Managing a busy restaurant, head waiter Kevin Murphy immediately sensed danger when a customer whispered in his ear what he had planned for his dinner date.
From the moment the man arrived, Murphy recalls, he told him “in no uncertain terms” that he was intent on having sex with the woman.
She was to be plied with enough alcohol to “knock her out”, the man insisted to the Irish waiter.
Horrified, Murphy deliberately seated the couple away from other diners in the southeast London seafood restaurant so as to give a clear vantage point.
“I had actually served the man a couple of times before for lunchtime meals, but thought nothing of it. Clearly he’d had a bit to drink, but right from the start, he treated me like a confidant in a plan,” says South Armagh-born Murphy, a Trinity College Dublin graduate who went on to drama school in London.
“So the red flags were there for me. I was in a position where, you know, you’ve got a choice; the heightened danger of the situation made it clear to me I needed to look out for the woman.”
When she went to the toilet, Murphy noticed a “flash of a pill packet” coming out of the man’s pocket.
He watched in disbelief as a tablet was dropped in her glass of wine.
“Right in front of me, I saw him put it into her glass. It was as blatant as that.”
Murphy says he could see the pill in the bottom of the glass.
“I intercepted her on the way back from the bathroom and told her what happened ... she possibly phoned the police herself, but I also phoned the police,” he says.
Despite the incident happening in 2006, Murphy remembers it vividly. His intervention led to property developer Rohail Spall (39) of Ilford, Essex, being prosecuted and jailed for two years after he spiked his date’s wine with the powerful sedative, Xanax, similar to the so-called date rape drug, Rohypnol.
Spall was sentenced for administering a substance with intent to commit a sexual act. When police examined the boot of his Mercedes, they found hundreds more tablets.
The story surfaced again this week after UK prime minister Keir Starmer pledged to introduce new laws in England and Wales to make ‘spiking’ a stand-alone criminal offence, and encourage more victims to come forward.
More than 10,000 staff in bars and clubs will receive awareness training to spot and prevent attacks as part of a pilot scheme.
In Northern Ireland, there has been mounting pressure to introduce similar legislation. The current law dates back to 1861 and relates to the administering of poison with the intent to injure, or administering a substance with the intent of committing a sexual offence under the sexual offences order.
Among those lobbying Stormont for legislative change is Tanya Kearns (31), a victim of spiking herself.
She believes the conversation needs to be broadened, given the many ways spiking can happen: through a tablet or powder, an injection, or more alcohol being added to a drink without consent.
The community arts worker’s traumatic experience in a quiet Belfast bar three years ago led her to set up a campaign and awareness group, Safe Night NI, in January.
To date, the group has received more than 900 contacts from people – mostly women – affected by spiking. It is backing calls for a dedicated law.
For Kearns, the issue is personal.
In December 2021, she met a friend for a midweek evening drink after finishing a youth club training session. She was halfway through a third drink when she began to feel dizzy and nauseous.
“I was losing feeling in the limbs of my body, starting with my feet and arms, and then I lost full consciousness,” she says.
Her friend had the same amount to drink and “knew something was wrong”, she says. She alerted the bar staff, but they “weren’t quick to react” and simply told her friend to bring Kearns home.
A bouncer at another bar “took it very seriously” and drove the two friends to a hospital emergency department. It all happened over just three hours – “not that I remember any of it”, she says.
Nurses advised her friend to take Kearns home. She awoke the next afternoon drowsy and “really disorientated” and could not remember getting home.
It was 5pm that day before she thought: “God, I actually need to phone the police.” By the time she was tested, it was too late; the substance had left her body.
“It took me a while to download the information. Even though I wasn’t assaulted, I felt really invaded and really vulnerable,” she says.
She learned later from talking to friends, peers and others about her own experience that so many others have also been victims of spiking with some replying: at least something worse didn’t happen.
“It’s just assumed that you get up and get on with it because it’s so common. Someone might ask if you left your drink behind or if you’d too much to drink,” she says.
“And I guess all of those things are a symptom of victim blaming, and casualising violence against women and girls in general because it is a crime that predominantly impacts us.”
One of her frustrations is how the police handled the incident and at how, because no substance was found and there was no specific offence, the case was “just dropped with no further investigation”.
Many spiking victims have told Kearns they never reported it, leading to what she says is a “gap” in the true picture of offending. “It was screaming out to me that something needed done,” she says.
Asked by The Irish Times to provide figures on spiking cases, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said that incidents were “rare”, though a police source said that it remained a “challenge” to verify statistics because there is no specific offence for spiking in Northern Ireland.
“We know nationally there has been media coverage of spiking and we have to be mindful of not amplifying the public perception that this is a notable recorded problem in Northern Ireland, as confirmed cases are rare based on the evidence at the time of investigation,” said PSNI Superintendent Joanne Gibson.
In the Republic, there is no specific crime type of spiking.
A Garda Siochána report published in May said that spiking “may be reported as an independent offence (poisoning) or be used by offenders to facilitate committing other crimes”.
Between 2020 and 2023, the highest number of spiking incidents (95) were recorded as “poisoning”. A further 78 incidents were recorded under “sexual offences” and the remaining 66 incidents under “assaults”.
Stormont’s Department of Justice is currently liaising with the UK Home Office on its proposed plans to amend legislation, a spokesman said.
For Kevin Murphy, changing the law on spiking and mandatory training of bar staff is a “clear public safety issue”. Murphy, now an actor living in London, believes that awareness must begin in Northern Ireland’s schools.
“The broader point for me would be that society as a whole needs to have the confidence to be able to intervene when they feel someone is threatened,” he says.
He pointed to the fact that many institutions offer fire training and that “if that bell goes off, we do X, Y and Z”.
“In a similar way, there should be those mechanisms in place in spiking awareness training that are just as instinctive; the moment you see you see danger in a bar, you report it,” he says.
“But if that bar person, that 18-year-old on a shift that night, doesn’t feel confident to do something, then it falls down.
“So I think any new legislation can’t be tokenistic. It has to be instinctive and it has to be trained. It has to be just an extension of any public safety environment that you’re working in.”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
