Billions need to see fight against oppression grow — me too

Power has always been used to oppress - but it has also been used to cover up oppression, writes Fergus Finlay

Haven’t we come a long way from the Kerry Babies to the Me Too movement? And yet, have we gone nearly far enough?

The 1980s started with the Kerry Babies, and with the sad and lonely death of Anne Lovett and her newborn son in a field in Co Longford. Months apart, two young women gave birth to babies, and it led to the destruction of their lives.

Also in the 1980s, we had two extremely divisive referendums, one on abortion, the other on divorce, where we voted to preserve and copper-fasten the status quo.

And yet the 1980s ended and the 1990s began with the election of Mary Robinson. It was one of those moments when you felt cobwebs being blown away.

You felt that things would never be the same again. And in her acceptance speech in the RDS, Mary Robinson made it clear that she believed the women of Ireland had made the difference.

More than a quarter of a century later, in Ireland and around the world, the Me Too movement emerged. And throughout that quarter of a century, we learned more and more about the oppression and abuse that has always been part of Irish life.

In that quarter of a century, we learned about the abuse of generations of Irish children, hundreds of thousands of them, who had committed the crime of being poor.

We learned about the suppression of thousands of Irish women, in mother and baby homes and in Magdalene Laundries — supported by the State, and still operating while the Kerry Babies Tribunal sat.

The cobwebs are slow to lift in Ireland. We’re still debating these issues, and there is still oppression — of women, of children, of part-time workers, of families living in direct provision, of entire communities who are routinely marginalised and ‘othered’.

Throughout that quarter of a century, we also learned everything we need to know about how power is used and abused — from bankers to bishops, from politics to the planningsystem.

I spent a lot of last week trying to remember how the Kerry Babies case happened the way it did. It wasn’t meant to be that way. I worked for the Government that established the tribunal, and I can still remember the palpable shock in government at the circumstances that led to it being set up.

It was very clear that Joanne Hayes, and her entire family, had almost become the victims of a profound miscarriage of justice. There was ample prima facie evidence that they had been forced to confess to crimes they didn’t, and couldn’t have, committed.

The tribunal was set up to find out how that happened — because (surprise, surprise) an internal Garda investigation hadn’t been able to establish the truth.

In his careful speech to the Dáil outlining the reasoning behind the establishment of the tribunal, the then justice minister, Michael Noonan, warned that a “difficult period” might lie ahead for An Garda Síochána.

The gardaí, and their lawyers, turned it around. Instead of facing a trial, they put Joanne Hayes on trial. A tribunal set up to establish one set of facts spiralled completely out of control, and the government of the day (which was in any event preoccupied with the collapsing economy) was powerless to do anything about it.

But things did begin to change. People recognised that Joanne Hayes and her family had been ‘re-victimised’ in the proceedings of the tribunal and in its report. She paid a heavy price, but her story was instrumental in the beginnings of change.

Change, of course, is always accompanied by a backlash. Now, here and all over the world, we’re seeing women saying enough. No more.

The Me Too movement has become a powerful statement by women everywhere that the use of power against them for sexual abuse or harassment will no longer be tolerated.

The backlash has been swift, and in some cases it has been led by women. It seems to me to miss an essential point. Me Too is a pendulum swinging. There are two aspects to a pendulum.

The first is that often, having been stuck in one position, it swings a long way in the other direction. But the second is that this pendulum is long overdue.

Those who complain about Me Too as trial by media, or by social media, perhaps need to reflect on how long the media has been silent, and how often social media has been misused to bully people who are vulnerable or different.

Power has always been used to oppress —but it has also been used to cover up oppression. For that reason, Me Too is one of those seminal statements that says the cover-up too will no longer be accepted.

But pendulums swing slowly, and they always settle somewhere in the middle. After all the change, all the revelations, all the moments where people stood up to be counted, there is still oppression.

The inequality being recognised in the Me Too movement is the same inequality that ensures poverty and hunger all over the world.

Some of the world’s richest and most powerful people will gather this week in a posh ski resort in Switzerland. It will happen against the background of a new report by Oxfam that shows ever-widening inequality in the world.

Two people walk behind the logo of the World Economic Forum at the meeting's conference center in Davos, Switzerland.

According to Oxfam, last year saw the biggest increase in the number of billionaires in history, with one morebillionaire every two days. Nine out of 10 of the world’s billionaires are men.

And the rich got richer. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762bn in 12 months — enough money to end extreme poverty seven times over. Some 82% of all of the growth in global wealth in the last year went to the top 1%, whereas the bottom 50% saw no increase at all.

New data from global financial services company Credit Suisse, published in the Oxfam Report, reveals that 42 people now own the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity.

This annual conference of the rich and powerful will be attended this year by Donald Trump.

He has disgraced his office in every way imaginable since being elected, but he has done the one thing he was elected for — he has signed into law a tax package whose only purpose is to help the rich get richer. Nothing else matters to him and the party that supports him.

In other words, power will continue to be abused. And maybe, just maybe, part of the reason is because we can’t see it all for what it is.

The oppression of children, the oppression of women, the oppression of part-time workers, the oppression of the developing world — it’s all part of the same jigsaw. We all concentrate on our own bit of the picture, and we never seem to be able to see the whole thing.

It’s why I want to see the Me Too movement grow. But not just in its ambition to end sexual harassment and abuse against women, but to take a leadership position in creating awareness about all the other forms of oppression that still exist.

At the heart of it, today as always, lies the gross inequality that we never talk about.