Double Standards

I'm still trying to get my head around the whole Norris Affair, with my main thought at the moment being that John Waters was absolutely correct when he said today that:

'Nothing in recent years has revealed the ideological corruption of the Irish media as the David Norris saga. Nothing has so dramatically laid bare the extent to which our culture has been appropriated by people for whom words, facts, circumstances are no more than the raw material for beating Irish society in a new shape of their liking.'

Of course, there's a certain irony in the fact of Waters being part of that media, but I think his point holds. Not all of the article is sound -- I think he overplays comparisons with the X Case, for instance, and I'm uneasy about his rhetoric at a couple of points -- but his central thesis is spot-on. Until last week the Irish media had, in the main, given David Norris an astonishingly soft ride. Almost the entire media was clearly divided into two uncritical camps; for some Norris was a champion of Irish liberalism such that he couldn't be seen to do any wrong, whereas for others the fear of being accused of homophobia was so paralysing that they were incapable of engaging in legitimate criticism or scrutiny.

I still haven't seen even one article trying to establish when David Norris and Ezra Nawi ended their relationship. Was it 1985, as I keep hearing and as Norris indicated in his withdrawal speech? Or was it January 2001 as he told Joe Jackson in a 2002 interview? This matters, surely, as if it was the latter date it raises serious questions about why he was in a relationship with someone he knew to have had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy.

Even now I find it hard to comprehend how the Helen Lucy Burke interview from 2002 was so gently passed over, though this baffles me less than the fact that I can't find the text of the interview online. I can find extracts, of course, and damning ones at that, but I can't find the whole text as originally published in Magill -- surely there was more to the article than a few stray quotes -- let alone the full text as originally recorded. Why hasn't any reputable media outlet sought to republish the interview, along with, say, the 2002 Sunday Independent interview with Joe Jackson in which Senator Norris sought to clarify his Magill statements? This isn't even a complaint: I'm genuinely baffled.

The Norris affair forces us, I think, to ask a very serious question, which is 'how serious are we about tackling child abuse?' One might think, with their years of fulminating against the wrongs committed by Catholic clergy, that the Irish media was passionate about fighting this national scourge, leaving aside its aversion to reporting on the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse, but the way this matter is being handled should change that. Waters concludes his piece by saying:

'Thus this saga tells us that we now reside in an Alice in Wonderland culture, where language, meaning and truth are putty in the hands of journalists. A glaring similarity between particular sets of facts no longer guarantees that similar meanings will be adduced.

Now, we must consider also how political or ideologically useful the protagonist is.

Sexual abuse is deplorable when it implicates people the media consensus disapproves of, but otherwise is a technical matter arising from the absence of enlightened legislation – resulting, one assumes, from a paucity of classically-educated legislators.

How, henceforth, can the citizen have any reasonable expectation of being told, truthfully and consistently, the facts and meanings of events? And how, in the future, is the citizen to take seriously media fulminating about child abuse, when it is clear that, when a liberal icon is implicated, commentators and editors are disposed to look the other way?'

And he wrote that, it should be pointed out, before RTE decided to interview Ezra Nawi, Norris's former lover and -- more importantly -- a man who had been imprisoned for the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old boy. Sure, the boy had consented to what was done to him, but then so too had the sixteen-year-old boy involved in the only case in the Cloyne Report to have led to a criminal conviction. I very much doubt that RTE will be interviewing Brendan Wrixon any time soon. I certainly hope it won't.

Why assume anyone has a right to stand for the Presidency?

I hope Waters is wrong, and that the mainstays of the Irish media haven't simply been using the issue of child abuse -- a blight throughout all of Irish society -- as a stick with which to beat the Catholic dog. Unfortunately, it does rather look that way, and you can see this in how even such informed people as Fintan O'Toole and Vincent Browne can argue with reasonably straight faces that despite what's been revealed, David Norris should have been allowed to stand as a candidate in the Presidential election.

This baffles me, not least because it assumes that David Norris was basically entitled to stand for the Presidency, that at least twenty members of the Oireachtas were obliged to support his candidacy rather than those of someone else they might prefer to nominate, and that there's no real reason behind why our Constitution requires prospective candidates to be nominated by our elected representatives. How is it that Jed Bartlet put it in The West Wing?

'You know, we forget sometimes. In all the talk about democracy, we forget it's not a democracy. It's a republic. People don't make the decisions. They choose the people who make the decisions. Could they do a better job choosing? Yeah, but when you consider the alternatives...'

The members of the Oireachtas, most of whom we elect, have four roles under our Constitution: they make laws, they raise and maintain our armed forces, they hold the Government to account, and they nominate candidates for the Presidency. We've actually elected them to do that. If people didn't want TDs who wouldn't support David Norris' Presidential aspirations, they shouldn't have elected them. It's very simple.

If people have a problem with that, they should be campaigning to change the Constitution. Hell, they should have been campaigning since 2004.

Superficial Comparisons...

And yet, of course, there are people screaming about being denied their democratic right to vote for David Norris, and some of them have taken to scraping some old and empty barrels to make a point. Take for example, Áine Collins, a new Fine Gael TD who has apparently drawn comparisons between Norris' letter to the Israeli High Court and a letter written in 2003 to the then governor of Florida by Fine Gael's own candidate, Gay Mitchell, asking him to commute the death sentence for a double-murderer who was due to be executed. Of course, people have been ranting about this for the last couple of days, pointing out that Mitchell, as a Catholic, is opposed to abortion and that the murderer's victims had been the doctor at an abortion clinic and his bodyguard. In linking this letter with Norris's letters, Collins said:

'We heard what David Norris had to say, he did the right thing. I think Mr Mitchell absolutely [has questions to answer] he should come out and speak about that.'

I've never been a fan of Gay Mitchell, despite having voted for him in the 2004 European election, and should I be solidly home in the autumn I've no intention of voting for him in the Presidential election, but this is utter nonsense. The two situations aren't remotely comparable, and in fact I think they differ in at least six key ways:

• Mitchell was attempting to influence a political decision; Norris attempted to influence a judicial process.
• Why Mitchell chose the Hill case as one to write to Governor Bush about I do not know, but it was certainly not because of any personal relationship with the criminal; Norris attempted to appeal on behalf of someone who was a current or former lover.
• Mitchell had no relationship to conceal with Hill; Norris effectively sought to mislead the Israeli High Court by omitting the nature of his relationship with Nawi from his letter.
• As far as we know, Mitchell in no way sought to minimise the significance of a double murder, merely arguing that the death penalty is something that merely perpetuates the cycle of violence; Norris in his letter argued that Nawi’s crime was hardly so serious as to justify a custodial sentence.
• Mitchell asked only that a man not be executed, something that is in accord with the wishes of the Irish electorate, as expressed in a 2001 referendum, and in accord with the European Convention on Human Rights; Norris asked that a man not even be imprisoned for a crime that in Ireland would be punishable by up to five years in prison.
• Mitchell having written his letter has been public knowledge at least since it was reported by RTE in September 2003, and since then has been twice reelected to the European Parliament by the people of Dublin, topping the poll with more than 90,000 votes on each occasion; Norris concealed the fact of his having written this letter from his Seanad and Foreign Affairs Committee colleagues, and from his tiny Trinity College electorate whose elections of him were thus carried out in ignorance.

