Children the losers as ‘people power’ is perverted to electronic mob rule

NOW, you might say that the white flower protestors, in their serried ranks — affiliated to Gerry Ryan or Joe “Spontaneous Demonstration” Duffy — last week showed up the politicians and changed the face of Ireland for the better.

Am I going to fight with you, when you’re in good humour and just ready to fire up the barbeque?

Well, yes, I am.

Last week saw an astonishing outpouring of rage (some of it justified), criticism (ditto), emotion (a lot of it banal and vicarious) and pure guff (in spades) — at least half of the being latter irrelevant, confused, illogical and misinformed if not downright dangerous.

Public opinion, media and the time of the year came together, during the statutory rape debacle, in a mad frenzy that not only failed to improve, but palpably disimproved the situation vis-à-vis child protection in this country.

Just about the only benefit emerging from the frenzy was that Ireland moved a little further away from the daft notion that all child abuse is committed by clerics.

That notion had, for several years, served to distract people from the proper focus of child protection efforts.

On the other hand, that misapprehension was substituted by an equally daft notion that — in the interregnum between the striking down of the old statutory rape law and the installation of the new one — child molesters were wandering our streets slavering at every gym-slip.

The reality is that the overwhelming bulk of child molestation is done within families or the wider circle surrounding families. Total strangers in paedophile swoop-mode, prowling the streets in search of the underage are not a threat to the safety of every pre-teen in the country.

Neither were children were left totally unprotected by law against the depredations of sexual predators after the Supreme Court stuck down Section 1 (1) of the 1935 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act.

But, when a few legal eagles tried to point out that there were lots of other charges that could be brought in the event of a child being molested, in the days between the striking down of the old law and the setting up of the new one, they were shouted down and characterised as unfeeling and inhuman.

It was time for People Power, and it was inevitable that someone would come up with the white flower motif. SPAR flowers by the roadside are the leitmotif of this decade.

Thus effectively branded, the protest, originating in the media, fed back into the media, providing pictures, posters and sound bites mixing passion, prayer and tears under the overall banner of People Power.

The electronic mob had spoken.

Now, let’s be clear. Everyone who took part in the protests was good hearted, meant the best and was motivated by concern for children.

However, there can be no doubt that the confluence of weather, media, circumstance and protest produced a multi-faceted and disastrous outcome.

It revealed and reinforced a contempt for democracy and law which benefits nobody.

Instead of the sophisticated civic understanding that should have emerged from our much-praised education system, Ireland has developed such a sense of entitlement that when things go wrong, we cannot tolerate the possibility that — to quote the T-shirt slogan — shit happens.

No: someone must be to blame. Public discourse boils down to a version of a paint-gun game: find someone to splatter with blame, preferably a politician.

And, as in this case, if they’re not directly to blame, we still refuse to concentrate on the real issue because the paint-gun game is more fun.

So we decide they’re to blame anyway, indirectly, because they should’ve known. Because the buck stops with them. Because they don’t use the right words to connect with the public mood at its most outraged.

Or, worst of all, because they use perfectly correct words to describe legal realities at a time when the public would rather not accept legal realities.

The general tendency to assume that whenever anything goes wrong, it’s due to the incompetence, laziness or out-of-touchness of politicians was seen at its most florid and unproductive extreme last week.

The message received by the Government was that the Taoiseach was a fool and a knave for going to the UN. If anybody had a leftover set of stocks handy, Michael McDowell would have been in them. Mary Harney even got lambasted for describing Mr A’s victim as a ‘young woman.’ Given that the victim is now 16, it wasn’t criminal misrepresentation, but at that stage the emotional static was so loud nobody could hear anything.

Democracy requires the electorate to select representatives to do the legislating. Those elected are expected to take time to study and debate issues in their complexity before putting laws on the statute books that will govern our actions thereafter.

They may not always do it the way the electorate would wish, but the electorate can fire them at election time. That’s how it works. That’s how it should work. That’s how it didn’t work this time out.

Instead, what happened was that considered debate about the law was prevented. The urgent took over from the important. Placating protesters, many of whom demonstrably did not understand the issues involved, became the priority. And while it would, again, be satisfying to blame the politicians — particularly the government, for caving in to the electronic mob — that would be pointless.

A section of the public, their voice magnified by media, forced all of Leinster House to act with speed, rather than do what they were elected to do. (It’s important to register that a sizeable proportion of the population had buzzed off to their second homes or to Euro Disney and weren’t involved in the ‘debate’ at all. They’re innocent of this fine mess.)

Now, undoubtedly the opposition did well out of it. In this column, around this week last year, I predicted that competence would be one of the key issues, if not the key issue in the next general election. The inevitable coming to the fore of the competence issue put all of the opposition parties in a good position, last week.

The one who shone was Enda Kenny. The timing was odd, because, just a few days before this controversy erupted, a texter to a radio programme asked the rhetorical question, “Could you imagine Enda Kenny on the world stage?”

The clear supposition built into the query was that you couldn’t have Kenny as Taoiseach, because he would eat with the wrong spoon, laugh at the wrong time and generally make like a yokel.

He didn’t make like a yokel in the last few days. He was eloquent, statesmanlike, passionate and dignified.

But the point is neither the dunce’s cap on the Government’s block nor the laurel wreath on Enda Kenny’s blond head.

The point is child protection and good law, neither of which emerged from the maelstrom.

Just as Girl Power (courtesy of the Spice Girls) left us nothing more than a generation of children dressed as whores, so the much-celebrated People Power of last week left us nothing more than a new bit of bad, unworkable law.

It should have left us with a collective sense of civic shame.