It is difficult to say which is more dreadful: the prosecution and imprisonment of poor Micheal O Leidhin or the utter silence from the mainstream media following his conviction on bogus charges of sexual assault. There has been not a word of sympathy for this unfortunate wretch, whose greatest error was to have consensual sexual relations with a deeply insecure and neurotic woman of the kind we would once have called a Mad Fucking Bitch. The punishment for this blunder has been the utter ruination of his life.
If there is any consolation to this monstrous affair, it is that so far no women journalists have been exulting at his fate. But that might well be just a temporary relief, and soon half a dozen pairs of feminist heels will be gleefully dancing on the fresh soil covering both his life and his reputation.
Micheal was drinking in a Dublin pub with a female friend when they met the MFB, a “friend” of Micheal’s friend. The group went on to another pub and the MFB and O Leidhin began kissing. At the end of the night, O Leidhin asked the MFB to go back to his flat in south Dublin. Once there, they engaged in what Micheal’s trial was told was “consensual sexual foreplay type activity”. He suggested they have “penetrative sex”, (nobody speaks like that: he meant, have a fuck) She said no but left open the possibility that they could do so the next morning.
This is not my account. Minus the parentheses, it was that of the prosecuting counsel, Mr Delaney.
The term “consensual foreplay” usually means – as it clearly does here – that he was playing with her genitals. In other words, he was masturbating her. We don’t know if he was also playing with her breasts, but he would have been an unusual man not to have been. They went to bed, where she declined to have full sex, but, according to Mr Delaney, “left open the possibility they could do this in morning.”
Most of us have had experiences like that. I certainly have, as (give or take) I have what follows.
Later, he awoke and – by his own account – was “feeling horny”. She had already indicated that sex was a possibility in the morning, and morning had arrived. He climbed on top of her and began to feel her breasts. She previously consented to being masturbated, so having her breasts massaged was not something dramatically new. She woke up and told him to stop. He did so. They slept briefly before he drove her home. Later that morning, the MFB texted him, repeating her “expressions of annoyance” – her term – over what had happened in bed, but not before, ie, when he was masturbating her.
Some time later, they met and spoke for an hour after which “they agreed to differ” about what had happened.
A year went by, and events of the night were consigned to history – or so it seemed to him, but not to the MFB, for whom the term “expressions of annoyance” had in the intervening period mutated into something altogether more deadly. For she then went to An Garda Siochana and alleged that Micheal had sexually assaulted her.
Micheal was duly, arrested, charged, tried and found guilty by a jury, the judge, Karen O’Connor sentencing him to prison for fifteen months, with three months suspended. Thus ended his career as a broadcaster and a journalist, with ruin being visited on his life. No doubt the MFB is about to become a feminist icon and the living embodiment of the Me-Too movement. Meanwhile, her “victim impact statement” remains as a perfect declaration of bunny-boiling MFBness. I quote from news reports:
Reading from her own victim impact statement, the woman said that while she wished to retain her anonymity, she did not want O Leidhin to remain anonymous.
She said the assault had left her traumatised and feeling lost in the world. She said she was sexually violated when she was at her most vulnerable.
She said the night of the attack was the last time she would ever go to sleep feeling safe from attack. She said she replays the assault again and again and has felt depressed and suicidal. She said she did attempt to kill herself by overdosing and ended up moving back in with her parents outside of Dublin to cope with the trauma and stress.
She was unable to get public transport for a long time because the “touch from a stranger was unbearable”.
“My whole life and sense of self have been destroyed,” she said. She said she has since found it extremely difficult to trust men and would completely freeze during any intimate sexual activity.
Just as well for the men concerned, because they’d probably have been next in the dock. And as for the “criminal” deed that is central to this tragedy: in those same circumstances, had the woman felt the sleeping man’s body in any way, would criminal charges have resulted?
We all know the answer to that.
So many issues are combined in this one truly scandalous affair. The first is the meaning of consent and how long it lasts. The second is the absurd delay in reporting the “offence”. The third is the decision of Gardai to proceed with this ridiculous case. The fourth is the extraordinary conduct of the trial judge who not merely let the matter go to the jury but then imposed an utterly savage and life-ruining sentence. The fifth is the importance of the “victim impact statement”.
Let us focus on this last one. Few legal innovations in recent decades have had the corrupting effect of the unchallenged “victim impact statement”. The argument against such presentations was that they rewarded the dramatic, the hyperbolic, the emotional while disadvantaging the scrupulous, the calm and the continent.
Consider the terms the MFB used, reading from her prepared script (lest she forget some of the juicier terms); “traumatised”, “suicidal”, “depressed”, “lost in the world”, “sexually violated”, her “whole life and sense of self (having been) destroyed”.