I think the last point is the key one. The Mitchell story was dealt with by the media eight years ago, and has already been passed over -- twice -- by the Irish electorate as being of no real consequence.The Norris story, on the other hand, is new information that had been concealed for years from Norris's colleagues and electorate. It invites serious questions about his attitude to adults having sex with minors, and invites these questions at a time when -- in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report and the Taoiseach's speech on Cloyne -- we seem finally to be starting to embrace the idea that no excuses in this field can be tolerated. 

SAVI again, and the realities of abuse in Ireland

I believe that's the right attitude, because child sexual abuse is a national scourge and if the table 4.9 of the SAVI Study can be trusted, almost 18 per cent of all child sexual abuse in Ireland has involved adults abusing fifteen- and sixteen-year olds. In the context of Ireland's adult population at the time the SAVI Study was carried out, this means about 140,000 of them had been sexually abused by adults when they were in their mid-teens. Sure, they may have gone along with this, but that's kind of the point: they were too young and too inexperienced for their consent to have been in any way mature or informed.

If we believe that the Taoiseach was right to say that teenagers are children, that Ireland's children are her most prized possession, and that safeguarding their integrity and innocence must be a national priority, then this belief must have consequences. Belief in itself is worthless; it's only belief in action that means anything. As Fintan O'Toole said back in the day, 

'You don't need moral courage to point out the failings of the other side. You need it for your own side, for people you know and like and believe in. It's precisely when friendship and loyalty are at stake that morality is tempered in the fire.'

I'm not saying people should be shouting or pointing fingers at David Norris. I don't think anger and sloganeering are the way forward. We have a colossal national problem, and McCarthyism, tabloid witch-hunts, and political blood sports won't help us solve it. Neither, however, will shameless double standards. Abuse is endemic in Ireland, and the only way we can deal with this properly is to do so -- carefully and thoughtfully -- together. The seduction, rape, and molestation of Ireland's children should not be a political football.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Five

So we left the Brother last Thursday evening, and him sitting in a Kerry field beyond Killarney, chasing the sunset in a field of hay, cursing the farmer who'd started baling it. What's happened since then, you might wonder, in the ongoing saga that Ireland's twitterati call #paintingtour?

Well, as the night progressed the Brother mentioned his favourite sign of the trip thus far, one that'd have been too dangerous to stop and photograph, saying 'Cork Therapy Clinic -- Previous Left Turn'. That'd been a few days earlier, of course, but not nearly so much earlier as this marvellously iconic sight which he posted as a competition for his Twitter followers; if anyone guessed the county, said Eolaí, he'd allow himself a can of stout. I'd have gambled on Carlow, but after much disputing around the photo's geotag -- showing where the Brother was when he posted the picture, not where he took it -- it was eventually revealed in the early hours of Friday morning that it was taken in north Wexford, way back in week one!

Alternating between pint and paint, and with tea to ease the transitions, he carried on into the night. With another painting done, he set off again on Friday, looking back to the Reeks and struggling to Farranfore, having a bit of a scare on the way. Having used his tablet to work out his route, he hadn't secured it properly to the bike afterwards, and cycling down a hill it fell off, and was hit and run over by a tractor. However, thanks to the tablet's heroic sleeve, even hitting the ground at speed and being run over didn't damage it at all! And if that scared him, then he scared us, conjuring up a terrifying image that evening by warning us after his arrival that though he was happily ensconsed among his hosts, filled with food and clutching his tea, he had some concerns about his attire. 'I tell ya tho',' he said, 'these cycling shorts aren't going to see too many more counties.'

Still, erosion to shorts aside, it clearly proved a jovial evening, and suitably fortified and rested he set out again on Saturday, cycling past classic pub scenes and typically gorgeous Kerry landscapes on his way to Tralee. Unfortunately, given the weekend that was in it, with a bank holiday and golf going on, Tralee was booked up. There being no room in the inn, the Brother was forced to turn around and pedal back to Farranfore, making it back where he'd started just before dark. Still, his future hosts made plans for him appearing with all agreeing on the need for tea, beer, tea, wine, tea, curry, and tea*, and one boasting of having arranged for the importation of my Brother's clan. He may have been exaggerating on that one, as I certainly didn't get an invitation.

Kerry Road Markings

Out on Sunday, having had to abandon his plan for two days of gentle cycling, he set off again, pausing on the way to admire Kerry County Council's assiduous road maintenance, and again to rectify yet another puncture. Onward again through the misty rain, looking west to the Dingle peninsula, and through the hurling stronghold of Kilmoyley where the locals had quickly picked the Q, C, and K from the local Quick Pick, all the way to the home of Dat Beardy Man and Arwen the dog. 

Monday saw the Brother painting and inhaling tea at the side of yet another Kerry road, and with the sun down he put away his paints and turned to dinner and more tea.

Two hours behind schedule on Tuesday, he set off from Lixnaw through Finuge and Listowel, onward to Tarbert to get a ferry over the Shannon Estuary. He stopped to share tea and griddle bread with a needy if somewhat adorable dog that'd been chasing a chicken only moments earlier, and then continued pushing his legstraining way through Clare, his tenth county, making his way past Ballynacally, village of a thousand hanging baskets, to Ennis, his destination for the night.

Yesterday seems to have been an odd one, with him under orders to paint some zombies in the west of Ireland -- no, I have no idea, but he assures me they  weren't painted from life, though they may have been rendered from living death. Whatever about the Zombies, though, he also did a gorgeous painting of a couple of pugs for his hosts. Sadly, one dog didn't make the cut for some reason.

Quin Abbey

Today has seen him cycling southeast, more or less, stopping to eat a sandwich at Quin Abbey, taking a cattle grid at speed, marvelling at an unexpected sign in Sixmilebridge**, pausing to wish for tea, and eventually passing Thomond Park as he entered Limerick City by the old Cratloe Road, crossing the Shannon at Thomond Bridge to be hosted in his eleventh county by the notorious Bock the Robber.

Five weeks cycled, eleven counties graced with his presence, and I have no idea how many paintings painted or mugs of tea consumed. Let's hope his legs hold up. As I keep saying, you can and should follow him on his blog and especially on Twitter, where his hashtag's #paintingtour. I wouldn't bother following him on Google Latitude, though, as that has a habit of putting him in Drogheda when he's in the Dublin Mountains or Kilmore Quay, in Lucan when he's in Ardmore, and Garryvoe Beach in Cork when he's in north Kerry.

And again, as I've also said before, if you think there's a chance he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live and you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, you should let him know. Just send him a message. It's not called social networking for nothing...

The Brother's Route Thus Far, as roughly reconstructed from Twitter updates

* Though you could argue that tea, wine, and spirits is the correct order of drinks.

** One needs to be warned of such sinister creatures.

Swashbuckling recollected in Solitude

I'm delighted that my housemate's ploughing through the copy of A Time of Gifts I gave him for his birthday. To be fair, he should be. It starts superbly and its prose never falters. I must find out how my fairy blogmother has got on with her copy.

As I reckoned at the time of Paddy's death, the Patrick Leigh Fermor blog has provided wonderful reading in the week's since Paddy's death. Even with the obituaries all done and dusted, it's carried on, whether giving us today a wonderful extract from A Time to Keep Silence, or encouraging us to donate to fund someone's effort to emulate Paddy's walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, or speculating on whether Gregory Peck's character in The Guns of Navarone might have been based on Fermor, or gracing us with the whole of Colin Thubron's fascinatingly insightful New York Review of Books article on the man who, until a few weeks back, I'd have happily called the Greatest Living Englishman.

