The creature was a party of boys, marching...

One of my sharpest and funniest memories of English class in secondary school was studying Lord of the Flies, in which one of my friends read almost an entire passage in a monotone, much to the obvious annoyance, however suppressed, of our (brilliant) English teacher.

'The rules!' shouted Ralph, 'you're breaking the rules!'
'Who cares?'
Ralph summoned his wits.
'Because the rules are the only thing we've got!'
But Jack was shouting against him.
'Bollocks to the rules! We're strong — we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat — !'

I say it was almost wholly in a monotone. It wasn't entirely so. My friend rose from his monotone to roar 'Bollocks to the rules!' and then slipped back into his previous flat delivery. Comedy value aside, I loved the book and our study of it, often thinking that whatever about his other work, Golding achieved something special with that Lord of the Flies, showing just how thin and frail our veneer of civilization can sometimes be.Part of the sheer force of that passage, so burned into my memory by my friend's take on it, was how drastically it showed Jack having cast aside the very fabric of civilization that he had so chauvinistically championed earlier on:

'We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.'

'You knew, didn't you? ... I'm the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?'

I couldn't help but follow the coverage of yesterday's Mancunian riots -- and those elsewhere in England, both yesterday and over the previous days -- with an air of some disbelief. Leaving aside the question of why the rioting is happening, I've been amazed at the police's complete failure to get to grips with the situation. Water cannons and rubber bullets aside, the police are, as it stands, perfectly well-equipped to deal with what's being going on.

What do I mean? Well, broadly speaking, riot control aims towards one of two possible outcomes, these being dispersal and confinement.

• Dispersal is usually the preferred outcome, with the unity of the mob being shattered so that a rout begins and the rioters flee home. 
• Confinement isn't really desirable, because that means locking an angry mob into one place, which can endanger officers, but sometimes it's the only real option; it entails establishing a cordon around the mob, and then pulling the cordon tight. We've all heard of 'kettling'. Well, that's what kettling is: it's riot control tactics aimed at confining a mob.

The viral rioting that's spread across England over the last few days is such that dispersal tactics are basically useless. The mobs we've seen haven't been standing their ground. They've not been facing off against police, hurling molotov cocktails or such; rather, in the main, they've simply marauded along streets, smashing shops and vehicles, looting, plundering, and occasionally mugging as they've gone. It's wild and dangerous Lord of the Flies stuff, but it's not the behaviour of a unit inclined to stand and fight. These mobs aren't solid; they're fluid beasts, even gaseous ones. There's no point using water cannons against swarms that are happy to run away and ransack somewhere else... unless you're trying to drive them into a specific spot.

I know, this sounds like it's straight out of Sun Tzu, but there you have it. He knew stuff.

Kettling tactics, on the other hand, could work very well with swarms like these, assuming they're not quite as technologically savvy as people seem to be making out, with all their ridiculous hysterical claims about Blackberries and Twitter. I'm sure technology's playing a role in summoning the troops, but I seriously doubt it's being used -- in any serious way -- to coordinate them. It's possible, but unlikely. Besides, insofar as it is being used, it'll leave a huge trail of electronic footprints that'll result in vast numbers of arrests.

Take, for example, yesterday afternoon's ransacking of Oldham Street in Manchester's Northern Quarter, which you can get a good view of from this distressing video. Now, I know there are reports of there having been 2,000 or so youths rampaging through Manchester, but from looking at the video I very much doubt that there were more than 300 on Oldham Street -- perhaps as few as 200.


... the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable
In any case, the important thing isn't numbers. What's most important, from the point of view of crowd control, is how narrow Oldham Street is. Streets like this are ideal for confining rioters in.

I'm pretty confident that 120 police could have caged this horde in a matter of minutes, providing they divided up sensibly, and coordinated their movements properly. That's assuming they wanted to, of course, and I'll get to that.

This is pretty much how I'd envisage the situation at the start. Let's say there are 200 or so looters on the street -- there may have been more, but it wouldn't really matter in this context. The 120 Police are divided into three groups, a western group to move up Tib Street, a central group to block Oldham Street, and an eastern group to move up Lever Street.

Very quickly, then, the western group would advance up Tib Street, with a 10-strong unit peeling off onto Back Picadilly, a 20-strong one onto Dale Street, and the remaining 20 officers carrying on to Hilton Street in order to blockade Oldham Street from the north. Likewise, the eastern group would move up Lever Street, with a 10-strong unit peeling off onto Back Picadilly and the remaining 20 officers stationing themselves on Dale Street. This would have to be done very quickly, but also as discreetly as possible. No sirens, and staying as far back as they can manage. They need to be almost out of sight; the trick is to establish a silent cordon and then strike quickly.

The jaws of the trap have to snap shut almost instantaneously. The 20 officers at the northern end of Oldham Street should charge down to the junction with Dale Street, and then stop, with the 20 officers on either side of them then falling behind them, forming a wall of 60 officers, 20 wide and three deep. The 40 officers just out of sight on Picadilly would then move into position, blocking the southern end of Oldham Street with a two-deep wall of 40 men, while simultaneously the two 10-strong units on Back Picadilly would advance to close off the narrow exits, each unit being two men deep. There shouldn't be more than a few seconds between the northern and southern manoeuvres.

