Walk With Jesus”, was scheduled for January 31 in Whitechapel – long home to one of Britain’s largest Islamic populations.
Metropolitan Police officials said permitting the event in that location would be “reckless” given the potential for violence.
Social media advertisements promoted the gathering as a “Christian march”, inviting participants to worship Jesus Christ during January, which organisers described as “the month dedicated to the holy name of Jesus”.
Authorities confirmed the march could take place elsewhere – but not in Whitechapel.
This marks the second Ukip event banned from Tower Hamlets in recent months.
In October, the Met outlawed a planned demonstration called “The Mass Deportations Tour” over fears of serious disorder.
Protesters descended on Whitechapel to “stand firm” and show that they were “ready to defend our community” – and columns of men could be seen chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they marched.
Nigel Farage described the scenes as one of the most “terrifying things” he had ever witnessed.
Ukip subsequently redirected their rally through west London, finishing at Marble Arch.
The party accused police of “caving in to Islamists” and “violating their democratic right to assembly”.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman said the decision rested solely on public safety concerns, not political considerations.
“It would be reckless to allow an event to go ahead when we understand there’s a risk of serious violence to members of the community and to our officers.
“We are not doing so on the grounds of politics. We’re not even doing so on the grounds of whether people will be offended or not by their presence,” he explained.
“We are doing so solely on our risk assessment for serious disorder.”
Mr Harman added attempts to communicate with Ukip in recent weeks had yielded only “limited responses and limited engagements”.
He urged organisers to collaborate with Scotland Yard to identify a suitable alternative venue.
“We reasonably believe that there would be a hostile local reaction to their presence – which many may perceive as provocative – and a consequent risk of violence and disorder,” he said.
“As the police, we just can’t allow that to happen.”
The senior officer confirmed that should a more appropriate route be agreed, the procession could proceed as it did previously.
Anyone defying the restrictions and attending the banned march would face arrest, he warned.
Germany is approaching a political breaking point, and the public knows it—even if the anti-German, anti-European ruling class refuses to act.
A sweeping new survey has confirmed what millions of ordinary Germans experience daily for over a decade now: mass migration has become the country’s most pressing crisis, eclipsing foreign wars, climate rhetoric, and elite talking points.
According to a new poll carried out by INSA, half of the German population now identifies migration as the single biggest problem facing the nation. That assessment comes despite years of mainstream media minimization and demonization of alternative viewpoints, and official government messaging insisting the issue is exaggerated or “solved.”
What makes the poll’s results particularly striking is that this concern cuts across political lines. While 83 percent of Alternative for Germany (AfD) voters rank migration as Germany’s top challenge, substantial shares of voters from other parties quietly agree—even if they continue voting for pro-mass migration platforms.
Among supporters of the liberal-centrist Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, half now say migration is the country’s most serious issue. Even voters aligned with the left-wing nationalist BSW register a majority level of concern, undermining the claim that opposition to mass migration is a fringe—or expressly conservative or right-wing—position.
On the liberal left, denial remains stronger but not total. Roughly one-third of Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) voters and nearly a quarter of Alliance 90/The Greens voters acknowledge migration as the nation’s primary problem—a remarkable admission given those parties’ central role in relentlessly pushing open-border policies and persecuting those who opposed them.
These numbers expose a growing contradiction in German politics that has become impossible to ignore. Large numbers of voters recognize the damage caused by uncontrolled migration yet continue to support parties that actively expand it, suggesting political paralysis driven by fear, habit, or left-globalist media pressure.
That paralysis is all the more alarming given recent immigration figures. Despite public opposition, the federal government admitted nearly 400,000 non-EU migrants in 2025 alone, compounding pressure on housing, welfare systems, schools, and public safety—costs overwhelmingly borne by hardworking German taxpayers.
The same INSA survey shows that 65% of Germans believe the country is now in clear economic decline, with bankruptcies rising and industrial competitiveness eroding.
This worrying pessimism also spans the Right-Left political spectrum. Even among Green and SPD voters—groups most invested in the current economic and migration model—around half acknowledge that Germany’s economy is moving in the wrong direction.
Freedom of expression, once taken for granted in postwar Germany, is also seen as increasingly fragile. A majority of respondents—56%—now say freedom of opinion is under threat, with concern especially pronounced in eastern Germany, where distrust of elite institutions runs deepest.