Among the article's pleasures are how it contrasts certain choice passages of PLF's writing, such as the middle-aged Fermor's conjuring up the swashbuckling ambition and thirst for novelty of his eighteen-year-old self:

'To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar…. All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year…there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!'

Which stands in stark contrast to his thoughts in his  early forties on time spent in French monasteries, where, as Karen Armstrong writes in her introduction to A Time to Keep Silence, the whole life of the Trappist monks had been designed to protect them from the distractions of -- and the lust for -- novelty:

'I was profoundly affected by the places I have described. I am not sure what these feelings amount to, but they are deeper than mere interest and curiosity….

For, in the seclusion of a cell—an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual and long solitary walks in the woods—the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.'

It's a fine article, well worth the reading, and though not quite as exhuberantly expansive as Anthony Lane's indispensable New Yorker piece from 2006, its more narrow focus bestows its own rewards.

So Many Questions, So Few Solutions...

Fintan O'Toole has an absolutely brilliant article about double-standards in the Irish Times this week. In it he says:

'What saddens me about the whole David Norris affair is the proof that so many distinguished, thoughtful liberal intellectuals have refused to learn the lesson that we took it on ourselves to teach the Catholic Church over recent years. We despised the church for its moral equivocation, for its culture of denial, for putting tribal loyalty ahead of ethical honesty. When we saw the agony of church people at having to give up "one of their own", we thought that "people like us" would never be like that.

We would know, surely, that you don't need moral courage to point out the failings of the other side. You need it for your own side, for people you know and like and believe in. It's precisely when friendship and loyalty are at stake that morality is tempered in the fire.'

Oh wait. That wasn't this week, and it wasn't about David Norris. That was three-and-a-half years ago, and was  about the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, whose conduct with Nepalese youths had attracted attention through the documentary Fairytale of Kathmandu, and who had been defended by several of his literary and artistic peers, with a letter from them having been lauded in the Seanad by David Norris, who publicly called for the broadcasting of the film to be postponed, pending an investigation.

I'm sorry, I'll read that again

Fintan's response to the Norris affair has been rather different. He freely admits that it's unacceptable for any member of our parliament to seek to influence the sentence of someone being tried for a serious crime, and declares inexcusable Senator Norris having done so on official headed parliamentary paper, and in his capacity as a senator, a member of our parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, and a possible future President. However, he says, this is no worse than the conduct of several other Irish politicians over the years, and as such should hardly demand a more serious penalty. Besides, he says, 

'It is quite understandable (even admirable) at a human level that he would have wished to make a plea for mercy for someone he loved... [Norris attempted to influence the Israeli High Court] out of a misguided sense of loyalty to someone who had been the love of his life... shouldn’t we feel uneasy at the notion that the gay man whose own sexuality was criminalised for so long is held to a higher standard than straight politicians? David Norris has a lot of explaining to do, but he should be allowed to do it in a free electoral debate.'

I happen to think Fintan's getting at something of value here, but still, as many of the comments on that article recognise, he's guilty here of the same double standards he so condemned in connection with those who would have defended Cathal Ó Searcaigh. And as we all know, and as Fergus Finlay admitted when talking with George Hook and John Waters on the radio the other day, if -- say -- Senator Ronan Mullen had acted in a similar fashion in connection with any priest convicted of behaving as Norris's erstwhile partner had done, then his political career would have been finished, and you'd have very few people defending him.

The Taoiseach's Speech, revisited

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, which is one of the very best things I read as an undergraduate, says that an angry man is rightly praised when he is angry at the right things, with the right people, in the right fashion, at the right time, and for the right duration. Although I believe that the Taoiseach's speech on Cloyne failed this test by being deeply wrong in how it attributed blame to the Vatican and by implication to the Pope, I do believe the anger Enda was expressing was -- in general -- absolutely justified. Indeed, much of what he said in the speech was a real call to arms, a heroic declaration of how high our standards must be if we are truly to cherish all the children of our nation. 

In this light, it's rather ironic to see Irish commentators who'd lauded the Taoiseach's speech and those who over years have espoused the sentiments Enda expressed being unabashedly dismayed that David Norris has felt obliged to withdraw from the Irish presidential race. 

I'm only singling out Fintan as I expect more of him than others; as I've noted, he's has been curiously silent in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report and the Taoiseach's speech, perhaps because he realised how much of Enda's speech was directed at the wrong target. Nonetheless, given how often he's spoken out against the Catholic Church's influence in Ireland -- sometimes justifiably, and sometimes less so -- I'm quite confident that he has wholeheartedly embraced the Taoiseach's unambiguous declarations of the primacy of the Republic over the Church, and of his determination to protect our children, 'our most precious possession of all'.

If there was a central theme to the Taoiseach's speech, it's that the time for excuses is over. If we want to protect children, then we have to have high standards and we have to abide by them, and in this light it's worth thinking -- just for a moment -- about what David Norris did. Let's leave aside the question of whether Irish politicians seeking to influence foreign courts is appropriate, or whether Senator Norris's actions were wise or foolish. Let's just focus on the central point, which is that he argued that the rapist of a fifteen-year-old boy should not be imprisoned, and test it against the high standards the Taoiseach proclaimed and the country applauded...

One could easily argue that by appealing for clemency in 1997 for a man who'd been convicted of the rape of a fifteen-year-old, and by lauding in a 2002 Magill interview the idea of older men initating teenage boys into sex, Senator Norris had displayed 'a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children'. One could fairly ask whether David Norris believes young teenagers to be children whose integrity and innocence should be safeguarded, and whether he thinks of their childhood as a sacred space we should do all we can to protect. One could further ask whether anybody who at least until recently did not hold such views should even think himself fit to be the President of a Republic of rights and responsibilities where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of 'morality' should not be tolerated or ignored.

Perhaps most strikingly, in view of how there are no shortage of people raving about David's integrity, as though he's a martyr to basic decency and letting one's heart rule one's head, one might wonder what it is that has rendered some of Ireland’s brightest, most privileged and powerful journalists either unwilling or unable to address these questions.

Is there a right to run for the highest office in the land?

What Fintan's latest article basically says is that standards have been lower in the past than they are now, and that it's unfair to force David Norris to pay the price now for having in the past abided by those lower standards.

I see Fintan's point, though in picking his examples of Irish politicians who weren't punished for having written letters or posed Parliamentary questions in connection with criminals, he conspicuously omits the example of Trevor Sargent, who resigned as a junior minister in February 2010 in recognition of how his having contacted the Gardaí in connection with an assaulted constituent could be seen as having been unlawful. He also omits the fact that the Presidency is the highest office in the land, and thus an office with which the highest standards should be synonymous. Perhaps most troublingly, he commits the common error of making it seem as though Senator Norris had been entitled to stand for the Presidency, as though other members of the Oireachtas had a moral obligation to support his candidacy.

I appreciate that Norris has achieved a lot in all his years in the Seanad, and that he had huge popular support before the weekend, but I'd be very curious to know what his support was on Monday or Tuesday. Sure, his most ardent supporters have made their views well known, and there are certainly no shortage of them, but beyond that hard core? I'm not sure. We'd need to poll people asking not 'do you thinking David Norris should have been allowed run for the Presidency?' and not 'do you think Finian McGrath, John Halligan, and Thomas Pringle were wrong to withdraw their support for David Norris' presidential campaign?' but 'If you could, would you vote for David Norris as President of Ireland?'