At this point the cage would be more or less complete, but it would make sense for the central unit to rush as far north as Back Picadilly, which would confine the mob in a still smaller space and allow the Back Piccadilly units to fall in behind the central unit, so that 60 officers would hold the mob to the north, and 60 to the south.

Once confined, it'd be possible for the police to start wading into the mob -- which seems basically unarmed -- and arresting individuals one by one, focusing immediately on anyone trying to break into shops in the hope of carving out escape routes. It'd take time, but it'd be doable.

The only risks to implementing such tactics lie in the possibility of the rioters having scouts of some sort, lads stationed a good way off able to phone their mates and tell them of the police movements. I think it's possible that there may well have been some outliers capable of doing this, but the thing is, even leaving aside how speed would be of the essence in a situation like this and how the police needn't have all started from one point -- it'd be more effective if they converged from several directions -- technology works both ways, and the police have far better technology than the rioters. I'm pretty sure they'd be able to jam phone signals or even have any phone masts in the area turned off, whilst continuing to rely on their own radios.

The white blob represents the rioting mob, with the other markers signifying phone masts

For what it's worth, I'm not plucking these numbers out of thin air. Riot control police are regularly armed with a large shield and with a long baton, designed to be swung; it's equipment analogous to that which was used by Roman infantry, and we know from Polybius and Vegetius that when fighting in close order Roman troops required a frontage of about three feet, though they could hold an area five feet wide when in open order.  Allowing for this, then, I reckon each line of officers on Oldham Street and Dale Street would need to be about twenty men across, with those on Back Piccadilly being five men across.

Now, I'm not saying for one second that Greater Manchester Police are stupid for not having done this. On the contrary, they know this stuff inside-out, so the question then becomes one of why this was allowed to happen.


'Meetings. Don't we love meetings? Every day. Twice a day. We talk.'
It was, quite obviously, a policy decision, and I hope it's one that's discussed in Parliament, as otherwise I can't see there being any point in Cameron having recalled Parliament; surely it's not simply so that left and right can point blaming fingers at each other while Britain continues to burn.

(For what it's worth, and I'm pretty sure that Phillip Blond would argue this way, the fuel for these fires has been laid down by decades of social, political, cultural, and economic errors, these errors having been made by those of all political stances, and quite probably by journalists, academics, and other opinion-formers almost as much as politicians. It won't do for left or right to blame each other; both sides should accept their own errors, whoever well-intentioned they'd been, and start tackling things responsibly.)

The key points seem to lie in police statements in this article. Steve Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Met said yesterday that:

'The Met does not wish to use baton rounds but if it gets put into a position that it needs to protect the people and the property and the lives of Londoners, [then] we will do so.[...] We had people as young as 11 being arrested for looting last night. Do we genuinely want to see the police of London using that type of tactic on 11-year-olds? We have to be very careful about what we use and how we're using it.'

That's the problem. What happens if you kettle a gang of a few hundred teenagers and even slightly younger children, and some of them try to escape? I don't think the police want to be wielding batons against kids. They might be savages, but they're still children.

Indiana Jones and the Monasteries of the Air

Chatting the other day to a philhellenic friend of an archaeological persuasion, I was pointed in the direction of an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles set in 1910 in which our youthful hero visits Athens, and indeed travels rather further north. I was advised that, although funny, the film is something of a qualified success in terms of its aim to be an educational show.

It's hard not to be impressed by the ship's amphibious capabilities

Their ship sails from Odessa to Constantinople, on to Thessaloniki, and from there makes its way south, apparently cutting across Euboea and overland to Athens, rather than following the traditional route around Cape Sounion and into Pireaus. As their ship approaches Athens, Henry Jones Senior summons his son, points, and says 'See the minarets over there--' just as the camera cuts, rather inexplicably, to a nice shot of the Tholos at Delphi, followed by an even nicer one of Delphi's Athenian Treasury, which had -- interestingly enough -- been reconstructed only a few years before this episode supposedly took place.

You'd need impressive eyesight to see this from Athens

Given that it's two hundred miles from Athens to Delphi, and no part of this story is set there, I'm not quite sure why we're treated to sights none of the Joneses get to revel in, but still, onwards with the tale.

Ascending the Acropolis, Jones Snr starts upon a description of the Parthenon, at which point young Indiana bolts up through the steps of the Propylaea and past the Temple of Athena Nike until he stands looking at the Parthenon itself. They don't stay long, with Mrs Jones needing to hurry back to their hotel, and while there the plot kicks in: Jones Snr and Jnr shall be going north, to Meteora, there to spend a Spartan weekend translating Byzantine transcripts of Aristotle.

As you do.

And no, contrary to too many websites, this is NOT an amphitheatre

Anyway, once they've packed, Indiana and his father head of by horsedrawn carriage to the theatre of Herodes Atticus, where Jones Snr proceeds to give his bemused driver incomprehensible instructions in ancient Greek, delivered with a Conneryesque burr, before trotting off to show the theatre to his son.

'I bet there were lions and gladiators,' exclaims Indiana, swishing his stick.
'Junior,' says his father, 'lions and gladiators were Roman, not Greek,' apparently oblivious to the theatre having been built by a Roman senator.
'Oh, well I'll bet Alexander the Great cut off some poor fool's head right here,' says Indiana, slashing downwards.
'Junior, this was not a barbaric slaughterhouse,' corrects Jones Snr, neglecting to mention that Alexander died almost five centuries before the theatre was built, 'we are standing in a theatre, a temple of great poetry, drama, and philosophy.'