Among AfD supporters, alarm over speech restrictions is overwhelming. More than four out of five AfD voters say they fear they can no longer speak freely—an indictment of a political culture that increasingly equates any form of dissent with ‘extremism’.
In contrast, voters aligned with the left-liberal globalist Greens and FDP largely deny any such threat, reflecting a widening experiential divide between Germany’s governing class and those who live with the consequences of its policies.
The polling numbers also explain the current electoral momentum. AfD now leads nationally with 26%, edging ahead of the Union parties and far outpacing the governing coalition, whose credibility continues to erode.
More importantly, INSA notes that AfD possesses the most loyal voter base in the country, with the highest proportion of “secure voters.” This suggests that the AfD’s ascendency isn’t just a protest wave, but a durable political realignment driven by lived experience.
Previous surveys reinforce the same conclusion. A separate YouGov poll found majority support among Germans for a immigration moratorium (stopping all immigration for a specified period) and large-scale deportations—policies still treated as some kind of taboo by establishment parties.
The picture that emerges is unmistakable. Germany’s population understands that mass migration is undermining social cohesion, economic stability, and democratic trust, yet the political system remains locked in ideological inertia.
For hardworking German taxpayers, the injustice could not be clearer. They are asked to fund ever expanding social welfare systems that mainly help illegal aliens and foreigners, absorb declining services, and accept rising insecurity—while being told their concerns are illegitimate or immoral.
That is it about the greenie jet-setters of World Economic Forum flying in on a plume of carbon compounds, and their urge to make life just a little more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for the little guys they claim to know what’s best for?
Not too long ago, the “you will own nothing and you will be happy” guys were promoting the eating of bugs to save the planet — recall that a French company called Innovafeed that was promoted at one of these WEF gatherings that got a lot of attention from the Washington Post as a bright new wave-of-the-future idea.
Now they’d like us to wash our clothes less often:
See, 70% of CO2 emissions coming from a cotton tshirt come from washing and drying it. Bad tshirts, stop them! And washing clothes puts microfibers into the water system! (Let’s see their video on birth control into the water system, which is actually believed to be giving young men high-pitched voices.) Worse still, washing clothes wears them out, and creating a lot of ‘clothing waste.’ Maybe they should try recycling.
They want jeans washed just once a month, with no adjustments suggested for the condition they are in. Pajamas get once a week, jumpers, or sweaters, get once every six weeks, again, with no concessions about how dirty they are. They do make a concession on worn underwear and stinky gym clothes.
But can you imagine having to deal with kids’ clothes washed on that schedule? Kids love dirt, they’re drawn to dirt, they demonstrate it every time they go out to play, and it’s not just the boys.
By these greenie standards, drug-addicted street bums would be the most eco-friendly people on the planet.
The BBC reports that there are leftists who have already joined something called “the no-wash movement‘ to save the planet. I wrote about them here, citing their bid to create a Pig-Pen Nation.
Now the horrid idea has exited the dumpsters and made a home for itself at the WEF for promotion outward.
It’s all part of the leftist urge to make life as wretched as possible for the well-fed average joes of the West.
As I wrote here, they really like this stuff and they’re on a tear:
What a sick world this is. Greens have unsuccessfully tried to sell us on all sorts of repulsive things to put into our bodies — from various versions of soylent green, to “stewmaking” burials, to human compost burials, to recycling urine into drinking water to save the earth, to eating bugs. It’s one disgusting thing after another, which these days even includes attempting to coax people into taking public transit. Not too long ago, a Utah official tried to encourage people to eat wild toads to save the environment. Utah teachers were also recently caught teaching CRT in schools behind the kids’ parents’ backs.
It wasn’t enough that the greenie left came for our light bulbs, our flush toilets, our guns, our plastic straws, our gas stoves, or our hamburgers.
Now they’re coming for our coffee.
Another greenie favorite is going without air conditioning. The New York Times was promoting that last year. I wrote about it here.
Now they want crusty, dirty, smell-it-a-mile-away clothing, all made worse by the greenie practice of going without air conditioning.
This is disgusting, and the WEF is all part of its promotion. Whatever their next bright idea is, and there will be a new one, you can bet it will be disgusting. All to get them back into grass skirts and mud huts.