The Constitution doesn't allow just anybody to run. It has clear criteria, and I've not yet seen any serious popular demand that these criteria be changed: candidates for the Presidency must be citizens of at least 35 years of age and must be nominated by at least twenty members of the Oireachtas, or by at least four County or City Councils, or by themselves, if they are a current or former President. On this basis, the absolute maximum number of people who could run in the 2011 Presidential election is twenty: eleven nominated by members of the Oireachtas, eight nominated by councils, and Mary Robinson if she nominated herself. There's no obligation on anybody to support anybody else's nomination, irrespective of how popular opinion polls say they are, if they don't like the idea of that person being President, or if they'd rather wait to see if somebody else better might come along before the deadline. Nobody's allowed to nominate more than one candidate, after all.

There's a strong case that these criteria should be changed, so that with a sufficiently large proven support base candidates could run without needing -- in effect - the approval of those people we elect to represent us at local or national level, but that's a debate for another day.


Withdrawing with grace
I've watched the video of David Norris's withdrawal speech, and have read it too, and think it's a touching piece of rhetoric. I'm still confused about why he refers to Ezra Nawi as his 'former partner of twenty five years ago' when in a 2002 interview he said their relationship only ended in 2001, but still,I'd recommend studying the speech as I think it raises some important points. Having described his former partner's rape of a fifteen-year-old as 'disgraceful', Norris said:

'I do not regret supporting and seeking clemency for a friend, but I do regret giving the impression that I did not have sufficient compassion for the victim of Ezra’s crime. I accept that more than a decade and a half later when I have now reviewed the issue, and am not emotionally involved, when I am not afraid that Ezra might take his own life, I see that I was wrong. He served his time and never offended again. Yes, his actions were terrible but my motivation to write the letter was out of love and concern. I was eager to support someone who had been very important in my life.'

I think Norris, in saying this, has effectively revealed and conceded something very valuable. Faced with the reality of someone he knew having -- let's be frank -- taken advantage of a child for his own pleasure, Senator Norris had responded with love and concern, but with love and concern that was directed wholly towards the person he knew.

This, as it happens, is how I think huge numbers of Irish people respond when they hear that people they know have been accused -- or even found guilty -- of such crimes. In their minds they rationalise the behaviour of their loved ones, they minimise the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they're still their brothers, or their sons, or their friends. This is, in fact, exactly how Denis O'Callaghan behaved in dealing with allegations of abuse in Cloyne. The Cloyne Report recognises his personal kindness but quotes him as admitting that he sometimes tended to show favour to accused priests, having been emotionally drawn to their plight, in such a way that that compromised his care for complainants.


Things to keep in mind
There are certain key things that I think we need to keep in mind in any sober discussions of child sexual abuse in Ireland. Chief among these are that the use of children by adults for sexual gratification is always wrong, that child sexual abuse is deeply damaging although different people can be damaged in different ways, that child abuse endemic in Irish life, and that the vast majority of instances of abuses are committed by people related to the abused children or by friends or neighbours of the family.

The all-pervading cancer of child abuse in Irish life is something I've referred to often in recent weeks, pointing to the SAVI Study's 2002 finding that 27 per cents of Irish adults had experienced sexual abuse in their childhood or adolescence. Vincent Browne, in today's Irish Times, goes some way to explaining what that figure means, focusing on the numbers who'd experienced contact abuse and rape:

'A report funded by government departments and published almost a decade ago, Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland, revealed that one in five women reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and a quarter of these (5.6 per cent of all girls) reported having been raped in childhood. One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and 2.7 per cent of all boys reported having been raped in childhood. We are talking here of more than 100,000 women having been raped in childhood and about 57,000 men.'

Vincent's figures aren't quite right here, though he's on the right track. The SAVI data is based on people who were adults in 2001, and so we need to look at the nearest census figures, those being the 2002 ones. In 2002, there were 1,426,681 adult males in Ireland and 1,477,491 females. Tables 4.3 of SAVI gives us a detailed breakdown on the prevalence of different types of abuse experienced by the survey respondents, with table 4.5 breaking down the respondents in terms of the most serious types of abuse they'd experienced. Focusing on the percentages, with a view to applying the SAVI figures to the general population, the essential SAVI data is as follows:

Based on the 2002 census figures, this means that ten years or so ago, there must have been about 530,000 adult survivors of contact sexual abuse in Ireland, with about 38,500 of them being men who'd been raped in childhood, and about 83,000 of them being women who'd been raped in childhood. The figure, then, for Irish adult victims of childhood rapes should be regarded as more like 120,000 than 160,000. Either way, we can all surely agree, this is an abomination.

In commenting on David Norris, Vincent Browne notes that Norris's representations to the Israel High Court showed no concern for the psychological consequences to the boy who had sex with Ezra Nawi. This matters: in saying this  Browne is effectively recognising that a young teenager cannot be said to agree in a mature and informed way to have sex with an adult, and that such sex, even if 'consensual' can prove profoundly harmful. It won't do to say it was consensual. What Brendan Wrixon, the 'Father Caden' of the Cloyne Report, got up to with the then sixteen-year-old 'Patrick' seems to have been consensual, such that the DPP couldn't have him prosecuted for sexual assault, but it's telling that he's the only cleric in the Cloyne Report to have been convicted for any offenses detailed in that report: he pleaded guilty to gross indecency.

People shouldn't be used as things, and adults shouldn't convince themselves that just because children go along with them, that they really know what they're doing. The teenagers' actions might not have been quite 'involuntary', to use Aristotle's terms again, but given their immaturity, their actions were surely, at best 'non-voluntary'. There was no true consent.

The problem is that with there being more than 780,000 adult survivors of child sexual abuse, and with about 120,000 of these having been raped in childhood, we have to face the fact that there are huge numbers of people in the country who have clearly committed some form of child sex abuse at some point.  As Fintan O'Toole said last August:

'Rapists and child abusers walk among us all the time. We sit beside them on the bus, say hello to them in the shops, share jokes with them at work. '

They're our workmates, our friends, our brothers, our neighbours, our children... and there are lots of them. Even if Vincent Browne overstated the case in April 2008 when he said that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland, the fact remains that there are far too many people out there who have abused children for our criminal justice system ever to cope with.


So what do we do?
I don't know what the answer is, because I don't believe that Denis O'Callaghan's 'pastoral approach' is the way forward either. Kindness, frankly, is not enough, and certainly won't do anything to stop the most determined and devious of abusers. However, I do think that any serious attempt to try to deal with this must aim to achieve three things, which, while not mutually exclusive, nonetheless have a certain priority to them, these being prevention, healing, and justice.


Prevention obviously is the main priority. The abuse that's been done cannot be undone, and there's little point expending most of our efforts in punishing the crimes of yesterday if we're not taking serious action to protect the children of today. Proper background checks for all those who work with children are crucial, of course, but given that most abuse happens in the family circle, that'd just be scratching the surface of the problem. We need something rather better than that. I think the key is probably the education of children, such that, for instance, children have it drummed into them time and time again that there are certain things they need to tell parents or other responsible adults.

In a heavy-handed way I'm talking about a type of sex education, but in the main I'm thinking of something more subtle -- even something more natural. Take, for example, how parents might read books to their children, and how the most popular of which in recent years would surely be the Harry Potter series. The basic plot of each book involves something bad happening and then the children deciding not to tell the adults responsible for them, convinced as they are that they'd not be believed. Plotwise, this is absolutely necessary, and it works from the viewpoint of the characters' development too, but it's not good practice for children. So whenever parents watch films or read books with their children, they should watch out for stuff like this, and talk to their children, and get them to understand that Harry and Hermione and Ron were wrong, and that there was no guarantee that things would have worked out as they did...


