Power in Ireland clearly likes to be naked, even when intellectual
IT'S not the double standards of Irish life which trouble me, so much as the transparent hypocrisy with which they're applied. It's if as the rest of society won't notice when one set of rules is imposed on one occasion, but then thrown aside on another.
Pace yesterday's column on the priest Sean Sheehy giving a character reference to the convicted sex-offender Danny Foley, which triggered mass-indignation from women commentators. But not long before that court case, the writer Colm Toibin gave a character reference to the poet Desmond Hogan who had been found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year old boy, with what we now call "special needs". Desmond Hogan walked free from the court, despite the youth and vulnerability of his victim.
Response from the professionally angry classes? Silence.
It almost seems that priests and homosexuals have changed places in Irish life. Once it was the latter that Official Ireland marginalised and ostracised. Now it is the former. And I wouldn't mind, except that the double standards are still so ostentatious.
Power in Ireland clearly likes to be naked, even when intellectual. So the Ireland that banned contraception and divorce and abortion, even for women with cancer, and which imposed Catholic teaching through the institution of the State, has metamorphosed into a doctrinaire liberal Ireland, with new icons, and new mores, that are just as hypocritical and as intolerant as the Catholic values they are displacing.
If there were some subtlety from the new hierarchy I might be a little more tolerant of its admonitions. But there is not. It is every bit as crude and flagrantly discriminatory as the hierarchy that went before it. How else could Dail Eireann have passed the outrageous Sexual Offences Act of three years ago, which rules that a 16-year old boy who has sex with a 16-year old girl shall be guilty of a sexual offence, but the girl shall not, by statute bound? This 16-year-old girl might have had many sexual partners, and the lad she seduces might be a virgin, and God knows it is not difficult to successfully proposition a 16-year-old boy. But our lawmakers have specifically introduced a discriminatory clause which states that the boy shall always be the offender, and the girl shall always be the victim; and thus the boy can be imprisoned, and be put on the sex-offenders' register, and so be debarred for ever from emigrating to the US.
Not merely did this ridiculous law get passed through Dail Eireann, it was ratified by the Seanad, and signed by the President. What would those two august bodies, and that august lady, have done had the law penalised the girl only, and exonerated the boy, as a matter of statute?
The State has conjured any number of government-sponsored quangos into existence to impose the rules of the new Official Ireland of the Mind, and to vilify those who oppose their agenda. Other, mirror-image but self-appointed bodies have emerged throughout Irish life, and with comparable agendas. Thus, if I say that one of the problems with Kilbarrack is that its young male population consists of largely priapic, oversexed ruffians, I will get into trouble from the National Council for the Unemployed, the Labour Party, and every liberal in the Seanad. If I say that the problem with Malawi is that its young male population consists of largely priapic oversexed ruffians, I will be hounded by the National Migrants Council and by Dochas, which (as I know from personal experience) will try to jail me, and by the National Press Council, in a serious attempt to destroy my career.
BUT if I say that the problem with Irish rugby-clubs is that their young males are largely priapic, oversexed ruffians, I will be congratulated for courageously revealing an untold truth.
For Official Ireland of the Mind revels in double standards, and in the imposition of its own politically-ordained moral order; why, just like the Catholic Church of yesteryear.
We now know that Gerry Adams -- who was the archbishop, the police commissioner and the chief justice within the entire republican community -- effectively protected his brother Liam after the latter was accused of incestuous rape. Liam Adams was even allowed to work with youth groups (and actually had a prominent role in that jolly outfit, the republicans' internal security unit). Do you really think that Official Ireland is going to go after Gerry Adams in the same way as the archdiocese of Dublin was pursued? (Never mind for the moment that the consequences for some of those with whom Liam Adams had a cosy chat turned out to be somewhat graver than normal?)
Yes, Official Ireland of the Mind is rightly angry about the failure of the State to punish the criminals in our financial community for the destruction of the Irish economy. But do its adherents not see that they are part of the problem?
Intellectual incoherence is like an unfinished roof. Merely because the tiles over your head are intact doesn't mean you won't get wet if tiles are missing elsewhere.
Which is one reason we are now all getting thoroughly soaked.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/co...e-1985659.html