Swedish investigators have just uncovered that Somali immigrants have committed welfare fraud, with most of nearly $100 million dollars siphoned off, some of it used to pay for visits to Thai sex clubs, stays in luxury hotels abroad, and political party membership fees. And still worse, some of that money went to support Islamic jihad groups in Somalia. More on this latest scandal involving Somali immigrants and welfare fraud can be found here: “Somali Immigrant Welfare Scams Uncovered in Minnesota–and Sweden,” by Zolta Győri, European Conservative, January 2, 2026:
More than one billion Swedish kronor (€92.4 million) in taxpayer funds intended for preschools and schools have been siphoned off through an Islamist-affiliated welfare fraud network in Sweden. A recent probe found that funds meant to support Sweden’s education system were diverted through a network of independent schools allegedly linked to radical Islamist activity.
The findings followed a police raid on an apartment in Gävle, north of Stockholm, where several individuals connected to a radical and violent Islamist extremist group were staying. Police were searching for Rabie Karam, described as “one of the main actors” in a network of schools accused of recruiting and spreading radical Islam.
One of the most prominent cases of fraud involves a Gothenburg school that received 462 million kronor in public funding. Somali-Swedish former MP Abdirizik Waberi served as principal and was convicted of siphoning off 12 million kronor (€1.11 million) through fake invoices. According to the report, large sums were sent to Waberi’s Islamist party in Somalia, while other funds were used for private purchases, including Thai sex clubs, political party membership fees, and trips to luxury hotels in Southeast Asia and Kenya.
The owner of another Gothenburg school, which employed former Islamic State terrorists who had returned to Sweden, also stole millions of kronor, transferring the money to Malta before disappearing….
How was it that Swedish authorities allowed known Islamic State terrorists to return to Sweden after they had been fighting abroad for the group?
Hungarian MEP András László (Fidesz/Patriots for Europe) commented on the similarity of the two cases saying, “Mass immigration leads to the same failures in Europe and America. Minnesota and Sweden literally experience the same fraud.”
It’s not “mass immigration” that has led to an epidemic of welfare fraud in Minnesota and Sweden, but “mass Muslim immigration,” and with even greater specificity, “mass Somali immigration.” That is reason enough to call a complete halt to Somali immigration to the West, while the full scope of the problem can be investigated, and the perpetrators sentenced to suitably long prison terms. And there is not a reason in the world why the tap of that particular immigrant faucet should be turned on again.
The Spanish Union of Railway Engineers (Semaf) is calling for a three-day strike in February to demand better railway safety measures from the Spanish government after two deadly train accidents this week killed dozens of individuals.
The Spanish news agency Europa Press reports that the upcoming strike is being called for February 9-11 and comes after a deadly train derailment on Sunday left 43 dead and over 150 injured in southern Spain — followed by a second accident hours later in Gelida, near Barcelona, after a wall collapsed as the train was passing, killing the train’s driver and leaving at least 37 injured.
The Spanish newspaper El País identified the dead train driver as a 28 year-old male from Seville.
In a Wednesday statement, Semaf said it considers the “constant deterioration” of Spain’s railway to be an unacceptable situation and detailed that, much like the accident in Gelida, another detailment recently took place near the municipality of Maçanet after a rock fell onto the track and was hit by the train. No injuries or deaths occurred as a result of the Maçanet accident.
“Various measures must be implemented urgently on our network to guarantee the safety of professionals and users,” the statement read.
As an “initial” response to the two deadly accidents, the railway union is calling for a general strike across the railway transportation sector to demand railway infrastructure safety guarantees and “criminal responsibility from those in charge of ensuring safety in the railway infrastructure.”
“The serious accidents in Adamuz and Gelida, both of which resulted in several fatalities, mark a turning point in demanding that all necessary measures be taken to ensure the safety of railway operations,” Semaf told Europa Press.
Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente reportedly responded to the calls for the upcoming strike by saying that, “We understand the drivers’ state of mind and we respect it (…), but we do not agree that a general strike is the best way to convey their message.” Puente expressed his absolute “confidence in the Spanish railway system.”
Deutsche Welle reported that CCOO, another Spanish Union, expressed moments before the strike dates were announced that the safety of railway workers and users “cannot continue in the current situation” and that, in the absence of sufficient measures and action, they would call for strike action or other forms of pressure.
Puente reportedly assured that his office would sit down to talk with the train drivers to reach an agreement that would avoid a strike in the railway sector, stressing that a stoppage, in his opinion, “would not contribute anything.”
Bishop Robert Mutsaerts Wikimedia Commons, Danny Gerrits, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Dutch Bishop Robert Mutsaerts has criticized liberal theology as a great “danger that comes from within” to the Catholic Church.
In an article on his blog published in early January, the auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of ‘s-Hertogenbosch cited Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, who wrote that he did not fear “’the barbarians at the gates,’ but rather the danger that comes from within.”
“I would now like to address liberal theologians and believers. Not to accuse them, but to invite them to reconsider,” Mutsaerts wrote, adding, “If Belloc was right, and if he were to speak to us today, he might say: Christianity in Europe is not threatened by secularization alone, but by a theology that no longer trusts its own core.”
He noted that in Germany, the problem is not external threats but the German bishops themselves, who “have published a document (‘Segen gibt der Liebe Kraft’) that offers pastoral guidelines for priests and pastoral workers for blessings of couples living in relationships that the Church calls ‘disordered.’”
“The German synodal processes have previously adopted documents advocating a reconsideration of the teaching on homosexuality, space for gender diversity and inclusion of trans and intersex persons, and discussions on celibacy. All under the guise of pastoral care.”
Mutsaerts stressed that “in Catholic theology, pastoral action can never be separated from truth.”
“The Church distinguishes between objective moral order (what is good or sinful) and subjective guilt (how personally responsible someone is),” and therefore “it cannot declare that something is morally good that it has always considered intrinsically disordered.”
The bishop said it’s important to remember the Church’s distinction between sin and the sinner.
“Think of the famous words of Augustine: hate the sin, love the sinner,” he stated. “If you justify sin, you are guiding the sinner further toward the abyss.”
“That is as unpastoral as it can be. If sinful situations are structurally blessed without clear language about conversion, the cross, asceticism, or moral growth, then sin is trivialized to ‘imperfection.’ That may sound pastoral, but where there is no longer sin, there is also no longer any reason for conversion, and Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is declared superfluous. And every blessing becomes meaningless.”
“Love without truth is loveless,” he said.
The Dutch bishop issued a warning that if Christians conform themselves to the spirit of the age, they will become secularists:
But what happens when bishops, priests, and theologians are so busy defending Christianity in such a way that the secular environment no longer takes offense at its contrarian views? Have they not in fact ceased to defend Christianity? When the resurrection of Jesus is reduced to “the story continues” instead of the actual resurrection of Jesus from the tomb; when Jesus is no longer the Savior, but primarily a moral example; when sin is replaced by “brokenness” without guilt, and grace by affirmation without conversion? What remains is a vague, polite, respectable quasi-Christianity in which nothing is at stake and which differs in no way from secular views.
He concluded that “when Christianity adapts too much to the spirit of the times – it loses precisely what makes it relevant.”
“Liberal theology rightly emphasizes human dignity, but often struggles with radical sin – not as moral failure, but as existential distortion,” the bishop noted. “What remains is a Christianity that no longer saves people, but merely accompanies them. To the abyss.”
He continued:
Perhaps the real challenge for liberal theology today is this: 1. Do we dare to believe again that Christianity is true, not just valuable? 2. Do we dare to accept that the Gospel judges us before it liberates us? 3. Do we dare to speak again about conversion, sacrifice, redemption – without apologizing? Not because the barbarians are at the gate, but because the Church is in danger of becoming empty.
“Belloc did not fear the barbarians at the gate, but civilization that has forgotten its own soul,” Mutsaerts declared.
A general view of the Neckarwestheim nuclear power plant in Neckarwestheim, Germany.Wikimedia Commons, thomas springer, PD-self
A senior figure in Austria’s power sector has highlighted Europe’s ongoing dependence on nuclear power to maintain electricity supplies during winter months.
Speaking to Austrian media outlet Selektiv, Gerhard Christiner, Technical Director of Austrian Power Grid (APG), said: “At present, the European electricity system is unthinkable without nuclear power imports in winter.”
Christiner’s comments come amid Austria’s push towards 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, a target enshrined in national policy, while it grapples with costly import needs and grid inefficiencies.
Although the country achieved 94 per cent renewable generation in 2024 on a balance-sheet basis, exporting nearly 5 terawatt-hours (TWh), the picture shifted dramatically in 2025 due to weaker hydropower output.
Austria imported about the same amount it had exported the previous year, resulting in a swing of nearly 10 TWh.
“On dark, windless winter days, PV [photovoltaic] and wind production nears zero,” Christiner siad, predicting persistent deficits over winters possibly up to 2030, making Austria a net importer for the foreseeable future.
