“It’s the man in your bed, not the man under your bed you should be worried about,” the former State pathologist Marie Cassidy said when asked about the possibility of an Irish serial killer. Something about that line made readers look and read and share again and again.

But we already knew that, didn’t we? Almost nine out of 10 who died in violent circumstances knew their killers, according to Women’s Aid data. Out of 264 women killed since 1996, 170 died in their own homes.

In the effort to depict foreign men as a blob of murderous threats to women, some well-known “patriots” on social media are weaponising the appalling recent deaths of some women for a sinister purpose: to put wings under the “single, unvetted, military-age men”. That’s the notion that male refugees are inherently unsafe to the public and to women in particular. In reality, the nature of violence against women is that women are most at risk from men they know.

This brazen lift from English racial purity merchants is a winner (leaving aside the hilarity of the great Irish “patriots” scavenging from imperialist rhetoric). Last year the claim that a migrant was behind a sexual attack in Finglas – one of many such false reports – had women and children piling into Finglas Garda station asking questions, while outside prominent males called male refugees “rapists”, threatened gardaí with eviction........

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