Letters to the Editor: Is this really the best we can do for women?
'The sight of a woman climbing onto a table at the World Snooker Championships bothered me far less than seeing someone throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, but that’s only because I have a passing interest in art and none at all in snooker.'
And yet, closer to home, when I read about a 13-year-old boy’s brutal attack on a young woman in Cork (‘Boy (13) carried out violent sex attack on woman in Cork City’ 20/4/23) in what is yet another brutal attack in a seemingly endless stream of brutal attacks on women in this country — I couldn’t help but think that we too have our own epidemic of violence that we appear incapable of doing anything about. What of the role of the wider society?
We speak about misogyny, Incels, about Andrew Tate and his podcasts.
We say, "how can Americans make guns so available?"’ And likewise perhaps, in a more civilised future, people will also say — "why on earth did they allow the most horrendous and violent pornography to be freely accessible to every child with a smartphone?"
We have warnings on every scrap of plastic, every road turning, and anything resembling a danger; every bottle of beer and packet of cigarettes has a warning and is labelled — we’re told to "gamble responsibly" — and yet, in the wild west of the internet, a child can watch a young woman getting beaten, abused, and demeaned for someone’s sexual gratification with just a couple of clicks.
Is this really the best we can do?
For crying out loud, we already have 160 TDs, many of whom are a complete waste of taxpayers' money. Their annual salary is €105,271, which is greater than that paid to an MP in England, €97,839 (£86,584), which does not include expenses — usually as much as or greater than their wages.
We have 949 elected county councillors who get paid between €30,500 and €56,600. There should only be one TD for every county, regardless of population size, and the money saved, about €14,070,000, could finance the wages of the county councillors if they were made full-time with an increase in their wage.
The 26 TDs should then be required to report to their county councillors once a month at least, to report what is going on in the Dáil and to take instructions from the councillors as to what their county needs. This is not rocket science and I think we should have a referendum to decide on this matter.
The sight of a woman climbing onto a table at the World Snooker Championships bothered me far less than seeing someone throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, but that’s only because I have a passing interest in art and none at all in snooker.
But such protests are all about making us feel uneasy and getting our attention. When I watched activists storm the Grand National my thoughts strayed to a protest of another era, one that helped to change the course of history: At the Epson Derby in 1913, suffragette Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king’s horse.
She wanted to highlight the fact that women were denied the right to vote. She died of her injuries. That protest brought the suffragette campaign to new heights and helped to win people a basic human right that should never have been denied to them in the first place.
Sitting on a “Whites Only” seat on a bus in Montgomery in 1955 resulted in Rosa Parks being arrested, brought to a police station, and treated as a criminal, but her action highlighted the injustice of racist laws in that part of the USA.
I’m not suggesting that every direct action protest is necessarily always the ideal way to go, but often the inconvenience occasioned by the protest pales to nothing beside the enormity of the issue being highlighted.
Youthful protesters invading the course at Aintree is less disagreeable, I believe, than the deaths of three horses at the same event.
Likewise, a woman who glued herself to a railing at a greyhound racing track last month caused far less suffering to her fellow beings than those who abandon unwanted or underperforming dogs or kill them.
And the odd traffic jam or hold-up due to a disruptive climate change demo ought to be less worrying than the prospect of all life on the planet ending because we continue to pollute and poison our oceans, rivers, and lakes and turn the very atmosphere into an invisible plastic bag to smother us all.
Unfortunately, pressure via high visibility action is necessary and it works. Without it, every conceivable form of injustice, oppression, and cruelty would get a free run.
But don’t expect any plaudits from the rich and powerful if you opt to rattle their gilded cages.
Doing the right thing can get you into a lot of bother!
This group is made of a judge, barrister, academics, former adviser to the Attorney General and a former secretary general.
Not one of those appointed to this group comes from law enforcement. One has to wonder why?
Aren’t those who investigate and enforce our laws also better equipped to look at the running of our courts?
That some members, a minority I might add, of this group are in favour of abolishing this court is truly baffling, but not surprising.
That’s what we’ve come to expect from minority groups with a gripe.
Not one of these naysayers will ever have, or ever had to deal with the aftermath of gangland or terrorist-related killings, threats, and intimidation of witnesses, or risk their own lives in order to preserve the very foundation of our hard-won democracy.
While this minority and others try to dictate to us, we should hold fast to an institution that has served us well and has been, as Helen McEntee stated in 2021, “a vital component in our response to the anti-democratic and criminal forces that have sought to undermine the integrity of our State through violence and intimidation”.
I for one would see it as a step backwards if we were to allow for the abolition of a court that has served us so well.
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