Healing, then, is the next stage. Again, leaving aside the fact that most reported cases of abuse don't lead to a conviction, I don't see the point in putting most of our energy into punishing people while hundreds of thousands of abuse victims are to suffer in silence. We need to find a way to help abuse survivors heal, as best they can. I reckon that'd take a huge amount of work, using counselling groups, state-funded therapy, reconciliation tribunals to allow survivors to confront their abusers, forums where people can just talk about this, religious organisations and ministries and services, and just encouraging people to open up and to listen... whatever it takes. In his homily on Reek Sunday, Archbishop Neary said:

'A woman asked me last week when it would all end. The honest answer is that it will not end until every survivor has told their story and until every victim is facilitated in embarking on their journey to real healing, where true dignity is accorded.'

He's right. There are probably few things Irish people are better at than telling stories, and yet for many of us we can't tell stories that almost define who we are. We keep those stories in the dark, trapped within us. We talk a lot, and say very little. We need to find a way to change that.


Finally, there's Justice. For some people justice will be necessary to the healing process; in other cases, it'll be necessary for the protection of other children. But given that there are only about 4,500 prison places in all of Ireland, and that there may well be more than twenty times that number of people in the country who have abused children at some point, I think we have to accept that much though many of us might wish it, we can't hurl them all into prison. Clearly there are a small number of monsters out there, multiple abusers who've ruined countless lives; whatever may have caused them to become what they are, I don't think there are many who'd argue against them facing the harshest of prison sentences.

But what of the rest, and keeping in mind how difficult it can be to prove abuse has happened, especially if it happened a long time ago?

If it's true, as I've read, that a third of all abusers are adolescents, and that adolescents are more susceptible to therapy than established abusers -- their sexuality, such as it is, still not being fully formed in many cases -- then I think there's hope that they can themselves be healed. Indeed, given the statistics, I think it's very likely that many adolescent abusers were themselves child victims only a few years before they committed their own crimes. That's not to say that abuse is contagious, such that abuse victims regularly become abusers -- that's a gross and calumnious oversimplification -- just that given the huge prevalence of abuse in Ireland, a significant overlap between the two categories must be inevitable.

In between these extremes, I really don't know, save that each case must be dealt with on its own merits. I think there are distinctions between different types of abuse, but I'm also fully aware that what, say might be embarrassing but basically harmless for one child could be utterly devastating for another. I also think that there are distinctions between an adult stupidly becoming infatuated and getting involved in a relationship with a single adolescent and one who deliberately seeks out and grooms children of whatever age so that he can prey on them. Again, even recognising that all of this is wrong, I think we have to draw distinctions. Flattening it out so that everything is equally monstrous, equally unforgiveable -- that'll get us nowhere. We can't throw half the country into prison.

I'd also add that I don't believe it helps things to scream at people for not doing enough to prevent abuse. Sure, there are some people in positions of authority who do nothing whatsoever or even effectively facilitate abuse, but there are times when I'm not sure it's possible to do enough. The more I've learned and thought about it, the more I've become convinced that abuse is a miasma, a pollution that contaminates all those who come in contact with it. What do you do if you learn that a fifty-year-old man, married and with children of his own, had abused his cousin thirty-five years earlier? What he did back then may have been monstrous, and may have done horrendous damage to that cousin, but in the years since then he may have had help and he may have changed...

Because there's the dilemma. What if that man is abusing his children even now, and you have the power to stop it? Are you in some sense responsible if you don't act? But what if he did terrible things decades ago, but stopped, and grew into a decent adult, and is a good husband and a good father? Because then the prosecution of him wouldn't just punish him for his crimes -- it'd punish his wife and his children too. Situations like that must exist all over the land. There must be thousands of cases like that. I think we need some kind of mechanism to enable people to bring forward serious concerns based on real experience -- not just 'soft information' -- without necessarily setting in motion courses of action that could shatter more lives.


Anyway, that's all I've got. Ten posts I've done on this now, some huge and all labelled 'Abuse and Cloyne'. Time, I think, to focus on cheerier topics for a while.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

Ireland Through A Glass, Darkly

I'm a huge fan of The West Wing, and have watched it so often that I tend to recognise lines from the show being echoed -- Jason O'Mahony, for instance, in the context of a sensible and concise discussion of the death penalty, seems to be channelling a very good point about drug barons that Leo McGarry -- as distinct from Patsy McGarry -- makes in the third episode of the show:

'Oh, then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process.'

In writing about Cloyne, David Norris, and sex abuse in general I've thought often of 'Two Cathedrals', the spectacular finale to the show's second season, which is structured around the funeral of President Bartlet's executive secretary and very old friend Delores Landingham. In a series of flashbacks, Bartlet remembers her trying to persuade him of the injustice of women in the school he attended -- and where his father was principal -- being paid less than the men.

'Numbers, Mrs Landingham,' he says, 'If you want to convince me of something, show me numbers.'

In the aftermath of her funeral, wrestling with the storms that surround him, he imagines her with him -- or he's haunted by her ghost, but let's run with the former -- as he wonders what to do.

'God doesn't make cars crash and you know it,' Mrs Landingham says. 'Stop using me as an excuse.'
'The Party's not going to want me to run,' insists Bartlet.
'The Party'll come back. You'll get them back.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mrs. Landingham, I've never been the most popular man in the Democratic Party.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mr. President. Your father was a prick who could never get over the fact that he wasn't as smart as his brothers. Are you in a tough spot? Yes. Do I feel sorry for you? I do not. Because there are people way worse off than you.'
'Give me numbers,' he says.
'I don't know numbers. You give them to me.'
'How about a child born this minute has one in five chances of being born into poverty?'
'How many Americans don't have health insurance?'
'44 million.'
'What's the number one cause of death for black men under 35?'
'Homicide.'
'How many Americans are behind bars?'
'Three million.'
'How many Americans are drug addicts?'
'Five million.'
'And one in five kids in poverty?'
'That's thirteen million American children. 3.5 million kids go to schools that are literally falling apart. We need 127 billion in school construction, and we need it today!'
'To say nothing of 53 people trapped in an embassy,' adds Mrs Landingham.
'Yes.'
'You know, if you don't want to run again, I respect that,' says Mrs Landingham, getting to her feet, 'But if you don't run 'cause you think it's gonna be too hard or you think you're gonna lose - well, God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.'

So what's this got to do with sex abuse in Ireland?

As a country, and despite all the newspaper headlines, we simply haven't got to grips with the reality of child sex abuse. We've got some understanding of how damaging it is, because we've heard the heartbreaking stories of deeply brave people like Marie Collins and Andrew Madden, but we have no concept, collectively, of how prevalent it is, of how many people have experienced it, of how many people have committed it, of how many people know about it, of how rarely its perpetrators have faced justice, or of who the perpetrators actually are.

When it comes to child abuse in Ireland, most people haven't a clue. The problem, when we get down to it, isn't primarily within the Irish Church; it's within the Irish people. Truth be told, until very recently I don't think distinctions between the two are meaningful: given the huge numbers of twentieth-century Irish families with priests, brothers, or nuns in their ranks, I don't think we can speak of the twentieth-century Irish Church as though it was somehow discrete from the twentieth-century Irish Nation. I don't think we should discuss the abuse of thousands of children by Irish priests as though it's somehow a different phenomenon from the abuse of hundreds of thousands of children by other Irish people, and I don't think we can discuss the Irish Church's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse as though it's somehow different from the Irish Nation's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse.