These were the very words, immune to deconstruction or analysis by defence counsel, that so influenced Judge Karen O’Connor – “compelling,” O’Connor found them. The demand from the “Me too” movement that every woman has a right, not merely to be heard, but also to be believed, apparently has now been assimilated into Irish jurisprudence.
O’Connor also noted that O Leidhin was a person of prior good character whom she considered to be at a low risk of sexual offending in the future. Low risk? You halfwit, O’Connor: he had not sexually assaulted anyone. For what young man or woman has not woken up in the middle of the night, joyfully feeling the body of their latest sexual partner? But of course, there can be no concept of male innocence in the mad and vengeful world created by feminists, where the purpose of courts is to punish individual men in symbolic revenge for the generalised “injustices” of the patriarchy.
The political and legal triumph of Irish feminism is almost complete. Over the past two decades, an apartheid system of law has emerged as Ireland became the first country in the world in which most practising lawyers were women. A dozen years ago, two Polish men, Mariusz Szwajkos and Pawel Kalite, were brutally murdered at the instigation of two teenage girls. The evidence against them, including text messages both before (inciting the attack) and afterwards (gleefully exultant) was extremely powerful, or so An Garda Siochana thought, because they pressed for the the girls to be charged. But they weren’t, and they were not even named in the course of the trial in which their male accomplices were, very properly, jailed for life.
In another case, Claire Nolan deliberately drove her car into Michael Duffy and killed him. She was merely found guilty of manslaughter, and imprisoned for six years, or three years with time off, which was pretty good going, because she had 15 previous convictions. But at least she went to gaol, unlike other women men-killers.
Norma Cotter twice fired a shotgun into her sleeping husband and walked free from court after she pleaded guilty to manslaughter. One of the grounds for her non-imprisonment was that she had just had a baby, which is a useful strategy for female killers; between your husband-killing spree and your trial, get pregnant, if you can find a man heroic enough to do the deed (increasingly unlikely these days). If he touches your breast while you slept, you might even get him put in the slammer as well: a double whammy!
Like Gary Cotter, a similarly sleeping Declan O’Neill was killed by his lovely wife Dolores, who stabbed him 21 times and struck him 26 blows with a plumber’s hammer. She claimed that he was a drunk who had often abused her, and naturally, she too walked free. But the court never heard of the record that he’d kept of her violent behaviour; of her hitting him over the head with various objects, including bottles, and how he had needed hospital treatment after she had deliberately driven a car into him. Moreover, the forensic evidence showed that Declan O’Neill was a light-drinker. It is somehow grimly but wholly apposite that Dolores O’Neill, the woman who knifed and bludgeoned her sleeping husband to death, was an employee of the Equality Authority.
I have been unable to find a single woman in public life – politician, journalist, lawyer, academic – who has condemned the leniency of the sentences imposed on the Nolan, Cotter and O’Neill creatures, though we all know of the uproar that would have resulted if women-killing men had been treated so considerately.
In the final decades of the 20th century, the males of white western civilisations committed a form of symbolic species-suicide unprecedented in mammalian history. Not merely did they abandon their monopoly of political and legal power, they also acceded to the creation of asymmetric values that invariably favoured women, and none as enthusiastically as in Ireland. Here successive governments either created or began to fund self-perpetuating, autonomous, single-issue advocacy bodies such as the National Women’s Council, the Equality Authority, the Rape Crisis Centre, the Migrant Council, LBGT Ireland and other politically-correct vigilante groups. No such bodies existed to protect white heterosexual males. These vigilantes can be relied on to howl indignantly at anything they dislike, their anger being enthusiastically reported by an abject and slavish media. Central to their ideology is the dogma of permanent female victimhood and equally permanent white male culpability, a phantasmagorical doctrine that quite effortlessly survived the simultaneous capture by women of all the senior legal positions in Ireland: those of the President, Chief Justice, Director of Public Prosecutions, Minister for Justice and Garda Commissioner.
Mariusz Szwajkos, Pawel Kalite Declan O’Neill, Gary Cotter and Michael O’Neill are all literally dead, while Micheal’s death is merely metaphorical, but what these five men have in common is that they were all deliberately killed by women, Moreover, with Micheal’s unchallenged fate now a precedent, this republic will probably have to have to build a vast Gulag to accommodate all the men who have made slightly wrong moves without written permissions in triplicate, as recorded by the public notary that the modern man should always have with him whenever he is foolish enough to take a woman to his bed.
The alternative is that the sexes stop having sex with one another. Thus the hell created by feminists, a bitter world of sadness, solitude, pornography and rampant rabbits. So, girls, you’ve finally got your way – are you pleased with yourselves now?