Margaret Buttimer: Remembering Clownworld’s Irish Prisoner This Christmas

As turkeys are carved and selection boxes pilfered throughout the nation, one Bandon home will be without a key member of their household this Christmas. A grotesque reminder of just how far off the rails the country has erred in the past 20 months, Margaret Buttimer, a 66 year old Leeside grandmother, looks set to spend the holiday period behind bars as a guest of the state.

Sentenced to a six month jail sentence (with another six suspended) for the crime of repeatedly not wearing a face mask on multiple occasions, Buttimer received the sentence at the hands of Judge McNulty at Bandon Cour last week.

The umptenth time she had faced the long arm of the law for her non-compliance, Buttimer had become a rallying point anti-lockdown feeling i.e. sanity for activists at large.

In her previous run-ins with the law Buttimer had been put under a curfew and sent to Limerick Prison, famous for its wing of female identifying ‘trans’ prisoners.

To some, mask wearing is not the best hill to die on when fighting against the current state enforced lunacy. Regardless, at any hill and at any time must such frank injustices be protested against, with inhumanity shown to one dissident likely to be replicated to us all eventually.

It is striking that in a state that can barely maintain law and order on a given weekday on O’Connell Street seeks to vent its frustration on a solitary grandmother from Bandon for the meagre crime of not wearing a mask.

For all the human rights NGOs populating the civic space barely a murmur has been uttered in the mainstream against the spectacle of the state’s pursuit of Buttimer.

The legal cost for the dozens if not hundreds of public sector man hours put into prosecuting Buttimer may never be known but is merely another stain on Irish legaldom.

While we heard a lot of Americanised talking points from the Irish left about police abolition in the wake of the BLM craze of 2020, very little sympathy has been expressed of Bandon’s most wanted.

On Buttimer’s part, while some months ago I’d have written her stand as crankish there has been no point I was without a grudging respect for her stance.

Covidmania has made it clear that it will put an end to our society as we know it if we do not seek to put an end to it first. It’s better to be fighting these battles now over the mask issue rather than some months ahead when like Austria we face enforced vaccination under legal and professional duress.

Whatever misgivings one can have with the Irish courts, a small mercy has been the fact we are without the ideological sadism seen with the hate speech ridden UK. While hate speech laws are some time off the books, the Buttimer debacle is an early warning sign of how unjust proceedings can be for dissidents. 

When it comes to courts and interactions with Gardaí in general I’d advise any reader to minimise their time with either. A rule of thumb is that any political subversive who finds before a gown and gavel is already a dead man.

One gets the feeling we’re going to be experiencing some more Yuletide incarcerations in the years to come.