And yes, I'm fully aware that not everybody in independent Ireland was Catholic, but insofar as the overwhelming majority were, I think we have to face the fact that the Church wasn't separate from society so much as it was a facet of Irish society, and one that reflected wider society, with all its vices and virtues. I've wondered about this kind of stuff many a time in the past, and friends have responded with disbelief, saying that while they realised that most Irish sexual abuse happened within the home, it was surely obvious that priests abused far more than other people. And then I raise the figures from the 2002 SAVI Study, and they look very doubtful.

The good, the bad and the ugly: Media coverage of scandals in the Catholic Church in Ireland.

There's a very pertinent article by one Michael Breen in the Winter 2000 issue of the Irish Jesuits' journal Studies. Breen was then a priest and head of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Limerick's Mary Immaculate College, where he is now Dean of Arts. In this article he argues that:

'As well as setting the agenda for public issues, the news media can also set the agenda for themselves by their repetitious coverage of a single event and their definitions of newsworthiness. People, including journalists, cannot pay attention to everything; they are selective. They take shortcuts by relying on the most accessible information sources. Frequent repetition of a given story at a national level focuses journalistic attention on that issue. The framing of a news story, therefore, is of critical importance in terms of the ultimate impact of a story.'

Breen recognises that the Church should be grateful to the media for it having exposed the horror of child abuse within the Church, thereby forcing the Church to deal with the issue. However, he also notes the anger of those who feel that the media in Ireland had created a narrative which convey the impression that the primary perpetrators of child sex abuse in Ireland are Catholic clergy. For example, with reference to the Irish Times, which certainly would not be the worst offender in this regard, Breen claims that between August 1993 and August 2000 -- at which point, presumably, he wrote the article -- the term 'paedophile priest' was used 332 times. In contrast, he says, the term 'paedophile farmer' was used just five times, and such terms as 'paedophile parent', 'paedophile teacher', and 'paedophile journalist' weren't used at all.

Central to Breen's argument is the idea that the general media failure to alert people to the fact that the vast majority of child sex abuse occurs within the home does child protection a grave disservice, and that this is exacerbated by 'a media concentration on clerical abusers to the virtual exclusion of most others'.

How bad was the situation ten years ago?

I first came across Breen's article when reading the 2002 SAVI Study, which alludes to the article once or twice. The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Study, which I've mentioned a few times in recent weeks, was a huge survey, conducted in 2001 by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. More than 3,000 people were interviewed in depth about a range of related issues such as whether they'd ever been a victim of sexual abuse or violence, the nature of that abuse or violence, the relationship they'd had with those who had abused or assaulted them, whether or not they'd ever disclosed their experiences before, and whether their experiences had been dealt with through the courts. The survey had a high response rate, and should be regarded as authoritative; to put it into context, in contrast to the more than 3,000 people interviewed for the SAVI Study, a typical political poll in Ireland is based on a sample of 1,000 people.

The Study, of course, dealt with both the abuse of children and of adults, but given that we're talking about child sex abuse now, the key findings are -- more or less -- as follows:

• Roughly 27 per cent Irish adults in 2001 had been the victims of child sexual abuse. Given that the adult population in the following year's census was 2,904,172, this means that there must have been something of the order of 780,000 adults survivors of child sexual abuse walking around Ireland.
• Just under 65 per cent of child abuse victims had been abused whilst under the age of twelve.
• Over 48 per cent of abuse survivors had never disclosed their experiences to anyone before being surveyed.
• Just under 52 per cent of abuse survivors surveyed had previously told family, friends, or others of their experiences.
• Only about 5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point been reported to the Gardaí.
• Just 16 per cent of 38 abuse cases reported to Gardaí had gone to court; of these six cases, only four had resulted in a verdict of guilt.
• In other words, little more than 10 per cent of reported abuse cases had by 2001 led to a criminal conviction.
• More broadly, only about 0.5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point led to a criminal conviction.

I said 'more or less' there because it's sometimes difficult to make the figures add up. I'm not sure why, but it seems that not everybody surveyed answered every question. Still, let's stay with that figure of 780,000 adult abuse survivors. I think we'd have to agree that that's abominable: it means that more than one in four Irish adults suffered sexual abuse when in their childhood or adolescence.

Now, one question we need to consider, if we want seriously to engage with Breen's argument that the media's excessive emphasis on clerical abuse is both misleading and dangerous, is the issue of how many victims of sexual abuse in Ireland were victims of people who they knew as priests.

Tables 4.10 and 4.11 of the Report give us the most important data in this regard, though, as I've said, the overall numbers don't quite add up, in that these tables seem to refer to just 722 people, whereas it seems that 844 people who responded to the survey said that they'd experienced child sexual abuse. So, combining the data from the two tables into one table, here are the facts as they stood in 2001, when the Study was conducted.

It seems, then, that in 2001, out of a sample of 722 self-identifying abuse survivors, 12 said that they'd been sexually abused in childhood by people they knew to be priests. Of course, it's possible that some of the 'strangers' were priests too, but given that it seems that clerical abusers abused their positions in society in order to gain access to children who they harmed, it seems unlikely that they'd have hidden the fact of their priesthood. That would have been their best way of ensuring their crimes were kept secret.

So, 12 out 722 seems to be the real figure for clerical abuse in Ireland, that being just under 1.7 per cent, and from a time when there were no specific child protection measures anywhere in Ireland, when there were far more priests than there are now, and when priests had a social status and an access to children that they haven't had in a very long time.

Are things really different now?

I think they are. Unfortunately, the State hasn't done a second SAVI study, but given how the findings of the first one seem to have had no impact on the national consciousness or official policy -- Vincent Browne, in a May 2010 Irish Times article, referred to it as 'the seminal but largely ignored report, Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland' -- I'm not wholly convinced that there'd be any point in doing more work in this precise area.

(Browne, it should be pointed out, has probably pointed to the Study more often than any other figure in Irish public life, and it was presumably in connection with this that he claimed in April 2008 that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland. I don't think anybody was listening.)

Having said that, it rather looks as though it's not merely that 'most child sexual abuse happens in the home' so much as that 'almost all child sexual abuse happens in the home.' Maeve Lewis, on taking the helm at One in Four back in 2008, said that her organisation would be attempting to tackle sexual abuse in familes, saying that 'the most dangerous place for children is in the extended family,' but I'm not sure what they're doing about it. The Irish Times ran an article in February 2009 in which one Mick Moran, a Garda Detective Sergeant working with Interpol in fighting internet paedophiles, said that 85 per cent of child sexual abuse takes place in the family home or in the family circle. Perhaps even more horrifyingly, in November 2009 the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97 per cent of those who had been sexually abused as children and who had sought the help of Irish rape crisis centres in 2008 had been abused either by a family member or a friend of the family. What's more, a 2003 conference of the Irish Association of Care Workers was told that a third of all sexual abuse in Ireland was committed by adolescents, and indeed, there seems to be a fair amount of scholarly literature out there on the phenomenon of sexual abuse by adolescents.

This doesn't seem to be the impression the media gives...

I think most reasonable people will readily concede that most abuse happens within the home, and that the reporting of clerical child sex abuse is somewhat disproportionate, but will think that it's not wildly so. The thing is, I don't think the numbers bear this out.