Onwards he warbles about Socrates and Aristotle, somehow winning over his sceptical son, who doesn't seem to realise that his father, the great scholar, is in fact a charlatan who believes a second-century AD theatre had been the site of numerous fifth- and fourth-century BC philosophical debates.

Off they head, then, back to the wrong carriage and off to travel -- it would seem -- by horse and cart to Meteora, burbling about syllogisms in a manner that'd cause Aristotle's corpse to turn like a gyros spit. Even if things had gone smoothly, I can't think this would have worked out for them, given that it's just over 200 miles from Athens to Kalambaka, the main town in Meteora. For what it's worth, it'd be just south of the 'O' in 'Thessalonike' on the map above.

For what it's worth, they could have got the train, as a shiny new line had been built only the previous year.

Well, soon tossed out of their cart -- and they can't have gone more than a mile or so from Athens at this point -- they start to walk, wittering about Cynicism as they stroll through a desolate landscape in the vague hope that a bus might appear. As the day wears on, they sit resting under a tree until they cadge a lift in a passing cart, laden with peasants and chickens, with Jones Snr taking the opportunity to teach his son about Stoicism.

At some unidentifiable spot they have to get off and Indiana suggests they go back to the hotel; his father refuses, saying that they weren't to know that the cart wouldn't go the whole way -- two hundred miles, remember -- and they'd just get another ride. Feeling that as dusty as they are they're unlikely to get a lift, so they resolve to wash their clothes, bathe, and continue.

Next we see them swimming, nakedly, in the sea, having presumably washed their clothes in sea water and left them to dry, salt-encrusted, on bushes along the shore. Given that they should be heading inland, in a generally north-westerly way, this seems to be rather off-course for them, but such geographical inconvenience is as nothing compared to what happens next, with a flock of sheep stealing their clothes.

This whole episode looks plotted by someone with too many Joseph Campbell books, and no maps

With nothing but a slight briefcase -- itself containing pens, paper, and it would seem everything young Henry had been told to pack back at the hotel -- and some branches to hide their nudity, they approach an ancient yaya, whose startled shrieks summon her daughter and granddaughter, thus creating a wonderfully archetypal scene whereby our heroes are transformed into Cretan shepherds by a Classic representation of the three-fold Goddess, maiden, mother, and hag.

Off they trot in their new clothes, being shunned by passing tourists in a car but soon being given a third lift since leaving Athens, this time by a man called Aristotle with a donkey called Plato. Cue much comic misunderstanding and a discussion of Plato's Republic. In the course of the confusion, Jones Snr gets out in a huff and Jones Jnr stays in the cart, as they continue their journey to Kalambaka and what Patrick Leigh Fermor, in Roumeli, calls the Monasteries of the Air.

Pictures really don't do justice to how astonishing Meteora is. You have to go there.

Approaching a monk as he comes out of an elaborate cage, Jones Snr addresses him in contemporary -- rather than ancient -- Greek. Like Odysseus, I suspect he'd learned a lot from the three women he'd met, though rather peculiarly he begins his conversation with 'Kalispera,' meaning 'Good evening,' and then bids the gentleman farewell by saying 'Kalimera,' which means 'Good morning.' I think we can take this as further evidence of his deep mastery of an esoteric pseudo-Hellenism.

Still, up they're winched to the monastery, where the monks greet them, with one -- presumably the abbot -- saying 'We waited for you all morning.'

'We got delayed,' replies Jones Snr, looking embarrassed as he adds, 'It's a long story'. My guess is that he just that moment remembered that there was a train he could have caught, but I really don't think he had any reason to feel sheepish. After all, the two of them had covered more than two hundred miles by donkey and on foot in just one day, even finding time to swim, wash their clothes, chase some sheep, and get transformed into authentic Greeks by a mysteriously iconic trio of Greek women.

Why, Sean Connery himself, first and greatest avatar of Henry Jones Snr, could tell of just how valuable eventful Greek journeys can be.

Dinner follows and a night's rest, and then, after morning prayer, they settle in the library, where Jones Snr sends young Indiana off to banish his boredom by immersing himself in a study of Aristotelian causality; he's helped in this by Nikos Kazantzakis, who makes some good teleological points about oranges but doesn't give any real indication of what he's doing in the monastery.

Further shenanigans of decreasing probabilty follow when the lads try to leave, but I don't want to spoil the story for you. You should seek it out. It's a rather better introduction to Greek philosophy than it is to Greek geography or to how time and space relate to each other in the Mediterranean world.

The Story is that there IS no Story

Or, it's not the crime that's the problem; it's the cover-up.

I've said a couple of times over the last few days that the Irish media -- or at least its more respectable tentacles -- has displayed an astonishing double-standard in connection with  its coverage of the Norris saga, but I feel the weekend's developments took that to a new level.

For starters, and in the context of a constant wittering about dark conservative conspiracies, Israeli meddling, Norris's graceful withdrawal from his campaign, and the political establishment having closed ranks against him, the Sunday Independent claimed that their latest poll showed that 78 per cent of people thought Norris was right to drop out of the race, but that 54 per cent thought he had been the victim of a conspiracy, and that 45 per cent said they would have voted for him if he'd stayed in the race.