“So we are promoting a product that has no value on the market a quarter of the time,” he said.
The reliance on imports extends across Europe, where the transformation to renewables has turned many nations into winter importers.
France, with its substantial nuclear fleet, remains the continent’s largest exporter often supplying a median of 8,000 megawatts (MW).
Austria also gets further energy from the Czech Republic, a nuclear champion.
Christiner, though, was clear that Europe’s system depends on nuclear exports from these countries.
“Austria’s physical imports in winter contain a share of nuclear power,” he noted, adding that this will remain the case “for the foreseeable future”.
Nations such as Belgium, which has delayed its nuclear phase-out, and Switzerland, debating a reversal, contribute to this critical mass, despite Austria’s longstanding anti-nuclear stance.
The interview also addressed the financial implications of Austria’s energy challenges.
APG’s 10-year grid development plan, set for approval by regulator E-Control, calls for €9 billion in investments in transmission infrastructure by 2035.
Looking further ahead, scenarios modelled using APG’s ZusammEN2040 software estimate total transformation costs for a climate-neutral energy system at around €140 billion by 2040.
These figures account for doubled electricity demand through electrification and efficiency gains, although exact outcomes depend on technology choices and consumption trends.
Christiner criticised political delays in grid expansion, arguing that a focus on renewables without matching infrastructure has led to inefficiencies.
Price differences with Germany, for instance, cost Austria €650 million yearly based on a €9.60 per megawatt-hour (MWh) gap across 70 TWh of consumption.
Adding €100 million in congestion management and losses from PV production at zero or negative prices — where 24 per cent of output is affected — the total inefficiencies approach €1 billion annually.
He dismissed calls to reunite the Austrian and German electricity price zones, citing potential overloads and higher re-dispatch costs in Germany, which already run to €2-3 billion per year.
The APG director advocated for better co-ordination, including diversified import sources to enhance energy sovereignty.
“Austria cannot achieve energy autarky,” he said, emphasising the need for robust European networking to access the cheapest available power.
He said being fully self-sufficient would be “massively more expensive”.
Legislative reforms, such as updates to the Electricity Industry and Organisation Act (ElWG) and Environmental Impact Assessment Act (UVPG), are essential to accelerate grid projects and overcome local opposition.
A sadistic sex offender serving a sentence for the horrific rape and murder of a young woman has begun claiming a transgender identity. Mark Richard Lawrence, now 64, was 22 when he abducted, raped, and murdered Julie Ann Muirhead. Lawrence, who now calls himself Maryanne, previously confessed that he “always wanted to kill a girl” and said he “tried to kill his 12 year-old sister” as practice.
Lawrence has a long and disturbing criminal record. The convicted rapist and killer began offending when he was just a teenager, and has said he began to have violent fantasies beginning from the age of 15.
Lawrence appeared in court for the first time in 1978 at the age of 17, having been charged with the aggravated assault of a young boy. The judge released Lawrence with a warning and, six months later, he was again charged with committing the same offense on another young boy. According to The Herald Sun, Lawrence was handed two years’ probation.
Mark Richard Lawrence
Months later, in early 1979, he was back in court on charges of assaulting a 17 year-old girl. He again avoided jail time and received a slap on the wrist: three years’ probation and an order to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. That same year he was again charged with the aggravated assault of a child, for which he was fined $75.
By 1981, at the age of 20, he had been committed to psychiatric clinic Wolston Park Hospital in Queensland. Lawrence escaped the facility and attempted to rob a man at knifepoint, for which he served only four months in prison. After completing his sentence, he was returned to the psychiatric hospital, where he reported having repeated fantasies about rape and murder.
It was here that Lawrence met his next victim, 29 year-old Julie Ann Muirhead, a fellow patient at the metal health facility who was being treated for self-harm. Lawrence lured Muirhead away from the hospital grounds before brutally assaulting and killing her.
Wolston Park Hospital personnel first noticed Muirhed was missing on December 26, 1983. Because the hospital was short-staffed, a search was not conducted out of concern that other patients would have been neglected. On January 4, Muirhead’s decomposing and burned corpse was found under a tree 50 meters away from the hospital.
Victim Julie Ann Muirhead, who was raped and murdered by Mark Richard Lawrence in 1984.
Muirhead’s body had been stripped down to her underwear, and her trousers were pulled down around her ankles. Her clothing was nowhere to be found. A towel had been wrapped around her neck.
While Muirhead’s death was initially suspected to be a suicide, it was later uncovered by an investigator that Lawrence, along with fellow psychiatric patient 21-year-old Robin Joseph Sirett, had lured Muirhead away from the facility with the promise of beer in a bid to act out one of the rape fantasies he’d been having.
After sexually abusing her, Lawrence slit her throat with a broken bottle as Sirett helped him hold her down. The two then reportedly tried to burn her body.
In 1985, both men were found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The investigator who solved the murder said that he believed that Lawrence should never be released. Former detective Bob Munt told the press Lawrence was a “sex maniac” who was dangerous to the public.
“I still think he is crazy,” Munt said. “I believe he will reoffend without doubt as he has offended before the (killing) and after while in jail… I saw the way he acted, the things he did at the time, the way he spoke, the way he laughed in court at sentencing,” he added.
In October 1999, while incarcerated at the Moreton Correctional Centre, Lawrence violently raped his cellmate, and an additional seven years was added to his sentence. An additional year was added for an escape attempt in 1991, bringing his expected release date to 2008.
When his sentence expired in 2008, prison officials utilized the Dangerous Prisoner (Sexual Offender) Act in a bid to keep him behind bars indefinitely, due to concerns that he remained a danger to the community and harbored sadistic sexual fantasies. Lawrence appealed, and the Supreme Court determined that he should be released under a series of strict limitations.
Among the restrictions of his release was a requirement for Lawrence to receive regular injections of Goserelin Acetate, a drug used to chemically castrate dangerous sexual predators. However, then-attorney general Jarrod Bleijie intervened, filing a petition to keep Lawrence behind bars, where he remained for another decade.
In April 2020, Lawrence was released under a supervision order in accordance with the Dangerous Prisoners (Sexual Offenders) Act of 2003. Justice Bowskill ordered Lawrence to obey “reasonable direction” provided by a corrective services officer, including who he may or may not have contact with, and required him to do so for the following twenty years. Lawrence has been appealing the terms of his supervision order since 2022, and in December 2024, the High Court of Australia ruled in his favor.
Sometime between 2024 and 2026, Lawrence was returned to the prison estate and is currently being held at Queensland’s Wolston Correctional Centre.
Now, The Courier Mail reports that Lawrence is “undergoing transition” and is asking to be referred to by the feminine name Maryanne. In response to questions from the outlet, a spokesperson for Australia’s correctional services said that he would not be held in a women’s prison at any time in the future.
“No prisoner is transferred to a Queensland correctional facility that does not align with their birth sex,” the spokeswoman said. “All prisoners in QCS custody are strictly managed in a way that protects the safety and security of the facility, officers and the community.”
Each state in Australia has different policies with respect to the housing of transgender inmates, and Queensland Corrective Services (QCS) has said the initial placement decision for a transgender prisoner must be made by an Assistant Commissioner on a case-by-case basis.
In 2023, Fair Go for Queensland Women reported that there were 65 trans-identified male inmates in the Queensland male prison estate. Of that number, 55% were serving sentences for the most serious offenses including murder and aggrevated sexual assault.
People protest outside the former Crown Paints factory, earmarked to house asylum seekers, in Coolock, north of Dublin, on July 15, 2024. Screengrab youtube
Last year in Ireland, a ten-year-old girl in state care was raped by a man the government had already ordered to deport. The government brushed it off as a “regrettable oversight.” The apology was so rehearsed it could have been written weeks before the crime.
There was no national outrage. No emergency debate. No resignations.
People protest outside the former Crown Paints factory, earmarked to house asylum seekers, in Coolock, north of Dublin, on July 15, 2024. Screengrab youtube
The public was told to stay calm. The reaction was labelled “far-right hysteria.” The government called it “misinformation.” This came as a surprise to no one, because in Ireland, the apology always arrives quicker than the accountability.
But that case did something the political class didn’t expect. It cracked the surface. It made people ask what else is being buried under government PR, staged compassion and fear of saying the obvious.
The truth is, this wasn’t an isolated failure; it was the latest entry in a pattern Ireland has perfected.
We apologise to children after the damage is done.
For years the state has known about grooming, trafficking, and sexual exploitation happening in its care system. Almost nothing changed.
When the Church fell, Ireland didn’t build something better. It built Tusla, a secular version of the same machinery of neglect, just with progressive language. Five thousand Irish children now grow up in hotel rooms and car parks. Some disappear. Some are trafficked. Some die waiting for basic medical care.
