Michael O'Loughlin remembers Theo Van Gogh

Polemical film maker Theo Van Gogh was killed by a radical Islamist in November, 2004. He is remembered by Irish poet Michael O'Loughlin who was his neighbour in Amsterdam for ten years. "He had, at one time or another, been fired from practically every newspaper, magazine or TV station in Holland. His polemics were mainly directed at a cosy sense of tolerance which drove him to distraction. Holland in the 1980s and 1990s had become a strangely immobile society. The liberal, social democratic consensus which had been painfully constructed over a period of a hundred years held sway, giving rise to the so-called 'polder model', a notion which was designed to remove controversy from the political sphere. ... Controversial subjects such as immigration, racism and the explosive growth of Islam among the Dutch population were simply ignored, because they might lead to conflict. Eventually, they did explode..."

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