The Irish Independent - Thursday May 13 2010

A new piece of feminist victimhood-folderol has entered the governing ideology of this state

by Kevin Myers:

I was writing yesterday about the striking case of the two Drimnagh girls involved in the incident which culminated in the death of two Polish male immigrants, but who have never been brought to trial. Equally striking has been the silence of the entire equality-feminist-multicultural industry on their amazing escape.

But this is par for the course. For Irish "multiculturalism" now embodies much of our strange politico-legal value-system, and this mysterious hybrid invariably exhibits a curious partiality when it comes to adjudicating on crimes in which the perpetrator is a woman and the victim is a man. Consider the occasion when a garda found two women beating and kicking a drunk on the ground in Newbridge, Co Kildare. The garda intervened, the drunk got up, and then clobbered one of his female assailants. He was then charged with being drunk in public, and with threatening and insulting behaviour.

Hearing details of the case, the judge said: "It seems to me that women are getting drunk and acting like alley-cats. Then they are fighting like savages. I can't say I blame the man for hitting her if she attacked him."

Cue, your usual feminist mumbo-jumbo:

• Christine Ross of the National Women's Council: "His comments show that, in some cases, judges are in need of gender-awareness training, and training on issues involved in violence against women."
• Frances Fitzgerald TD: The judge's comments raised "the important issue of the sensitivity of judges to violence against women".
• Jan O'Sullivan TD. "It appears that the judge is defending physical violence against women."
• Breda Raggett, national president of the Irish Countrywomen's Association: She called on the judge to resign, and declared his comments were highly offensive.

Not one woman in public life condemned the undisputed assault by the women on the defenceless man. But at least he survived, unlike Corporal Gary Cotter, shot dead in his bed by his wife Norma a couple of years later. The court accepted her plea of guilty to a charge of manslaughter, and so there was no trial, even though she had carefully loaded his shotgun twice before firing both barrels into his body as he slept. Yet the judge let this killer walk free from the court, in part because she had a family -- the youngest of whom had been conceived while she was awaiting trial.

Of course, from the feminist equality quangos in response to this extraordinary outcome -- silence. Those quangos were equally mum six years ago after Dolores O'Neill was found not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter, though she had knifed her sleeping husband, Declan O'Neill, 21 times and hit him with a plumber's hammer 26 times.

Her justification was that he was a drunk who had often abused her in the past. But the court heard absolutely no evidence about the record that he had kept of her violence towards him: of his personal notes, of conversations with his siblings about being hit over the head with various objects, including bottles.

The court never heard how she had driven a car into him, requiring him to have treatment at Tallaght Hospital. What would they have made of such allegations when combined with the forensic evidence from the state pathologist that Declan O'Neill was a light drinker?

It is almost beyond parody that Dolores O'Neill, the woman who knifed and bludgeoned her sleeping husband to death, was an employee of the Equality Authority. Aptly, the latest publication from a fellow quango of the Equality Authority, the Institute of Public Administration, contains an essay on 'Intimate Partner Homicide'. It begins with the risible declaration: "This chapter argues news reportage of violent crime in Ireland perpetuates gender stereotypes, particularly in its portrayal of women and its construction of binaries of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' women."

What rubbish. Indeed, God help the newspaper that even made the disgusting suggestion that a murdered woman had ever deserved her fate. The essay then uses some incredibly meagre evidence from the media coverage of just ONE murder -- that of Jean Gilbert by her husband David Bourke after she announced she was leaving him -- to make its entire case. The essay opined: "Even articles that challenged (the husband's) account of his ordinary marriage failed to acknowledge, or indeed to entertain the possibility of, a context of (his) violence in the marriage."

What? You mean, like the murder of Declan O'Neill, in which the trial court was never told of his allegations of repeated violence against him by his wife? Yet the O'Neill case gets no mention at all in this essay, though it is roughly comparable. Moreover, using the authors' logic, are the media now to be similarly allowed to entertain mitigating possibilities whenever the victim is a woman?

But overall, I wouldn't mind the essay's many failings if it were simply an undergraduate thesis, because frankly, "undergraduate" is what it amounts to; which is fine, because we've all got to learn. But instead, this non-insight into media reporting of Intimate Partner Homicide now bears the imprimatur of the IPA, which educates our public servants. Thus another piece of feminist victimhood-folderol enters the governing ideology of this state.

The essay Kevin Myers refers to in this article - 'Intimate Partner Homicide' by Nicola Carr and Stephanie Holt is contained in the publication 'Ireland of the Illusion', edited by Perry Shane & Mary P. Corcoran, and can be downloaded here.