An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
I got a cheque this morning for €70 from Google. Since the ads have been up for months, I don’t think its worth defacing my wondrous blog for such a small amount. I am happy to sell my soul, but not for €70 
So they are gone, and my thanks to Joe and Gavin for setting them up in the first place! Apologies to all for the commercial grubbiness.
Anyone who wants to subscribe to this should contact me. I’ve got the subscription details.
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Rob asked a question but my reply was so long I decided to write a post. This is a bit jumbled…apologies..
I did read Waters column. He comments on a book by a chap who worked at the Rape Crisis Centre for years and said that he was shocked at the attitude of the women he worked with who appeared to confine their work to investigating and condemning sexual crimes against both women and men, provided the assault was carried out by a man. If it was a woman, they weren’t so interested. By coincidence I think it was Matt Cooper who a few weeks ago interviewed a woman who argued that male paedophiles were jailed where female paedophiles were offered counselling.
Waters also commented on the piles of ads, outdoor and radio, about domestic violence and “Women’s Aid”.
So what do I think? Well, a few things. I am guilty of believing that most domestic violence and sexual crimes are carried about by men, and I don’t think that’s wrong. Female paedophilia IS extremely rare, but I wouldn’t support the principle that female criminals should be treated differently. In fact the woman Cooper interviewed said that the victims of the female paedophiles are often made to feel like they co-operated with the sexual activity which is most unfair. As for a grown woman raping a grown man…putting aside non-reporting, I think any fair minded person would agree this has got to be pretty rare and one would have thought, technically unfeasible…
On the issue of domestic violence, I know Waters was giving numbers some years ago that claimed that men and women were equally violent at home, but I could just never quite buy into that. Intuitively, and I know that’s no evidence, I just find that hard to believe. I’d really have to look into the figures more before I’d be convinced of that. If the figures did back it up, then obviously, I’d change my mind.
HOWEVER having said that, I was uncomfortable for the last few weeks seeing those ads of women with “end the silence” on them. There ARE men whose wives are violent. They should’ve done an ad with a man on it. But then its the Women’s Aid campaign and let’s face it, a lot of women have had need to flee to shelters because they had the crap beaten out of them. And many women had to go back to those same husbands because they had nowhere else to go. So organisations like Women’s Aid arose out of an actual historical need and not a manifestation of feminist’s imagination. They should probably change the name and start including men.
HOWEVER, the big mistake Waters makes is that while there is an argument to be made that ads about domestic violence should feature male victims, he loses potential supporters by language like this:
“This time of year it can be risky for a man to pick up a newspaper, there being a good chance that therein he will find himself defamed.
The run-up to Christmas is when women’s aid groups make their big push for funding. Thus, the candle-light vigil in memory of “women killed by men” or “women killed as a result of domestic violence” is a set-piece of what laughably passes for journalism. The number of such female victims – usually about a quarter of murders in the selected period – is underlined by way of accusing men in general of complicity in often unspeakable crimes. The other three-quarters of the statistical dead, being males, are airbrushed out. The not-so subliminal messages include: only women are murdered; only men murder women; “domestic violence” is coterminous with “violence against women”; such violence is intrinsic to “patriarchal society”: all men are guilty.”
See, the other 3/4 of male murder victims are also murdered by men. Well, the Scissors Sisters and other notable exceptions……..And no one is saying anything about all men being guilty, just that mostly, men are the ones doing the murdering. Women do it, but much more rarely. And the men aren’t airbrushed out, we hear about them in great detail..like the assassinations of the male drug barons, the beating to death of Paul Quinn by 12 other men and the fact that a woman and five children who died in a housefire in Omagh were not buried with the father for rather obvious reasons.
If I was a man who wanted to organise a campaign raising awareness of domestic violence against men by women, I wouldn’t start out by complaining about women’s aid organisations. I’d just start producing the facts to make people aware that there is a problem.
Well the News at One was great fun. It kicked off with Bertie telling Charlie Bird that Des Richardson’s method of providing false invoices to NCB to collect the money (which, lets face it, was just money laundering) was wrong and that he didn’t know anything about it. Richardson went about collecting the money and Bertie just spent it.
Isn’t that very similar to Charlie Haughey’s defence? Des Traynor collected the money and sure Charlie didn’t know what was happening? Of course, Traynor was dead and Richardson is still very much alive and if he gets a sniff of being dumped on by Ahern perhaps he’ll have to something to say about it…
Then Senator Eoghan Harris came on to tell us the whole thing is being made up by the Daily Mail, the Tribunal should be shut down and Bertie Ahern is one of Ireland’s greatest Taoisigh!! Hurrah!
