For those of you who may have been living in a yurt in Outer Mongolia recently, you may not have been aware of the odious example of verbal diarrhoea penned by one Jan Moir of the Daily Fail newspaper. The article speculated that Stephen Gately’s death was “unnatural” in the most vile terms possible, before the young man was even laid to rest – never mind the grief of his husband and family members at Gately’s sudden demise.

(Her article appeared in the UK edition of the Mail, but not the Irish edition. Clearly, the tiny-minded powers that be in that rag continue to think little of the Irish – we can access to your website, you know.)

Moir issued a few mealy-mouthed words of self-pitying “apology” shortly after literally thousands of comments, Twitter and Facebook messages, and blog posts poured scorn on her assertions (she was the victim of an organised internet campaign, apparently). Now that she’s sufficiently and callously “raised her profile”, the stupid bitch has done a Brenda Power and cobbled together her follow-up article purporting to include an apology to Gately’s family members and then proceeding to basically defend her original article. (“Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article.” Bullshit.)

And no, I’m not linking to the latest article. Off you go to Google, if you want to give the paper the traffic.

Notwithstanding the disgusting comments in her piece last week, this is more than about Jan Moir, however.

A report in yesterday’s Guardian cited research by the Metropolitan Police showing an increase of 20% in reported homophobic crimes in London over the past year. Policing and relations between LGBT people and the police appear to have improved; however homophobic crimes appear to be on the rise. Homophobic crime has also skyrocketed in recent times in Northern Ireland, including serious threats and violence.

In the 26 counties of Ireland, there are many Garda LGBT Liaison Officers nationwide, and they do sterling work – within the limits they are prescribed, however. The organ of the State for which they work – An Garda Síochána – does not see fit to record crimes as homophobic or hate crimes. Therefore, unlike in the UK, there is no official way of understanding levels of crimes and abuse based on actual or perceived homophobia. (This is last I checked, by the way. I would be delighted to be corrected on this.)

Instead, we can only rely on anecdotes and surveys by interested organisations to provide us with indications.

What is certain, however, is that certain people in society need very little to ignite whatever malice and latent violence that exists within them. Words light a spark, then inflame and turn this destructive feeling into a roaring ball of hate fire, blazing unchecked and unmediated across society.

This is not intended to add any further pain to Gately’s loved ones, by referring to him in yet another online opinion. Nor, indeed, is this is about the Jan Moirs or Brenda Powers of the world. And certainly, this is not about silencing those who preach homophobia.

This is, however, about speaking – as loudly as possible – to those preachers, to name their vicious polemics for what they are; and to plainly set out the undeniable logic which runs between thinly-veiled, mealy-mouthed homophobia, right through the spectrum of such phobia, to its violent manifestation resulting in injury and killings.

And no amount of poor-mouth non-apologies from the authors of homophobic diatribes will detract from that.