I found this staggering enough, as given the fallout of the Cloyne Report, one would think that it's preposterous to imagine as an approved presidential candidate anyone who had dismissed the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old by a forty-year-old as being unworthy of a prison sentence, let alone that anyone who had done that should actually receive massive popular support.

However, the day's other developments troubled me even more, as the Sunday Times and The Mail on Sunday both ran extremely troubling stories about Senator Norris's views. I can't help but wonder whether there's any significance to the fact that neither is an Irish paper -- rather, they're Irish variants of British papers, with deeper pockets than Irish ones and agendas rather different to those at home.

The Sunday Times, and Unreleased Letters

The Sunday Times, for instance, apparently ran an article in which a former member of Norris's team claimed that the resignations from the team that led to the end of the Norris campaign weren't due to the Nawi letters:

'There was a lot of surprise among the team last Sunday when they read the letters he’d released as they weren’t the ones that caused people to resign.

He released the safest letters to be published. The ones that made people angry included stuff that wasn’t appropriate. It was stuff similar to what had been in the Helen Lucy Burke interview – more controversial views on underage sex.'

The Burke stuff has been talked about before, of course, with Norris having clarified his original remarks by claiming he'd been having an academic discussion about ancient Greece and was talking about pederasty, not paedophilia. Leaving aside how I don't think that's much better, whatever was in the letters that have not yet been disclosed, it sounds as though they may have muddied his clarification. In any case, if this report is true, this surely is something worthy of further investigation.

The Mail on Sunday, and a Worrying Wish

You'll remember that central to the Burke interview had been how Senator Norris, back in 2002, had mused wistfully on how 'lovely' it would have been for his adolescent self to have been initiated into sex by an older man, after the fashion of Greek pederasty. As he subsequently explained to Joe Jackson, he felt terribly alone when he was seventeen; with homosexual acts being illegal, gay culture was furtive and sordid, and he believed it would have been better for him 'if somebody, a few years older, who is handsome, athletic and so on, came along'. Well, it seems that through digging the Irish Queer Archive at the National Library, the Mail on Sunday has unearthed the minutes of the Union for Sexual Freedom in Ireland's first conference, which record:

'David said as a child it had been his greatest desire to be molested so he, more than most people, knows the rarity of the homosexual child molester.'

Now, while I suspect this is accurate, as something so easily ascertained is hardly likely to be wholly false, I think we have to put down some caveats on this: nothing else from those minutes has been reported, so we don't know the full context, and this was more than thirty-five years ago, so it seems churlish to pull up something said in Norris's youth. That might legitimately be termed 'muck-raking'. 

The Mail on Sunday again, and Guilt by Association

The other key element in the Mail article concerns Norris's involvement in the late 1970s and 1980s with the Irish and international gay rights' movements.

The International Gay Association was founded in Coventry in 1978, though I'm not sure when: Wikipedia says it was founded on 8 August, but David Norris claims to have been in Coventry, writing one of three papers that led to the IGA's foundation, on 16 October. The IGA was a kind of umbrella organisation, encompassing lots of national groups, including the National Gay Federation in Ireland. The NGFI was based at the Hirschfeld Centre on Fownes Street, a community centre for Dublin's gay community which first opened on 17 March 1979, founded and originally funded by David Norris. As well as providing a base for the NGFI, it had a coffee shop and showed films, and was largely funded by a disco held there each weekend.

The Mail quotes from letters in the Irish Queer Archive showing that during the 1980s the IGA passed motions calling for the abolition of the age of consent  and for a campaign of solidarity with the Paedophile Information Exchange, which until it was disbanded in 1984 campaigned against 'the legal and social oppression of paedophilia'.

I don't think that there can be any denying that the gay rights' movement made some very nasty allies back then, allies that were also supported by the UK's National Council for Civil Liberties, and I think that in itself it's going too far to smear David Norris for connections with this. Without more evidence, I'd be very sceptical of the Mail's insinuation that he was involved with the IGA's support for the PIE. He may have been, of course, but I'd not be inclined to buy into that without more data, and that data should be there one way or another. The Irish Queer Archive should presumably have records of who was who in the NGFI, who were the NGFI delegates to the IGA, and who was involved -- at least at an executive level -- in the passing of IGA motions. 

I'm inclined to disregard the significance of the IGA support for the PIE in connection with David Norris, as if there were evidence of his supporting such motions I'd be pretty confident the Mail would have dug it up. Seeing as the Mail hasn't managed to do so, I suspect such evidence just isn't out there. Indeed, without such evidence, I think it'd be unfair to blame him for the decisions of the NGFI's umbrella body, especially at a time when a small and beleaguered Irish organisation was probably desperate for whatever help it could get.

A Deafening Silence

Having said that, I don't think there can be any denying that the details that have come to light one way or another suggest a deeply worrying continuity of opinion throughout his adult life. In 1975 David Norris appears to have said that his greatest childhood desire was to be molested. In 1997 he told an Israeli court that the statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old boy by a forty-year-old man didn't justify a prison sentence. At least according to one interview he remained in a relationship with the perpetrator of that crime until January 2001. In 2002 he spoke up in favour of ancient Greek and modern north African pederasty, and he repeated his views on that as recently as this year. And we don't know when the letters his campaign staff actually resigned over -- assuming the Sunday Times piece is accurate -- were written. 

