The first week of December, and the life and the career of poor Micheal O Leidhin have vanished over the event-horizon of Ireland’s tortured sexual politics. The status of women as permanent victims of predatory males has been affirmed, not least by women judges, and the abject silence from the media confirms that journalistic self-interest trumps the far greater journalistic obligation to seek and speak the truth.
To recap. O Leidhin was lying in bed with a woman whom he had met earlier in the evening and who had not merely agreed to be there, but whom – according to prosecution counsel’s euphemism “foreplay” – he had already masturbated. We do not know if she had climaxed during this session or whether he had felt her breasts. He would have been an unusual man not to have tried to achieve the former and a quite unique one not to have done the latter. We do know that she had indicated that full sex might be possible later, and this was now later. He climbed on top of her and began to feel her breasts. She woke up and told him to stop. He did so. She did not then leave in anger but remained beside him, sleeping. Before daybreak, he drove her home. They met some days later and agreed to differ in their interpretations of the final and minor sexual encounter of the night.
A year later she filed a formal complaint of “sexual assault” to An Garda Siochana, which suggested to a woman-reader of my earlier post on this subject that she had since fallen under the influence of a man-hating feminist-counsellor. At O Leidhin’s trial, his defence counsel did not declare that those earlier events must surely have served as implied consent for what followed. Why did he not do so? Perhaps because he was (if only subconsciously) aware of the effect of the SIAGS (see later) on his future career.
In the fatal absence of any assertion on those lines, and with no disputing the sequence of events, the jury found him guilty.
Judge Karen O’Connor said that she found the complainant’s scripted “victim impact statement” – post-trial, and therefore unchallengeable by defence and so without any possibility of counter-balancing in O Leidhin’s favour – “compelling”. No doubt she did, especially considering the melodramatic language used: “traumatised”, “suicidal”, “depressed”, “lost in the world”, “sexually violated”, her “whole life and sense of self (having been) destroyed”.
What for? Because he had briefly felt her naked breasts in his bed to which she had freely gone, and not long after he had masturbated her? Notwithstanding these irrefutable truths, O’Connor then sentenced poor Micheal O Leidhin to fifteen months’ imprisonment, three of them suspended. He was then publicly sacked by his employer, RTE.
A question. Which one of you has never fondled the sleeping body of your partner with the intention of waking her or him up pleasurably? We apparently know the answer to this question from two women judges. Justice Aileen Donnelly in rejecting O Leidhin’s appeal said of his “victim” that she was entitled “to fall asleep and feel safe” knowing that there would only be sex “if she were awake and had consented.”
So, that is clear. Aileen Donnelly has never woken up her partner of the night by intimately touching that partner’s sleeping body, and neither has that partner done likewise to milady’s slumbering torso. A moment’s silence, please, in respect of the tragic lack of sexual adventure that this noble creature has had to endure on her virtuous journey to the bench.
Likewise, we might wonder whether Judge O’Connor had ever undergone such experiences, because her savage sentence on O Leidhin suggests probably not. However, this is where the story gets complicated. Six years ago, O’Connor was unfairly savaged for her “leniency” after sentencing the Irish Times journalist Tom Humphries to just two and half years’ imprisonment for grooming and sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl. Foremost amongst her accusers were the Rape Crisis Centre, Children at Risk and the broadside-broadcaster Ciara Kelly, with the subsequent and entirely predictable Dublin 6 echo-chamber approval of Mick Heaney in The Irish Times.
In fact, O’Connor probably had little scope for discretion once Humphries had pleaded guilty and he was not – as incorrectly alleged by the Rape Crisis Centre – a person of authority over the victim.
Many issues are raised here. The first is the legitimacy of commenting on judges’ sentencing by people (such as myself) who were not in court and have not heard all the evidence. This is a complex question to which there is no simple answer. Judge O’Connor was clearly wounded by the baseless allegation that she “empathised” with Humphries when the limitations and precedents of the sentencing process gave her little latitude. At some level, if only of the sub-conscious variety, during the O Leidhin trial she could be forgiven for not wanting a repeat of the monstrously unfair abuse she received after the Humphries trial.
I do not say what follows with any pleasure. I personally dislike Humphries, so I am not naturally on his side. But before his trial, he had undergone a complete breakdown, and for two years was regarded as a serious suicide risk and probably remains in that category. Any sentencing process must have due regard to such factors.
But even more important than the right to comment on sentences is the power of the most vocal and predictable of those commentators, namely Single-Issue Advocacy Groups (SIAG), see above. As well as being monodirectionally PC, SIAGs are effectively armour- plated against criticism. If you comment adversely on anything said by the Rape Crisis Centre, you are clearly in favour of rape, and if you remark unfavourably on the National Women’s Council, you are obviously a dedicated misogynist. Moreover, it is the nature of news-editors, already programmed through their utterly-corrupted right-on media college courses from which they originally emerged, to accept the PC agenda and seek headline quotes from SIAG spokespersons on the issues of the day, regardless of how little the SIAG types actually know.
Moreover, since most SIAGs are usually financed by the taxpayer, they function as a parallel and permanent alternative to government departments. They are therefore free to condemn politicians, judges and journalists while remaining secure from rebuke, even by the courts. According to SIAG logic, anyone who defended O’Connor for the sentence that she had imposed on Humphries must be morally indifferent to his crime. No disagreement or debate is possible: “virtue” is to be found only in howling execration at anyone who attempts to be rational or balanced.
The extraordinary (and perversely related) truth is that the more successful women have been in Ireland, the angrier so many Irish women have become. We saw this last January after poor Karen Murphy was murdered in Tullamore, which prompted a wave of media hysteria, especially from women columnists, about how horrible Irishmen were to Irishwomen – that is, until we learnt that the culprit was not Irish, whereupon a prudent but unapologetic silence instantly replaced the caterwauling.
Fact: Ireland has the eleventh lowest rate of homicide against women of the 193 UN member states, and the lowest rate in the European Union. Countries such as Norway, Canada and New Zealand – widely acclaimed as exemplary societies for women – experience femicide at between two and three times greater than Ireland. Last year, just under one third of homicide victims in the Republic of Ireland, or seven out of twenty-two people, were women. Two of these killings were of foreign-born women by foreigners, one was a victim of a psychotic familial double-murder and suicide, one a random murder by a deranged teenage boy, and three by partners. That’s it.
Moreover, not merely is Ireland an incredibly safe place for women, it is a similarly rewarding one. In 1996, this country became the world’s first democracy to have elected two women heads of state successively, Marys Robinson and McAleese. By 2015, Ireland had become the first country in the world where most practising lawyers – 52% – were women, and all senior legal positions in the Republic – those of the Chief Justice, the Minister for Justice, the DPP and the Garda Commissioner – were held by women. Today, Major General Maureen O’Brien is the second most important soldier in the Defence Forces and Helen McEntee is perhaps the youngest ever minister for justice, while women columnists and broadcasters now dominate the media.
And yet, at the same time as women have risen in power across Ireland, a woman who consented to be masturbated by a man while lying naked in his bed is later able to play the victim card, get him imprisoned and his life ruined merely for feeling her breasts without a single word of protest from any of Ireland’s many powerful women.
If our courts continue to tolerate such contrived nonsense, Ireland might be well on its way to becoming a legal gynocracy that rewards volitional victimhood and punishes heterosexual men according to the emotionally-deranged needs of their self-ordained “victims”.
And the only card vetoing this coercive passage towards a gender-hell is held by powerful Irishwomen, who as one, nonetheless remain silent.
First, they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew…