“Wear something tight,” garda William Ryan instructed the woman before hanging up the phone. That was a red flag, any man might think. Not many women would, though, because such is life for the fairer sex.
Some men, unsatisfied with judging women by their appearance, presume to dictate it. It’s a control impulse. A woman who doesn’t accept a remark like Ryan’s as a bit of banter risks being seen to lack femininity. Ryan, besides, was a figure of authority.
So the woman went along to meet him at Aughrim Garda station on September 29th, 2020, hoping to retrieve her son’s confiscated car. On her arrival, the then garda started slapping her bottom and groping her breasts. He prevented her from leaving. Trying to appease him, she showed him a photograph of herself in swimwear. He was not appeased. He took her upstairs and digitally invaded her.
Ryan mendaciously testified at his trial that the woman had consented. On Monday, before he was jailed for six years, his lawyer said his client now “unreservedly accepts his guilt”.
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The woman said in her victim-impact statement that he had broken her twice: once when he imprisoned and sexually assaulted her; the second time when he lied about her on oath. She said she felt “shame”, though she knew she had done nothing wrong and had spent the years since the attack “hiding away” in her house.
The judge was handed 35 testimonials on behalf of the convicted criminal. Among them were references or testimonials from other gardaí, including a superintendent.
The devaluing of women goes on and on. Public servants whose duty is to uphold the rule of law prioritise the male offender over the female victim. It revives memories of Fr Seán Sheehy providing a character reference and queuing with about 50 other people, mostly men, to shake Danny Foley’s hand in a Tralee courtroom after his conviction for sexually assaulting a 22-year-old woman. “As someone representing the Catholic Church, it felt like him and the church had taken Danny Foley’s side,” the woman said afterwards.
Memories too of Cathal Crotty’s conviction for punching Natasha O’Brien unconscious in Limerick and the trial judge, Tom O’Donnell, suspending his jail sentence, partly because a custodial one would have obliged the Defence Forces to dismiss him from his soldiering job. She had suffered panic attacks after the attack and had to quit her job because she was unable to work.
The tacit message from the court was that her livelihood mattered less than his. Crotty was subsequently jailed for two years by the Court of Appeal.
There are psychological repercussions when the institutions in your country – An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces, the courts, the Catholic Church – or their representatives keep telling you that people of your gender are inferior. You doubt yourself. You might even behave in accordance with the insinuation that you can never measure up to the average white man.
Sometimes the institutional belittlement is subtle. This season, RTÉ One has broadcast three prime time television profiles. All three subjects were male – Ben Dunne, Michael Smurfit and Gerry Hutch. In order to watch profiles of Mary Robinson or Edna O’Brien, Irish women of towering international stature, a trip to the cinema was necessary. It is no coincidence that both documentaries were made, exquisitely, by women: Aoife Kelleher and Sinéad O’Shea, respectively.
When I saw Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, there were 12 people in the cinema. One was a man. On the screen, Gabriel Byrne was explaining that O’Brien emerged from the literary scene of Patrick Kavanagh, Myles na gCopaleen and Brendan Behan. “A male preserve,” he called it.
When Micheál Martin announced his Cabinet featuring just three women among 15 ministers, there was an outcry. In response, the Government implied voters were to blame for electing only 16 women among Fine Gael’s and Fianna Fáil’s combined 86 TDs (18.6 per cent). How, then, to explain Sinn Féin’s 38.5 per cent and the Social Democrats’ 36.4 per cent female deputies? It’s not voters’ fault. It’s the establishment’s.
Ingrained attitudes and unconscious biases go unchallenged in public discourse. One such is the implicit slur in the standard defence of male privilege that appointments ought to be made on merit, as if women, by and large, are unmeritorious.
A recent Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll produced the chilling statistic that 49 per cent of males “didn’t care” about the few women in the Cabinet. This disregard for gender fairness is unsurprising in the misogynistic age of Donald Trump and Andrew Tate and its ethos that women are subservient to men, be it in the kitchen, on the porn screen or in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman.
Ireland got a demonstration of how the consensus militates against women’s interests when Helen McEntee was vilified for the “woke” work she did as minister for justice. Potentially life-saving legislation she introduced to safeguard victims of domestic violence and coercive control was brushed aside in a chorus of what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls the aggrieved entitlement of men. Get tough on crime, the consensus dictated, as if beating your wife to death is not a crime.
Women’s exclusion from the inner sanctum has not deterred courageous individuals from trying to change attitudes from the outside. Most recently, Giséle Pelicot did it in France. Jenni Hermoso is doing it in Spain. Nikita Hand did it in Ireland. History, even as it is repeating, warns us these may ultimately be losing battles. A US company has already stated it will continue working with Conor McGregor despite a civil trial jury’s finding that he raped Hand.
A more troubling detail in that Ireland Thinks poll was that 30 per cent of women said they didn’t care about the paltry proportion of women in the Cabinet.
Might these be some of the same women who voted to retain the constitutional enshrinement of women’s work in the home? Will they and their daughters be queuing up to buy their fashion corsets, a classic symbol of female subjugation unveiled at the January couture shows as the next big thing? Nice and tight, as Ryan ordered.
It is a fundamental paradox of women’s second-class status that, amid all the talk of toxic masculinity, nobody ever mentions the toxic femininity that gives it life support.