What I find remarkable about this is that these stories -- or at least the Sunday Times one and the Mail one pertaining to 1975 -- haven't even been touched upon in the more exclusively Irish media outlets. More than a day has passed and there's not been a peep on either of these subjects on RTE, in the Irish Times, or in the Irish Independent. 

I've already said that in order to deal properly with the cancer of abuse we need to define the illness, and that our attempts to diagnose it aren't helped by the media's constant repetition of a narrative that represents abuse as a primarily Catholic problem, a blight which the State has been hindered in battling by an intransigent and conservative Church. In the light of the Irish media's shunning of these new stories, I find it increasingly difficult to hold to the view that it is in any way serious about dealing with the reality of just how prevalent child abuse is.

Watchmen: A Very Belated Analysis

With the Zack Snyder film on Channel 4 last night, it was interesting to see Watchmen trending on Twitter. There were legions of derisive tweets scorning the film for being complex, ponderous, nasty, stupid, and dull; equally there were no shortage of people leaping to its defence by sneering at the people who didn't like it and calling them pretentious.

My favourite comments of the evening were one by a friend wondering whether the film's makers made a decision early on that as the film was to be long it should be dull too, one remarking that he'd gone to see it in the cinema when he was sixteen and had been forty-four by the time the film ended, one saying how it was weird to recognise every image from the comic but being retold by an idiot, and one pointing out that the film is not without merit, but is seriously flawed.

I think I'd go along with at least the last two of those two observations. The main problem with the film, as Pádraig Ó Méalóid concluded in reviewing it when it first came out, is that:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work.'

I know, we should judge films on their own merits, and not in comparison with the books they're based on -- even if that weren't common sense, Bill Goldman has proven the point with style in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?  --  but that's not to say that we can't analyse a film's strengths and weaknesses in comparison with the source material.

Watchmen is very much a comic about comics, a comic that tries to show just what comics can do, and that aspect of the book is obviously impossible to reproduce on the screen. Take, for example, the book's fourth chapter, where Doctor Manhattan is on Mars. This is an unparalleled instance of what comics can do, as it puts us exactly in the position of Doctor Manhattan himself: just as he exists in the present but simultaneously perceives all manner of points in his past and his future, so too we read the chapter, focusing on one panel at a time but always aware of and even able to see a host of other panels. In reading comics we are almost godlike ourselves, existing outside the universe of the characters in an eternal present but able to perceive all points in the characters' pasts and futures. They exist in a space-time continuum of their own, whereas we, beyond their pages, can see all points in their universe.

There's no way this can be reproduced on the screen. Snyder tries, but I think he fails. His Mars sequence is beautiful, but it doesn't even come close to achieving what the comic does in this chapter, and in some ways actually hurts his story. If the comics' reader is metaphorically divine, the cinema viewer is essentially voyeuristic, and in many ways it's hard to see the film's Doctor Manhattan as other than a standoffish voyeur.

Still, there's not much Snyder could do about that. What of the rest of the film?

Missing the Point

I think a huge part of the problem with the film is that Zack Snyder really doesn't seem to have understood the book. 300's glaring inconsistencies demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Synder's not an intelligent film-maker, and while I don't dispute his visual gifts, a book as relentlessly intelligent as Watchmen deserved to be brought to the screen -- if that had to happen at all -- at the hands of a smarter director.

The first time I saw the film -- on an Imax screen on the morning of the day the film opened, with me not having slept the previous night -- I was almost immediately thrown by how Snyder directed the opening scene where Eddie Blake is assaulted by his mysterious attacker. In the comic this episode is understated -- we see it as a series of flashback panels, interspersed into a dialogue between detectives inspecting the wreckage of Blake's apartment. There are only seven such panels -- we see an eighth later on, revealing the assailant's face -- and as far as we can tell if we assemble them into a sequence, what they show is that Blake was punched once, hurled to the floor where he is kicked once, and then thrown out a window.The episode is retold three times, and we only see these few actions, so I think that's probably all there was to the event.

Anyone who's seen the film won't remember the film's fight as having been quite so straightforward. A glass is thrown, a gun is  fired, knives are hurled, and there are punches, kicks, and blocks aplenty with bodies being smashed into and through things before Blake is dashed through his window. Oh and along the way, Blake punches a colossal lump out of what appears to be a concrete wall...

... and is himself smashed through what must surely be a fairly sturdy counter-top.

When I saw the film in the cinema I assumed the counter-top was marble, and stared in horror, thinking that Snyder seemed to have given genuine superpowers to both the Comedian and his assailant. Even allowing that it's probably meant to be a glass counter, I'm still far from convinced that Snyder doesn't want us to think of these combatants as being preternaturally powerful.

Just as importantly, perhaps, the tone of this was radically different from the tone of the comic. The comic keeps us at a distance, watching the action in a detached way, far enough off to observe and understand what's really going on. We see more of the game that way -- but this fight sought to suck us in, just as all the film's subsequent ones would do. The film tries to involve us in the action, pulling us in so we can't really see what's going on. I'm not saying that's not a reasonable thing to do, but if you want to do that, go and come up with your own story. Watchmen isn't about involvement. It's an autopsy of the whole costumed-hero genre, and like any autopsy needs to be carried out dispassionately.

Or, putting it another way, if you want visceral thrills and excitement, there are plenty of other superhero stories out there. Watchmen's not about that, and the film insults the book by trying to make it into something so radically opposed to what it's meant to be about.