A nine-year-old boy died waiting for scoliosis surgery, not because we lack doctors or the funds to send a child in need abroad for medical care, but because the system has learned to tolerate preventable suffering.
Dozens of children go missing every year from state care. Kyran Durnin was six when he vanished in 2022. The murder inquiry began two years later, with no body ever found. Another girl disappeared within an hour of entering care; she was found a year later locked inside a brothel.
This isn’t mismanagement. It’s structural. Ireland built a child protection system designed to look compassionate from the outside and function as neglect on the inside.
Performance is more important than protection.
Ireland presents itself as a humanitarian success story, a nation stitched together by compassion and progress. We lecture other countries about human rights. We light buildings in solidarity with foreign causes. Our politicians speak fluently in the language of international virtue.
But at home, the same institutions cannot keep their own children safe. Arguably, they never have. And when the public finally says enough, the government doesn’t engage with the outrage. It dismisses it. Calling ordinary anger ‘hate.’
What we’re watching isn’t new. It’s the oldest story in the world. The people who live close to consequences and the people who live close to microphones.
In Ireland, every failed policy from housing, migration, addiction, and crime all gets dumped into the same neglected postcodes. Then the media arrive to photograph the wreckage, never the cause, and call the whole thing ‘far right.’ Before, the media labelled the working class ‘scumbags’ or ‘gurriers,’ they called every cry of despair ‘ignorant.’ But now there’s a more effective phrase to dismiss these struggles: far-right.
From the outside, Ireland looks clean and well governed, the ‘good pupil’ of Europe. But if you were raised here, you’d know better.
Scandals are reframed and health failures are buried. The careerists apologise and carry on drinking taxpayer-funded pints in our parliament. We live in a quiet kind of corruption, the kind that has long become normal.
And as always, it’s children who end up bleeding for it.
So when Dublin erupted in riots after a child was stabbed, and again after another was raped, the government didn’t ask why so many people felt that something had snapped. It asked how to shift blame onto someone else.
Most people who protest aren’t interested in fighting. They show up with banners, not bricks. But the state treats them all the same. Guilty for daring to stand there. The cameras only focus on the one young man who decided to pick up a bottle, never the mothers, the grandmothers, the teachers.
Violence, when it happens, becomes useful to those in charge. It lets them dismiss every legitimate grievance as ‘extremism’ and bury their own failures.
In Citywest, Coolock and Newtownmountkennedy, instead of listening to communities, the police were sent in with batons and pepper spray. International reporters from outlets like GB News and UnHerd were sprayed too, something that would have prompted outrage if it happened in Russia or Israel. But because it’s Ireland, silence.
The people breaking windows aren’t ideologues. They’re the children of the children the state already broke and keeps breaking.
The real hate in Ireland isn’t on the street. It’s bureaucratic. It’s the calm, polite indifference that loses children, keeps families on the streets, and brands moral outrage as extremism.
Nothing is more tragic than watching the future burn its own future. The children of Éire picking up bricks instead of banners because they’ve run out of ways to be heard.
The presidential election made this clearer than any riot.
Catherine Connolly won with 63% of first preference votes. On paper, a landslide. In reality, one of the hollowest victories in modern Irish politics.
Less than half the country showed up. And of those who did, over 213,000 spoiled their ballots, the highest number ever recorded.
That’s not apathy. It’s revolt. It’s the refusal to play along with a system that performs compassion while abandoning accountability.
Spoiling a vote isn’t withdrawal from democracy. It’s a demand for its return. It’s the mark you can’t spin, censor or gaslight away.
Ireland’s ‘far right’ isn’t the army of bigots our leaders like to perform against on foreign stages. It’s a mirror, showing a political class terrified of its own people and a nation sick of being talked down to.
A country obsessed with looking good cannot do good. A political class trained to fear embarrassment will always choose optics over responsibility. And a system built on apology instead of accountability will always abandon the most vulnerable first.
Ireland doesn’t need new values. It needs courage.
Courage to tell the truth. Courage to face consequences. Courage to protect those the image makers would rather ignore. Courage to stop performing compassion and start practising it.
Until then, the gap between the Ireland we advertise and the Ireland we live in will keep widening, and the cost will keep landing on the same shoulders. The poorest, the youngest, and the least protected.
A country that cannot protect its children is not compassionate; it is breaking. And Ireland is running out of ways to hide the cracks.
