The Kangaroo Crew jump to conclusions in bid to condemn

SET to one side the morality of the quasi-judicial approach and let us deal instead with the craziness of it. The sheer, straight-up, no-messing craziness. The braindead loopiness that characterised this kind of procedure at the time and runs through any contemporary justification of it.

To fully appreciate the brain rot involved without contaminating it with considerations of moral rot, you have to roll back all of the outrage of last week and focus on one allegation, which is that when Mairia Cahill brought her accusations to the powers that be within the Provos, they decided to sit her down in a room directly opposite to the man she says raped her. For a considerable period of time they seem to have seen this as constituting a key element of the forensic investigation into the alleged crime. Or, to put it more simply, which seems appropriate in this context, they believed they could get to the truth of the matter by watching how the two people behaved in each other’s company. They would do this by observing the body language deployed by each. It’s not clear if they had a room with a one-sided mirror to facilitate observation, or if they were all going to crowd into the room simultaneously.

Now, these decent lads (as Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams would characterise them) may have pitched up for this kangaroo court with a body language degree rattling around inside their little pouches, and so the accused man would have no grounds for complaint if, should he be found guilty by those set to note his every sniff, they took him out thereafter and shot him (as Gerry allows would have been the normal course of events).