As I’ve said before. Fine! shut down the Tribunals, and let the Rev move in. They’d have great crack checking up on Richardson’s companies as well as Ahern’s.
What could Albert Reynolds have been doing during that six-hour stopover in Freeport in March 1994? Nipping to the bank, or topping up his tan?
We heard about the trip last week through evidence at the Mahon tribunal from Air Corps chief Ralph James, the former pilot of the government jet. He knew the stop had been made, but didn’t know why.
Martin Mansergh, who accompanied Reynolds on the trip to the Bahamas, was quick to suggest that the brigadier’s evidence “must be based on faulty recollection”. Mansergh was too quick, though. Between hearing a report of James’ evidence on the RTE news at lunchtime on Wednesday, and issuing a statement in which he sought to undermine the pilot’s evidence, the Fianna Fail TD might have paused to check the transcripts. The Air Corps chief was not relying on his own recollection but on detailed records of the flight plan which do indeed show a last-minute stopover was made in Freeport at the personal request of the then taoiseach.
The only one with a faulty recollection then is Mansergh, who can remember with exquisite detail the military honours afforded Reynolds on the trip and a dinner party hosted by Tony O’Reilly. But he must have been distracted when the plane touched down in Freeport because the TD is not terribly sure what happened there.
Mansergh’s instinct to get his statement out fast last Wednesday is symptomatic of Fianna Fail’s attitude to the tribunals. In general the party’s defence strategy has three legs: nobody saw me do it; the witness is mad; this is all a waste of money anyway. If no-one saw them do it then maybe they didn’t do it. The problem is that, sometimes, someone did see them and they give evidence about the most extraordinary transactions. The tales are sometimes so incredible that Fianna Fail is able to spin that, sure, “poor X isn’t well”. Despite my own propensity to engage in conspiracy theories, even I shake my head sometimes and think half of the evidence must be invented.
It was Tom Gilmartin who first introduced the Bahamas trip to the tribunal. Gilmartin says that Owen O’Callaghan, a rival developer, once told him that he’d given Reynolds IR£150,000 in his Cork home at around 3am one night in March 1994. Reynolds supposedly said he was tired and had to be picked up by helicopter as he was leaving for America the next morning for St Patrick’s Day. Other sources told Gilmartin that Reynolds collected $1m in New York, Boston and Chicago, good-will money because of the peace process. But only $70,000 made it back to Fianna Fail and Gilmartin quipped that “$900,000 must have fallen off the plane and floated down towards the Cayman Islands”.
Preposterous, no? Reynolds stuffing a bag with cash in a back bedroom in Cork in the middle of the night? A million dollars collected from rich Irish-Americans beind stashed in a Caribbean bank? Gilmartin’s off his rocker, right? Then the brigadier shows up with the flight plan.
The records show that Reynolds was indeed collected by helicopter late at night in Cork after a fundraising dinner. He did go off America next day, and there was an unscheduled stopover in Freeport on the way home from an official visit to the Bahamas. If Gilmartin’s got that much right, perhaps he’s not barking after all? Meanwhile Padraic O’Connor, former head of NCB stockbrokers, also testified to the Mahon Tribunal last week and has directly contradicted the evidence of Bertie Ahern. The taoiseach claimed, in that weepy interview with RTE’s Brian Dobson, that O’Connor was one of the close and personal friends approached to give him a dig-out when he found himself in financial difficulty. O’Connor says he was “friendly” with Ahern during their professional dealings, but not his “friend”. A donation of IR£5,000 was made from NCB to Ahern’s constituency funds and was not intended for the taoiseach personally. Under rigorous cross-examination, O’Connor’s version has stood up in its entirety and seems far more credible than Ahern’s.
But so what? Is it worth spending millions to find this out? If Irish people have made one thing clear it’s that they don’t particularly care about politicians getting hand-outs from businessmen. Perhaps they think everyone’s doing it, or that it’s worth having a crooked politician in power if they do the rest of the job properly. So everyone from Beverly Flynn to Michael Lowry have been re-elected even after incontrovertible proof of past improprieties. If voters don’t care, then what’s the point in enriching lawyers by teasing out more financial shenanigans?
Well, firstly, our crooked politicians don’t represent everyone. For every poll-topper with a dodgy record, there are many more honest, decent TDs and councillors who are disgusted by bribery, tax evasion and corruption. Those people deserve the truth, even if everyone else isn’t interested.
