‘He hit me as he passed’: women’s safety officer punched in the face on Dublin street

A Dublin councillor who campaigns on women’s safety in the capital was punched in the face by a man in a random attack when she was walking down a busy inner-city street.

Cat O’Driscoll, a Social Democrats councillor for Cabra-Glasnevin on Dublin City Council, is chairwoman of the council’s women’s committee. As a local politician, she has been campaigning on the issue of women’s safety in Dublin.

Ms O’Driscoll told The Irish Times that she was recently punched by a complete stranger outside Kavanaghs The Temple on Dorset Street shortly before 6pm on Wednesday, September 17th.

Ms O’Driscoll said she had been walking along the street with her headphones on. She was on her way to a canvass at the time. Her gaze was down towards the street, so she did not see the man coming towards her.

“I hadn’t even made eye contact with this guy, it was so out of the blue,” she said. “This punch just came across the side of my head.”

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She added: “He whacked me so hard on the side of my head that my glasses flew off … If I was a bit more fragile … I would have fallen, but I was able to catch myself.”

The man’s palm had been slightly open, and Ms O’Driscoll remembers the sensation of his fingers dragging through her hair after he hit her. “And I didn’t know people putting their hands in my hair would upset me so much,” she said.

“He hit me as he passed me, and then he kept on walking.”

Ms O’Driscoll said the man said something to her immediately after the attack, but she couldn’t hear. She only saw him from behind as he strode away from her.

“But I was in shock. I was in so much shock, I didn’t even know how to respond. I know I called him an asshole; that was my gut instinct.”

The street was very busy at the time, with many people making their way home from work. But nobody came to her aid or to check on her after the attack, she said.

One woman who was passing in a car rolled down her window and told Ms O’Driscoll to call the gardaí, but when the traffic started to move, the woman drove on.

“No one came over to be like, ‘Are you okay?’ … That was another layer to it that really shocked me.”

She reported the incident, and said that CCTV from the street will now be analysed by gardaí.

“But I don’t know how long it takes them to get CCTV, or how easy it is to identify people,” she said.

She said it wasn’t until the next day that she digested what had happened. She had a large bump on her head, but it didn’t bruise.

Ms O’Driscoll does not know if she was randomly attacked because she is a woman, or if her attacker had targeted her because of her politics.

“The people who I’ve told about this have been so supportive, but some of them have asked me, or one in particular asked me, ‘Would you leave politics over this?’

“I had forgotten that this guy might know me because my face was on poles last year. You know, I’m in the media the odd time … My face is out there, in places. So was that part of it: did he know I was a councillor, or was I just a woman to him?

“I can’t make that judgment, but it makes me concerned about women … and it makes me concerned about women councillors out and about, and other politicians.”

“I won’t leave politics over it, but if it had happened at a political event? Maybe I’d think about that.”

Since the attack, she thinks about it when she is walking in the city on her own. “Is he around? Because I won’t notice that, I won’t recognise him from the front,” she said.

“Will I recognise him? Or will he recognise me? Those intrusive thoughts come into my head quite a bit.”

Ms O’Driscoll said the incident has made her “more determined” to campaign on women’s safety in the city, but has also made her more conscious of the possible prevalence of under-reported, random attacks.

“I am wondering: is this happening to women and girls around the city more often? And we’re not talking about it?”