The boy had been killed just after lunch, while I was still at work. He was 17 and fatally stabbed outside a KFC on a London street. It was around the corner from the flat we were renting back then. I wouldn’t realise what had happened until I walked home from the Tube station later that evening. I saw the street cordoned off with police tape. Weary Londoners barely registered the dark stains on the pavement as they veered around the cordon. Four boys between the ages of 16 and 18 would eventually be convicted. Children killing children. It was the horrible culmination of a series of lesser violent crimes and altercations in the area.
A few weeks earlier I’d been shoved into the road by a few boys chasing someone, and for whom I and the elderly woman beside me on the pavement were mere obstacles to gaining speed. No one was hurt – more a case of luck than anything else. My husband grew up in London around such chaos and was the victim of a knife attack in his teens. He found this environment especially unsettling. It brought his childhood back in a way he found difficult to deal with. The killing of the boy named Yousef just metres from our door was a horror beyond words. We did the middle-class thing – what you do when you have the luxury of choice – and moved to the suburbs.
As an Irish person in London, I had felt like a voyeur witnessing the growing instability of our neighbourhood and its significant social problems. But as an outsider you feel such problems are beyond your influence and understanding, even when you’re standing in the midst of them.
Now we live in Canberra, the city whose reputation as the most boring place in Australia is one at which locals understandably bristle. “Boring” is a word that can be honestly reframed into something flattering – it means reliable, predictable, safe. These are wonderful qualities in a place to live. This city is, in general, all these good, “boring” things. So when the shopping centre beside my apartment (and which sprawls across the centre of the city as a kind of community hub, walking shortcut, escape from the weather and place of commerce all in one) went into brief chaos this week as a result of knife-wielding young men, I had that feeling again. Watching from the periphery.
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Stores at the Canberra Centre locked down when, one witness told ABC, four or five young men with big knives got into an altercation. A hammer was thrown at a shop window. People hid in back rooms while retail workers shuttered shoppers inside until the police arrived. The Bondi Junction stabbings of 2024, in which six were killed in a Sydney shopping centre, remain fresh in the minds of many Australians.
As brief mayhem unfolded in The Canberra Centre, I was making dinner in my apartment across the street, oblivious. Nobody was hurt and it seems people were more spooked by the incident than anything else.
A city-hardened Londoner might bat it away as one of several such cases in a week. But Canberrans are less accustomed to this sort of thing. For them it’s not an inevitable consequence of living in a city. Everyone I’ve encountered these last two days – at the local cafe, or the gym, or over lunch with friends – has mentioned it with shock and concern. Knife-wielding, angry young men are considered an aberration rather than a standard hazard in the local shopping centre at 6pm.
I still keep abreast of local news in Limerick, where I grew up and my family still lives. I thought about the sense of investment I have when anything happens there.
As an immigrant, you feel a sense of gratitude to the country that has taken you in. You pay taxes, try to assimilate and abide by the norms. You care very much and feel invested in your community. But you know it’s not your own. That kind of belonging takes years and is never entirely guaranteed.
Some part of you feels relieved not to carry what locals must carry; their sense of the past and fear for the future are captured in every undesirable event. Such incidents add to or challenge the narrative they carry about their home and their place within it.
The news story of the knife-wielding young men made me think again of Yousef, the 17-year-old London boy who died so pointlessly on the street in 2019 while I was working at my desk at The Sunday Times. While I was immersed in the mundanities of emails and lunch and not forgetting my scarf because it was a chilly day. I think about him often. When bad things happen, there is the event itself and there are the parts that linger after. The place reshapes itself around what has happened and is different.
When you live somewhere for a time, you are spared that part. You don’t belong as you do at home, but neither are you changed in the same way, as though the event has occurred inside you. You don’t carry its legacy – the collective failings that led to it being possible and the pain or fear of a community from within.
That is part of the privilege of being able to live in different places – you have the freedom to care about a place without belonging to it. To be in it rather than of it.
- Are you Irish and living in another country? Would you like to share your experience in writing or by interview? You can use the form below, or email abroad@irishtimes.com. Irish Times Abroad submission guidelines here.
