Colonel "Category Error" Myers

Not a week since Irish commentators began finally to ponder the meaning for our narrative of Statehood of the violence done to 188 women by Michael Neary over 30 years, Colonel Myers offers us a sober reflection on the complaints of women at the violence done them and their children by their menfolk and, by extension, the need for women to knuckle down under the patriarchy and get on with it. Neary operated with the licence of the Church, State and medical profession and his handiwork with the scalpel and surgical saw was cloaked in collegial, professional and complacent silence. Not only that, but doesn't a man like Neary represent something of a ne plus ultra of the social order the Colonel espouses so passionately as the means to protect ourselves, and especially our women, from the paleolithic horrors which continue to haunt our libidinal selves?

So he removed women's reproductive organs to no medical purpose? Not to worry, in the words of the man himself "I took away the cradle and left the playpen". What japes.

Cruiskeen Eile is not entirely sceptical of the Colonel's thesis that man is a beastly creature of infamous mein, though we take great issue with his hoary prescription to save us all, which he seems to have cogged out of Baden Powell's book of scouting and back issues of Boy's Own. However, in the red mist which descended after he read Mary Robinson's recent incendiary remarks in his very own paper, the Colonel lept astride his high horse (all 16 and a half magnificent hands of him) and made straight for a massive and dangerous category error. Citing his statistically compelling Google search for "violence against women", Myers concludes that far from being cloaked in silence as Robbo avers in the most witless contention the Colonel has ever heard, physical abuse of the fair sex is being shouted about from the rooftops. (Putting the phrase in inverted commas produces a mere 7 million hits, by the way, and how many would you get from Ireland only?). But one wonders how many of the sites he managed to unearth are on the side of the feminazis. Cruiskeen Eile expects that if he checked out some of those 44 million hits, the Colonel could well find the odd celebration of man's inhumanity to woman.

On to the category error. Violence against women is quite rightly a matter on which many people are compelled as a matter of justice to speak. But the academics, politicians, lawyers and feminists Myers is tired of reading about have in all likelihood impinged not one whit on the consciousness of the wifebeaters, domestic rapists and professional butchers whose attentions it is the wretched lot of too many women to continue to put up with. And in many of our institutions, neighbourhoods, families and even operating theatres, the cloak of silence has, over the years, remained very firmly in place. In fact, it is difficult to understand how Myers can have lived in this State in particular and the world in general - a world of child rape, oppression and abuse of women and their "bastard" offspring, white collar crime and even uncomplained of meals in bad restaurants - and conclude that what injustice calls for is a little bit more shutting up.

Myers is a privileged, educated member of Ireland's media "elite" and for better or worse a significant player in the intellectual life of the State. He may be under the impression as one of the relatively few people in Ireland (adult population 2.7 million) who read The Irish Times (circulation 117,500, ABC1 readership) that violence against women is a subject constantly on everyone's lips out of all proportion to the level of violence to which women worldwide are subjected, but I'm sure the sexist bores and bourgeois knuckledraggers of places like Portmarnock Golf Club*, to whom Kevin expects us all to bend the knee (Diary passim), wouldn't know what to make of a sociological report dense with fact if it was shoved without ceremony up their fat, stupid arses. It is to be expected, however, that they would seize with alacrity on the Colonel's fatuous whinge as a way to prop up their molly-coddled world of ridiculous privilege and self-regard.

A penultimate point. Kevin asks how the Defence Forces (of whose members he takes a childish, unsophisticated and unhelpful view) have come to be one of the organisations engaged in the global fight against gender-based violence. He should have asked fellow Irish Times contributor Dr. Tom Clonan, a commentator for whom Cruiskeen Eile has great respect. A former Army captain with 12 years service and someone in a slightly better position than the Colonel to judge, Dr. Clonan found that 59 of 60 women serving in the Defence Forces whom he interviewed for his PhD thesis had suffered bullying and harrassment. Twelve claimed to have been sexually assaulted:

Just two of the women said they felt that they could complain to the authorities about the harassment.

I don't know, Kev, but in those words I cannot help but hear the whisper of a cloak of silence being unfurled.

Last word to Senator Geraldine Feeney commenting on the violent physical invasion of women at Lourdes Hospital occasioning the removal of their reproductive organs:

If a man had a minor procedure carried out on his reproductive organ and he emerged from the operating theatre minus that organ, there would be outrage. It might happen once but would never happen 188 times.

I think we can safely conclude that the cloak of silence wouldn't be thrown over that sort of thing.

*Under Irish constitutional law, Murtagh Properties v Cleary [1972] IR 330, the courts do not consider as an issue of equality for the purposes of Article 40.1 economic discrimination against women. So pay 'em peanuts, it's in the Constitution! According to Mr. Justice O'Higgins, the gobshitery of Portmarnock Golf Club also has the protection of the Irish Constitution despite being the site of a licensed premises and the beneficiary of planning permissions which benefit few in an area where there is severe pressure on property prices.