The defence of those challenged with appalling truths about their country’s past is invariably to claim that they never knew. Magdalene Laundries? Industrial schools? Sexual abuse? No-one told us. Had we known, of course we would have done something. But people are skilled at knowing only what they want to know. Inconvenient truths, as Al Gore calls them, are easily ignored. The most important thing the tribunals do is strip away the lame defence of ignorance, and hold those inconvenient truths up for all to see. When details of Charlie Haughey’s finances were exposed his political colleagues had to line up one after another and claim, probably truthfully, that they had no idea. Another former taoiseach, John Bruton, was forced by the Mahon Tribunal to acknowledge that, yes, Frank Dunlop had indeed told him that a Fine Gael councillor, Tom Hand, was demanding bribes for zoning votes. Bruton admits he did nothing about it. I can certainly understand his reason for either discounting what Dunlop told him, or dithering instead of taking action. But now he can’t say he was never told, and that’s important.
I despise waste, but if we’re going to watch money flushed down the toilet on e-voting machines and make-up for Bertie Ahern, then a few hundred million on the truth is good value, relatively speaking.
Maybe Albert Reynolds wasn’t on the take, maybe Bertie Ahern really did save £50,000, maybe Tom Gilmartin’s evidence is more fiction that fact and it’s possible Frank Dunlop is gilding the lily. But let’s find out, and let there be no ambiguity about what we know and don’t know.
If intelligent men like Mansergh are happy to indulge themselves by defending their party and its leaders regardless of their actions, then let them. But don’t ever let them stand outside Leinster House and claim that they didn’t know, or that they were never told.
Shane Ross has an interesting piece on overcharging by the ESB.
It reminded me that I meant to point out to all the one-off-house-begrudgers that the ESB charges more to rural householders than urban ones. I’m NOT complaining, but just wanted you to know so there’s no more moaning about how us rural folk are costing you urban ones so much money.
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Just an update from Joseph O’Gorman..
Matteo Matubara
On Thursday December 6th at 5.30pm there will be a gathering of those who wish to show their respect for Matteo in a public manner in the Ed Burke Theatre in the Arts Building . The date of Matteo’s funeral will depend upon the resolution of a number of complex legal issues which arise out of his dying in Ireland without any known relatives. Because these issues will take time to resolve, we face a period of suspension which we are not used to when dealing with the death of those we know, it was therefore thought best to proceed immediately with a commemoration allowing everyone who wishes to set aside some time to reflect upon Matteo’s life and his time in College.All are welcome.
Poor Matt, well known to anyone who attended Trinity has died. Report from the IT
“Trinity remembers eternal student ‘Matt the Jap’
Gardaà are liaising with Interpol and the Japanese embassy to contact relatives of Matteo (Masahiso) Matubara, one of central Dublin’s most familiar characters, following his death last month. Paul Cullen reports.
Matubara (73), known affectionately to generations of Trinity College students as “Matt the Jap”, died of natural causes in his home off Mount Street almost two weeks ago. Gardaà broke into the flat after food which had been left at his door remained untouched for days.
His body remains in the morgue while efforts continue to make contact with his brother, who is believed to live in Tokyo. College friends are planning to hold a gathering in his honour next Thursday.
His passing was marked in the classified section of yesterday’s Irish Times with this tribute from the college’s Central Societies Committee: “Known to generations of Trinity College graduates and students as a ‘college character’, Matteo was a seemingly constant and eternal fixture at student events and meetings, and his passing conjures up a sentiment of not-quite-the-sameness.”
Raised in Tokyo, he studied in Norway and Paris before coming to Ireland in the early 1980s. In Trinity, with financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, he wrote a thesis on Islamic journeys in the Middle Ages. After receiving an M Litt in 1987, he stayed on in Ireland, and appeared to live on very little.
He was extremely deaf and communicated with people by sign language or, more often, by exchange of written notes. He could write in English, Irish, Japanese, Norwegian, German, French, Russian and, it is reputed, several other languages.
He was an inveterate correspondent; Prince Charles, Prince Michael of Kent and Prince Albert of Monaco were among those who replied to his letters.
He was on the Christmas card lists of President Mary McAleese and Jacques Chirac.
“He knew half the crowned heads of Europe,” recalls Joseph O’Gorman, assistant junior dean in Trinity. “There was even a photo of him with Tito.
“Matteo was the last of a number of eccentrics who pottered about college over the years and whose only real link to the place is the most important: they were known by generations of students for whom, in many ways, they formed a nostalgic link with their time in college. People who can’t remember what they read for the whole of second year have a clear memory of Matteo.”
Mystery surrounded his background, much of it encouraged by Matubara himself. He claimed not to have any family in Japan, until friends discovered he was sending cards to a brother in Tokyo. His library card was removed as he was found to have written on old textbooks, though friends claimed he was correcting typos.”
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