For starters, how many people in Ireland have even heard of the SAVI Study? There was an excellent comment the other day which asked what the reaction to the SAVI Report had been, considering the reaction to the Cloyne Report, and this got me thinking, because I couldn't remember any reaction at all. I'm not even sure when I first heard of it, but  I think it was in passing about two or three years ago.

So, I went to the Irish Times website, and started trawling through its archives as best can be done without access to them, using its 'search' function to see how many articles and letters since April 2002 had mentioned the SAVI Study. I searched for 'SAVI' and for 'Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland', and looked at each partial result as best I could, and in the end came to the conclusion that between April 2002 and the other evening, the SAVI Study had been mentioned in total 63 times over the last nine years, often in connection with the rape of adults rather than the abuse of children. The most recent piece mentioning it was a letter on 13 June. To put this into context, I'd challenge you to find out how many articles or letters have featured the word 'Cloyne' in the last month alone. At least according to the Irish Times' own search facility, it comes to 163 pieces.

That's 163 articles or letters in just one month in connection with a report which told us that two people who had been in positions of authority didn't follow their own guidelines, as compared to scarcely more than 60 references over more than nine years to an report that told us that more than 750,000 Irish adults were sexually abused as children. Is it any wonder that people don't know about the SAVI Study?

And I very much doubt that the Irish Times is the worst offender in this regard; it certainly won't have been the most sensationalist, but given how good a paper it is in other respects, I think it should be better than this. The media may not decisively influence what we think, admittedly, but it surely has a huge influence on what we think about.

Breen's Figures, Updated: Or, how do the numbers stack up now?

The SAVI figures showed that for every victim of clerical child sex abuse, there were sixty victims of child sex abuse by people other than priests. The hints at modern figures I've been able to glimpse in statements from the likes of the RCNI and Mick Moran suggest that nowadays the gap is even more stark.

This makes sense:  we're very careful about strangers and people outside our own families and close friends, and we're especially so around  Catholic priests; indeed most priests are themselves scrupulously careful around children; however inadequate or however imperfectly followed they may be, churches, schools, health authorities, sports clubs, scouting organisations and so forth all tend to have child-protection policies, and indeed to have designated people to look out for children's safety.

Unfortunately, these realities don't seem to be reflected in the media. Again, wholly relying on the Irish Times' search facility, and without access to its full archive and without time to do the serious work even if I had access, what can we say about how the Irish Times has reported on child abuse since Michael Breen commented on how things stood up to August 2000? Well, bearing in mind that this isn't as systematic an analysis as I would like to do, and hoping that a proper media student will do the real legwork at some point...

• The word 'paedophile' seems to have appeared in 1,320 articles or letters since September 2000. In 295 of those pieces, the term 'paedophile priest' was used; putting it another way, despite the fact that just 1.7 per cent of survivors of child sex abuse in Ireland were abused by priests, 22.3 per cent of all  Irish Times pieces mentioning paedophiles use the term 'paedophile priests'.
• Compared to the 295 uses of the term 'paedophile priest', the term 'paedophile teacher' has been used three times in the Irish Times since September 2000, while the term 'paedophile journalist' has not been used once.
• The phrase 'sex abuse' has been used in 2,295 pieces, but in 1,056 of these pieces, it appears as part of either the phrase 'clerical sex abuse' or 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 46 per cent of all Irish Times articles on sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with the clergy.
• A search for 'child sex abuse' brings up 1,190 results, but of these pieces, 579 use the phrase 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 48.7 per cent of all Irish Times articles on child sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with clergy.
• Of the last hundred articles to use the phrase 'child sex abuse', in 61 cases the phrase 'child sex abuse' was preceded by the word 'clerical', and a further 28 cases used the phrase in connection with the Catholic clergy, such that 89 per cent of the Irish Times' most recent articles or letters mentioning child sex abuse did so in relation to the Catholic Church.

Again, I'm not claiming that these are formal figures; they're ballpark ones, based on simple searches of the Irish Times' own electronic archive. You can and should check them yourselves. A real researcher could do important and substantial work on this. Still, even as a crude survey, I think they give a pretty strong indication that Ireland's newspaper of record has played no small part in fostering a popular belief that the institutional Church is a singularly malign force in Irish life.

By doing so, it bears an enormous responsibility for having distracted the Irish people away from the horrific reality that the overwhelming majority of child sex abuse happens with the family circle, being committed by family members, neighbours, and friends. In this it's not alone, and I believe the Irish media in general is effectively endangering Irish children even now, facilitating their abuse by diverting attention from the fact that it's happening. The prevailing narrative that the Irish media has pushed for years, concentrating on elderly clerical abusers and largely ignoring the far greater dangers in the Irish home, diverts attention from the fact that huge numbers of Irish children are being sexually abused across the land every day, and they are not being abused by priests.

So what's going on?

In an Irish Times article in June 2006, Breda O'Brien quoted Hannah McGee, Chair of the Department of Psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and one of the original authors of the SAVI study, as saying that 'We like our scapegoats, we like our simple stories.' 

The problem, basically, is that it would be easier for us all if we could single out clearly-identifiable groups in our society as being  responsible for most sexual abuse. Unfortunately, the horrendous reality is that we can't. That's like cursing one tree when we're standing in a forest. Child sexual abuse has been -- and may still be -- endemic in Irish life, such that, as the article says 'it is so pervasive as to be almost beyond comprehension'.

We have to figure out a way of dealing with this. Scapegoating priests and pointing fingers at other people isn't the answer. I'm not sure what is, but it's certainly not that.

David Norris, or Ireland in the Looking Glass

As it seems most people reading the blog nowadays are coming here in connection with what I've written on Cloyne, I've decided to give my Cloyne pieces their own label -- at seven so far, and this being an eighth one, I think that makes sense.

Obviously, the big news at home is the effective collapse of David Norris's campaign for the Presidency. Despite where the increasingly-polarised nature of Ireland's internal conversation nowadays, I really don't think anybody should be celebrating this, not least because an awful lot of people had invested an awful lot of hope in his candidacy, and hope is something Ireland really needs at the moment. For all that, though, I think it's worth thinking about -- carefully, honestly, and charitably -- if we are serious about holding up a mirror to ourselves as a nation, which is something I firmly believe we need to do.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not going to pretend that I've ever liked Norris, or that I planned on voting for him, or that I thought he'd be a fine President. While I admired his courage in fighting for the decriminalisation of homosexuality back in the day, I've mainly just found him annoying, and have been invariably exasperated whenever he's been on any panel discussions on the telly, interrupting everyone else and braying loudly so nobody else could be heard. To be fair, these public-house antics are all too common on Irish television, but Norris has always struck me as one of the worst offenders. At home earlier in the year, the Brother pointed out that if I really felt that way I should probably be campaigning for Norris, as President Norris would probably be far less prominent a presence on the television than Senator Norris has been, and I had to concede he had a point. And I've said this before.

An Imploding Campaign

So what's happened? Well, as we all know, a couple of months ago a story broke about how there'd been a Magill article back in 2002 in which Senator Norris, in the course of being interviewed by the restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke, warbled at great length about the practice of pederasty in ancient Greece, saying that there was a lot of nonsense talked about paedophilia, that the key issue was consent and not age, and that there was something to be said for the practice of older men introducing male youths to 'sexual realities'; he mused that he might have relished the prospect of such an initiation in his youth.

