Unanimous votes usually have a slight tang of “Our Beloved Leader” about them, so at best they should be treated with caution. Still, putting aside the common Irish desire to comply with the consensus – that most Beloved of all Leaders in Irish life – the unanimous vote within the Irish Commission on the Future of the Irish Media in support of Alan Rusbridger reminds us that feminism as a coherent movement in defence of women is dead. What it clearly is – and probably has almost always been – is a movement around the ideas that are pleasing to ambitious middle-class women.
Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian for twenty years, was appointed to the commission presumably because of the liberal orthodoxies that he personally embodies, not because of his success as an editor. Under his leadership, The Guardian lost so much money that most of the Guardian Media Group’s portfolio of companies had to be liquidated to support it. Throughout this time, he continued to employ Roy Greenslade as a columnist even after learning that the latter was an agent of the IRA.
Would Rusbridger have retained the services of a journalist who he had discovered was working for MI5, the British National Party or the UVF? Moreover, the IRA – which hasn’t gone away you know – wasn’t a fringe group with eccentric ideas, but a dedicated terrorist organisation that twice came close to wiping out the British cabinet and did actually murder a senior member of the Royal family. Active support for it was tantamount to treason; after all, the British Communist Party, which supplied so many agents to the Soviet Union, actually never did as much harm to living Britons as the IRA did. Nor is Greensleeze’s continued employment by The Guardian simply a matter of freedom of the press: the IRA blew up the headquarters of The Belfast News Letter and destroyed the printing plant of The Daily Mirror, the latter at a cost in today’s money of some €80 million. Belief in freedom of the press is wholly inconsistent with support for the IRA.
This is even before we consider the Mairia Cahill affair. As a teenager, she was repeatedly raped by an IRA man, a crime which the IRA covered up, despite complaints that this noble fellow had raped two other women.
So what does IRA actually stand for? I Rape Anyone?
Didn’t Adams senior rape members of his family?
Didn’t Gerry Adams’ brother Liam rape his own daughter?
Didn’t the IRA move Liam Adams the rapist to Dundalk?
Didn’t the IRA cover up all those rapes?
Didn’t Greensleeze, The Guardian’s media correspondent, remain silent about these monstrosities?
Didn’t Greensleeze claim in Rusbridger’s Guardian that Mairia Cahill’s criticisms of the IRA were due to her loyalty to a republican splinter group rather than because she had been raped by an IRA man?
Didn’t Rusbridger stand by Greensleeze for seven years until a belated apology was recently squeezed out of him?
Didn’t the vast majority of women in Irish public life, with the very clear and outspoken exceptions of Fine Gael’s Regina Doherty and the veteran feminist Anne Harris, who both stoutly denounced the Commission’s support for Ruisbridger, stay silent on this issue?
And am I going slightly mad with all these unanswered question marks?
No, not slightly.
Let me wonder here. If the victim of an IRA rape had been a woman barrister in Dublin, and Greensleeze had declared that her protestations against the IRA had been driven by political motives, and his former editor had allowed him to say that, and had then stood by him for seven years, then would the members our media committee have voted unanimously to retain that editor?
But Mairia Cahill is not a Dublin barrister, but was a working-class girl from West Belfast when she was raped. So: how much are feminist perceptions of and reactions to sexual violence predicated on the social status of the victims? Are working-class rape victims less likely to receive support from feminist groups than middle class ones?
That question is, alas, not a hypothetical one; we know the answer.
British feminist groups have been almost completely silent about the grooming and rape of tens of thousands of working-class girls by gangs of Muslim men. Many victims have gone missing, and it is impossible to say if they were murdered or if they simply ran away. Yet there has not been a single feminist demonstration in London denouncing the failure of the police forces, the social services, the political classes or the media for their failure – amounting to active criminal complicity – in the greatest mass-rape in western Europe since 1945.
Compare this to the hysteria and mass-violence over the recent murder of a single, middle-class white woman, Sarah Everard in London. It is unnecessary to add further condemnation to an utterly damnable crime: we all know where we stand on this abomination, without further self-exonerating and self-serving adjectives. But why the perfervour over this hideous killing compared to the silence over the fate of tens of thousands of white working-class girls?
Similarly, how is it possible that the National Women’s Council of Ireland could solicit and then publicise the opinions (as it did) of Gerry Adams on the issue of violence against women when the allegations about him and the abduction and murder of Jean McConville were a matter of public record? That the Council had sought the opinions of other political leaders on this issue simply means that it was not taking a principled stand but was abjectly following the standard formula for Hibernian pseudo-neutrality, rather like de Valera’s public grief over Hitler & Blondi.
The transient importance of Jean McConville reminds us how little the lives of working-class women have ever counted within a feminist-agenda that has always prioritised the needs and the values of ambitious middle-class liberal women. This was why Margaret Thatcher (and only after much-fevered debate) narrowly managed to squeak into The Guardian’s Top 100 women of the modern era, a historic absurdity that reveals so much. But so too does feminism’s unquestioning support of uncontrolled immigration from deeply misogynistic societies, along with its associated value-system, multiculturalism. In practice, this has not merely tolerated sexual-apartheid but actually exulted in it in the name of “diversity”, alongside those other brainless pieties, “equality” and “inclusion.”
Let me put these to the test. Would any of these defenders of diversity, equality and inclusion insist they applied to me as they do to the members of the Migrant Council, the Future of the Media Commission or the National Women’s Council? Yet the abject capitulations of the peace process allowed Sinn Fein-IRA full access into the marquee of respectability, but not, incredibly, Mairia Cahill – until, that is, she caused such a racket that Greensleeze and Rusbridger were obliged to apologise seven years after the original contemptible article was published.
But still missing from this marquee are the female-natives of the vast sprawling housing estates that are Ireland’s great contribution to the noble art of municipal mismanagement. These unfortunates have the poorest educational achievements of any native population in Western Europe, yet they remain almost completely absent from any feminist agenda. The dire estates they inhabit are simply vote-farms where electoral preferences are harvested by means of clientelist bribes and are then forgotten.
In Britain, the thousands of women who were groomed and violated as little girls in those post-industrial towns where they now have mosques where they once had mills still remain outside the protective marquee of accountability. Thus it is that the official inquiry into mass child-abuse in Britain is studiously ignoring the areas where Muslim rape-gangs were most active, and naturally, most feminist-activists are staying completely silent.
Genuine, all-embracing, class-free feminism was a chimera all along. It has now been overtaken by transgenderism, a scientific absurdity that feminists seem as petrified by as they were by the prospect of condemning Gerry Adams. This they have never done, though with perfect intrepidity, and no doubt emboldened by The Guardian & Greensleeze-inspired lynch-mob of four years ago, the National Women’s Council rather gallantly managed to denounce me. That kind of “I’m-not-your-friend-anymore” feminism has merely revealed what a thoroughly shallow and nasty phenomenon it can often be. So the unanimous lack of support for Mairia Cahill from the six women on the Future of the Irish Media suggests that it is their Commission that actually has no future.