Still, my concerns were almost allayed by the film's superb credit sequence. Indeed, I'd comfortably say that the credits are the best thing about the film. Loaded with jokes, and playing with the iconography of the last half century, its superheroic tableaux offer a potent and sometimes hilarious commentary on how superheroes have developed on the screen -- silver or small -- over the decades. There's only one thing I was troubled by in the sequence, but that aside, the first time I saw the film the credit sequence almost banished my concerns.

What if Superman were Real?

Unfortunately, as the film progressed, and especially thinking about it afterwards, I realised just how massively Snyder has misunderstood the comic. Take, for example, the scene at the end of the film where Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, explains his apocalyptic scheme to Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach says that they won't let him do that, and Adrian looks at them as though they're idiots.

'Do that, Rorschach?' he says, 'I'm not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago.'

Clever, you might think. If only Bond baddies could resist their urges to tell 007 what they're up to, maybe they might just get away with their schemes. But here's the thing. In the comic, Adrian doesn't say that. Rather, he says something which is subtly -- yet crucially -- different.

A Republic Serial villain? Well, of course, nobody nowadays remembers the 1940s and 1950s movie serials, where the likes of the Phantom or Zorro would confront all manner of nefarious characters and thwart their diabolic schemes, so it makes sense for Snyder to change things. Everyone nowadays knows how the Penguin, Lex Luthor, Magneto, Loki, and so forth have a tendency to give the game away to their heroic antagonists, so why not mention comics villains?

Except that this misses the point of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen to an astonishing degree. Just as Watchmen is, in terms of its form, a comic about comics, so in terms of its content it is a superhero comic about superhero comics. One of the things it considers and tries to answer in a sincere and intelligent way is what a world would be like if there were costumed heroes in it, especially if any of them had actual superpowers. An important parallel to the story in the original book is a comic-within-a-comic, this being a horrific pirate story. It seems there are no shortage of comics in the world of Watchmen, but they're not about superheroes. Superheroes exist in the real world, and so escapist fiction has to look elsewhere for its source material, rooting its stories instead on the high seas of the eighteenth century.

'I'm not a comic book villain?' Of course he's not. He's not a pirate.

Indeed, Snyder doesn't seemed to have perceived in any meaningful way the extent to which Moore and Gibbons grappled with how the existence of a godlike superhero like Doctor Manhattan would change the world. The Watchmen of the film is, like the book, set in an alternative 1985, but the texture of that world doesn't seem all that different from ours. It should be, however. The book has a scene in early 1962, where Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, learns just how world-changing Doctor Manhattan really is.

There's not a hint of an electric car in the film until pretty much the final shot, and neither are there any electric hydrants to power them with. This makes sense in some ways, of course, as the modified plot of the film in fact involves the eventual replacement of oil, other fossil fuels, and nuclear power with a form of energy based on Doctor Manhattan's own powers. That's fair enough, you might think, so what's this sign doing outside Hollis Mason's garage?

'Obsolete Models A Speciality,' it says. In the comic this is a reference to the whole automobile industry having been transformed, as well as being a metaphor for both Nite Owls being past their sell-by dates, but I'm not sure what it's doing here in the film. Sure, you might argue that I'm quibbling here, and that this might just mean that Mason fixes old-fashioned cars, but I don't buy that. Moore and Gibbons put an enormous amount of effort into building a real and consistent world, with its own distinct yet coherent texture, and that sign was a very deliberate part of that, a specific foreshadowing of just how thoroughly Doctor Manhattan's existence had changed the world; it seems to have little relevance here. It's just here, as far as I can see, because Snyder saw it in the comic and thought it should be there. I don't believe he considered why it was in the comic.

And yes, this is a small point, but it's these kind of details that reveal the depth of Snyder's incomprehension.

Missing the Magic between Panels

One thing Scott McCloud talks about at some length in his stunning Understanding Comics is that much of what makes comics work is what goes on between the panels -- the gaps in time that we fill with our own imagination. Cinema's brilliantly capable of doing this too, of course -- we need only think of the shower scene in Psycho, in which we see the knife being raised but never actually see Janet Leigh being stabbed to death.

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder's anything but a subtle director. He doesn't like to leave things to our imagination. I suppose the film's opening fight scene pretty much made that clear, but still, take, for a more gruesome example, the episode where a gang of 'Top-Knots' attack Dan and Laurie in  an alleyway. It happens in the third chapter of the book and fills just a few panels over five pages -- indeed, there are only five panels showing any fighting at all, and it can hardly be said that these panels shirk the violent reality of what's happening. Here are the first two panels, juxtaposed to make a point.

In the first panel Laurie breaks one mugger's arm with her knee and elbow; if you've any doubt of that, note the commentary from the TV interview with which this sequence is crosscut -- 'make it snappy,' says the interviewer, talking about something else entirely, but as part of this panel serving as a counterpoint to the image. The agony on the mugger's face is obvious. You can see him wailing on the ground in the second panel, as Laurie turns to a second assailant -- a third panel shows him clutching his broken arm. Dan, meanwhile, has grabbed another mugger's jacket with his right hand in the first panel, and in the second slams his left hand upwards, breaking the mugger's nose in a manner that is, as the interviewer's commentary tells us, 'quite sudden and quite painful'.