The surfacing of this old article set off a storm of protest, with people inferring that this was an attempt to smear the Senator through an unvoiced insinuation that gay people pose a threat to the young. Norris himself insisted that the quotes had been taken out of context -- which is always a problem -- and that he was being misrepresented with his campaign being deliberately sabotaged, but John Waters, who'd been Magill's Consulting Editor in 2002 held that he'd given Norris every opportunity at the time to clarify or retract his statements before they went to print.

Well, the story lapsed, but then over the weekend the Norris campaign basically fell apart with several key staff resigning, all in connection with the emergence of two letters, written in January and August 1997, pleading that the Israeli High Court should have mercy on Ezra Yizhak Nawi, a friend and former partner of his, who'd been convicted -- having pleaded guilty -- of having had sex in 1992 with a 15-year-old boy. One of the letters was written on official Seanad paper, and both were written in Norris' capacity as a Senator and a member of the Irish Foreign Affairs Committee. The story seems to have been sparked by a blogger who'd pulled together various bits and bobs from the internet, doing the kind of work Irish journalists probably should have been doing all along. Because whatever about that blogger's agenda, this stuff does matter: the President is our first citizen, and should be someone in whose judgement and character we have confidence.

A Question of Motive

I really don't know how this is going to play out, save that his Presidential campaign, no matter what he may think, is surely dead in the water. I listened yesterday to an interesting discussion on the topic on the radio, and though I agreed almost entirely with John Waters, I took issue with one thing he said. Waters made the point that the Burke interview took place five years after the Yizhak trial, and that he believed that Norris was trying to prepare the ground for when the story eventually broke. I don't believe that. I can think of three ways of explaining why Norris said what he did, and Waters' explanation strikes me as the least credible.

The first is that Norris may actually have believed what he said, and that this was why he was so willing to defend his friend, despite knowing that his friend had indeed admitted the statutory rape of a teenage boy. Norris may well have written his letters in the sincere belief that the boy's consent mattered more than his youth. I don't think David Norris is a devious man. This strikes me as plausible.

The second is that Norris may have defended his friend without full comprehension of what his friend had done, and had then rationalised away his friend's actions and his own support of him by convincing himself that what had happened was not merely harmless, but the sort of the thing that might even have been beneficial to the youth. That he thought this way strikes me as at least equally plausible, given that people have an extraordinary capacity to lie to themselves. I'll always remember an old psychology lecturer of mine saying that 'Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising one.' 

I don't believe Norris was cynically plotting a 2004 or 2011 election campaign back in 2002 -- though he does allude to his possible future candidacy in the longer letter -- such that he was trying to change the attitudes of the country so that nobody would bat an eyelid when they found how he'd begged the Israeli High Court to show leniency to a man who'd pleaded guilty to something that any Irish court would have recognised as statutory rape. That'd have been an absurd ambition, and one characterised by a cynicism that I've never heard anyone ascribe to the man. No, I don't think he was trying to convince the country. He may have been trying to convince himself.

What's that got to do with the price of (loaves and) fish?

So, what does all this have to do with us as a nation, and Cloyne as a recent phenomenon? There's no way that these developments can be discussed other than in the context of the last two weeks of heated debate, and it is striking that today's edition of the Irish Times is the first edition of the paper in some time not even to feature the word 'Cloyne', although the revelations of the Cloyne Report are clearly the subject, in part, of Archbishop Neary's Reek Sunday homily.

It's worth looking at the main letter in depth. Take, for example, this passage, wrapping things up:

'Tenthly non custodial sentences are routinely considered where the offender seeks treatment or counselling. In this case Mr Yizhak has been under the care of a psychotherapist and wishes to continue with this treatment. [...] Secure in the knowledge that Mr. Yizhak will not offend again in the same way, that he is prepared to make financial compensation available to the young man involved, that lasting and perhaps permanent damage will be done to his psychological and material welfare by being imprisoned, by view of the fact that there is a possibility that he may attempt suicide in prison, [...] I earnestly beg that the court may see the possibility of securing justice not by sending him to prison but by imposing a non-custodial sentence.'

I don't see how Senator Norris could have been 'secure in the knowledge' that his former partner would not offend again the same way, but I think what's clear here is that Norris is determined to make the case that his friend is no longer a danger to anyone, is actively try to best his worse nature, will attempt to remedy whatever harm he's done, and that no good could be achieved through his imprisonment.

Now, we all know that the political career of, say, Ronan Mullen would be finished if he had written such a letter in defence of, say, Brendan Wrixon, the 'Father Caden' of the Cloyne Report and the only priest featured in that Report to have been been convicted in the courts of the land. There'd certainly not be a discussion of whether it was still plausible for him to continue in his Presidential campaign, were he engaged in such a thing. That'd be the end of him. And indeed, I think that would be absolutely right and proper. Frankly, I believe that what David Norris did was wrong, and I believe that he should end his Presidential campaign now, and should give serious thought to resigning his seat in the Seanad.

'We Must Love One Another Or Die'

However, I really don't think people should be screaming to demand this. Those in Ireland who've spoken out in recent weeks against the Government's blustering attacks on the Vatican have received vicious personal abuse for pointing out that while anger at the revelations in the Cloyne Report is fully justified, anger at the wrong people and the wrong institutions was not. The last couple of weeks have seen too much heat in this debate, and not nearly enough light.

Some good may yet come of the Norris affair. One thing that should be clear is that David Norris, in begging a foreign court to have mercy on his friend, was motivated not by a callous contempt for Ezra Yizhak Nawi's adolescent victim, but by love for his friend, respect for the good his friend had done and was capable of, hope that his friend could change, trust that the help his friend was receiving could heal him, and concern that a prison sentence might destroy someone who regarded as basically being a good man.

It's easy to sneer at the naivety and misdirected kindness of David Norris, just as it is that of Denis O'Callaghan, but I think Ireland's not short of people who would take their approach, put in their situations.

Vincent Browne argued in the Irish Times back in April 2008 that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland, and though I suspect his figures are overstated, I think he approaches an important point. If it's true, as has been reported, that one third of all child sex abuse in Ireland has been committed by adolescents, with almost all sexual abuse that's reported nowadays having been committed by family members or friends, then we start to get at part of the problem. In June 2006 a group of NGOs dealing with child sex abuse claimed that fewer than three in every thousand cases of sexual abuse in Ireland ever lead to a criminal prosecution. The fact is that most Irish abuse survivors either never tell anybody what happened to them, or only ever tell family or friends. They don't want to take their siblings or cousins or parents to court. They don't want to take the husbands or wives or parents or children of family friends to court. They try to deal with it themselves and to keep things behind closed doors. They try to avoid hurting people they love.

Irish society does its damnedest to cover up the scourge of abuse in our country, but in most cases, I don't think it does this through malice or a cynical desire for self-preservation. I think that most people, on hearing of abuse -- especially abuse that happened long ago -- hope the problems have already been sorted out or will be sorted out, continue to trust people they've always trust, and hope that harm can be undone, sickness can be healed, and wickedness can be reformed. But of course, when we're wrong we allow abusers to continue in their wickedness, and doing so we allow them to continue ruining lives. 

Mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love -- the very best qualities we have -- can actually facilitate further harm.

There's no point shouting about this, let alone gloating. We need to tread very carefully. Our country has been broken for a long time, and we need to face the truth of this, and then start trying to figure out how we can tackle it. Anger won't heal us.