But how does Snyder render this? Well, he has Dan breaking an arm too. Like this.

Gory, eh? I'd say unnecessarily so. That's the mugger's forearm being graphically snapped, such that his radius -- and quite possibly his ulna too -- rips through his flesh, with blood spurting everywhere. This same sequence will also feature a neck being broken with a horrendous crunch, and Laurie driving a knife into the neck of another mugger. For all that the fight in the comic is violent, it's nothing like this. Gibbons' art was matter-of-fact, realistic without being showy, whereas Snyder, as in 300, glorifies in violence. Frankly, I think this is -- at least by James Joyce's definition -- pornographic.

And that, of course, brings us to perhaps the film's most gratuitous episode, a cringeworthy minute-and-a-half long sex scene, moodily lit and acrobatically performed such as to put the puppets in Team America to shame, and all conducted to the exultant strains of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, with the volume turned up to eleven. Perhaps you'd like to see how it appeared in the comic?

And then, following that little Hitchcockian gag, reminiscent of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, we had to turn the page to see...

Well, not a whole lot, actually. And doesn't that work better? Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I've got issues with Malin Akerman's pretty face, comely form, or shiny black boots. I'm just saying that there's no need for this scene in the film. The comic merely implies it, and allows us to fill in the gaps in as tasteful or tasteless a way as we see fit. The film, on the understand, reduces us to the status of voyeurs, watching an absurd sequence as devoid of necessity as it is of art.

Issues with Women

I've heard it argued that Moore has issues with women, and that this really comes out in his work, but having been weaned on Roxy in Skizz and especially The Ballad of Halo Jones, I just don't accept this. Horrible things sometimes happen to women in Moore's work, certainly, but horrible things happen to men too, and I think it's telling that he dedicated From Hell to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly, all five of them victims of Jack the Ripper, saying, 'You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Goodnight, ladies.'

There's an attempted rape in Watchmen, and this has enormous consequences to the story of both the book and the film, but the way it's handled in the film differs from that in the book, in such as way as to somehow be both trite and offensive. Snyder at times charts a course that differs from Moore's, in such a way as to hurt the work. And in the credits sequence, he does this:

Is that in the book? No. No, not really. The book details the death of the Silhouette in a text section -- an extract from Hollis Mason's autobiography -- as follows:

'After that, things deteriorated. In 1946, the papers revealed that the Silhouette was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship. Schnexnayder persuaded us to expel her from the group, and six weeks later she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies. Dollar Bill was shot dead, and in 1947 the group was dealt its most serious blow when Sally quit crimefighting to marry her agent.'

Dollar Bill's death is also shown in the credit sequence, with him sitting dead with his cloak caught in a bank's revolving door, as mentioned elsewhere in the story. That tallies with the story. But this image? Sure, the book says nothing of how the Silhouette and her lover were murdered, so some imagination is needed here, but was it necessary for them to have been killed in bed, in underwear and suspender belts, with the words 'lesbian whores' scrawled across the wall in their blood? This seems an image designed to titillate and horrify in equal measure, and seems a classic example of how profoundly different Snyder's vision of Watchmen is from that shared by Moore and Gibbons.

And then there's Rorschach...
I really think Snyder gets the characters wrong in this. There's no way that Snyder's Dan Dreiberg could be deemed a 'flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement,' as the book's Rorschach dismisses him, and his Doctor Manhattan is more an softly-spoken voyeur than an aloof god who's almost paralysed by his near-omniscience. The film's Ozymandias, as played by Matthew Goode, looks so effete that the phenomenal strength he displays in the movie is wholly inexplicable unless we assume he has superpowers. And as for Rorschach himself? Well, I think Snyder almost gets him right, but in cutting the most self-revelatory lines the comic Rorschach utters, he deprives Rorschach of the paradox that makes him breathe.

In the book there's a horrific sequence where Rorschach executes a child murderer after having realised the child's fate; it's a flashback scene, with Rorschach telling a psychiatrist how he became who he is. The film features the same episode, but even more graphically, and with some liberties taken in the action, and then has Rorschach say:

'Whatever was left of Walter Kovacs died that night with that little girl. From then on there was only Rorschach. You see Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her. Destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew. God doesn't make the world this way. We do.'

That's not bad, but the book has him saying something far more bleak, far more nihilistic, and far more determined than that:

Look at that. The Rorschach of the book doesn't merely say that if God's up there he obviously doesn't care; he says that there is no God, and indeed that there's no purpose to life, and no objective meaning to anything other than that we choose to impose on it. Rorschach sees this the world as a world of brute facts, without meaning or purpose or pattern save what we imagine. In a universe consisting purely of 'is', it's impossible to construe an imperative 'ought', and yet Rorschach does it anyway. What meaning does he chose to impose on his universe, and does he ultimately chose to die for? In both book and film, he answers that question in his diary:

'Millions will perish in sickness and misery. Why does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon...I will not compromise in this.'

Why must evil be punished? There's no meaning or purpose to life, after all, so why bother? The answer, ultimately, is simply that Rorschach is certain that this is true: this is the design he is determined to scrawl on this morally blank world.

In the film, if you want to, you can read Rorschach's disagreement with Veidt as a Kantian refusing to accept the views of an utilitarian, scorning the idea that evil can be done for the sake of a later and greater good, and then ultimately sacrificing himself, hoping that good will prevail but unable to countenance having not tried with every fibre of his broken being to overcome evil. But in the book, Rorschach's morality is his own.

Evil must be punished, he says, and in this he will not compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. But what is evil and what is good? Rorschach believes the world is, in itself, morally blank. Strictly speaking, he doesn't believe in good or evil, save as what he chooses to call good and what he chooses to call evil. And yet at the end, he realises that one man cannot have a personal morality, as distinct from and as superior to everyone else's. Either all moralities are equally valid -- Veidt's and Dreiberg's and Laurie's and Manhattan's as much as his -- or else there's a higher one, that transcends our own.

Either way, Rorschach, who has lived his life without nuance, having battled so hard and so long with monsters that he has become a monster, gazes so deeply into the abyss that he sees the abyss gazing into him, and realising  his own inadequacy removes his mask, so that at the end, facing death, he stands again as a battered and broken Walter Kovacs.


You'll notice I've not taken issue with the film's climax, which is significantly different from that of the book. To be frank, I didn't mind it. I thought that was an imaginative rethinking, and I'm not hung up on the film being a carbon-copy of the book. What I have issues with is films adapting books or comics or whatever and not even attempting to recreate the feel of the source material. If you just throw out the tone and theme of whatever it is you're trying to adapt, why bother at all? Surely the essence of the source should be the one thing that's sacrosanct?

On Pederasty, and Power Relations in Greek Sexuality

One thing that baffles me about the whole Norris discussion is this ludicrous idea that Greek-style pederasty could ever be defended as a worthy way of initiating male youths into sex. He said this to the Sunday Independent's Joe Jackson back in 2002 and has held to that line even this year, when speaking to the Mail on Sunday's Jason O'Toole, saying:

'There was a distinction between paedophilia and the classical Greek idea of pederasty, where in Plato's Symposium and these sort of books you'd find that an older man will take a younger man under his wing. Introduce him to life. Well, I said that would be much more preferable to the kind of ignorance and stupidity and fumbling that I was exposed to.'

Well, maybe, but that would hardly warrant calling pederasty 'lovely'. It's worth going to your library and working your way through the late Sir Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality, or at least reading the three pages on the topic in the latest edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Doing so should dispell some myths.

To start with, it's utterly meaningless to speak of homosexuality -- or heterosexuality for that matter -- in the context of ancient Greece. While homosexual relations were certainly common in antiquity, homosexuality wasn't seen as a phenomenon in its own right. This is effectively why it's correct to say that Saint Paul, strictly speaking, never criticises homosexuality itself: all else aside, it would have been impossible for him to have done so, as he had no concept of such a thing.

Putting it quite bluntly, and I learned this in one of my first lectures on ancient Greek comedy back during my undergraduate degree, the Greeks understood sex as being defined not in terms of heterosexuality and homosexuality, but in terms of sexual penetration and phallic pleasure, such that the participants in any sexual act were understood as being either 'active' or 'passive'. This polarisation correlated with other critera, such as social superiority and inferiority, maleness and femaleness, and adulthood and adolescence.

The OCD sums up the meaning of this by saying:

'Any sexual relation that involved the penetration of a social inferior (whether inferior in age, gender, or status) qualified as sexually normal for a male, irrespective of the penetrated person's anatomical sex, whereas to be sexually penetrated was always potentially shaming, especially for a free male of citizen status. [...] In Classical Athens [...] boys could be openly courted, but a series of elaborate protocols served to shield them from the shame associated with bodily penetration, thereby enabling them to gratify their male suitors without compromising their future status as adult men.'

What of paiderastia, then, the ancient pederasty that Senator Norris has so espoused? Well, it described sexual relations between adult men and adolescent males, and the language generally used to describe such relations makes it very clear that pederasty was primarily about gratifying the desires of grown men, rather than those of teenage boys. The older partner in a pederastic relationships is typically identified as the lover (erastēs) with the younger partner being described as the beloved (erōmenos); lest this be construed as a romantic distinction, it should be remembered that erōs is better translated as 'sexual desire' rather than 'love' in any purer sense. One could perhaps better translate the terms as 'desirer' and 'desired'; in any case we should be aware that for the Greeks sexual desire, in this context, was regarded as a one-way street.

Although there are some sources -- notably Plato's Symposium, as trumpeted by David Norris -- that try to promote pederasty as a noble exercise, there's little evidence that its main purpose was 'the education and moral improvement of boys instead of adult sexual pleasure, to quote the OCD. On the contrary, it seems that those a boy who chose to gratify -- and yes, that's the word -- his older lover's desire could be motivated by any number of things except for sexual desire or pleasure. While boys in pederastic relationships were deemed capable of non-passionate love (philia) for their partners, they were regarded as incapable of returning their desire. Pederastic relationships were always deemed inherently unbalanced.

This, of course, makes perfect sense, given how the Greeks divided sexuality into active and passive categories. For a youth to desire an older man would have required the youth to wish for a subordinate role, a role unfit for someone who would hope to play a prominent role in society or politics, say. A boy who indicated any such desire risked being identified as a kinaidos, and though we translate this as 'catamite', we have no real word in English that conveys the stigma of such an identity. 

Ancient pederasty, for all that it may have been dressed up by Plato to sound like something noble, was a profoundly exploitative arrangement. That anybody could sing its praises strikes me as, frankly, reprehensible.

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.