It is now four months since Osagie Igbinidion was found not guilty of the reckless endangerment of the life of 29-day-old baby Callis Osajhae, who died after being circumcised by him, writes Kevin Myers.
And as interesting as the outcome of the trial and the observations of the presiding judge, Mr Justice Kevin Haugh, has been the public response to the tragic death and the acquittal of the man who occasioned it, which has been precisely none.
Why is this? One simple reason. The baby who died so tragically and needlessly was a boy. Had the baby who died been a girl undergoing a comparable operation, a tidal wave of anger would - very properly - have rocked through Irish life. And at the very least there would have been cries to outlaw the female version of the bungled operation which killed little Callis, namely genital circumcision.
This newspaper reported on the case, in part, as follows. "Addressing the jury before they retired to consider their verdict, Judge Kevin Haugh said it was important for jurors not to bring their "white, Western values" to bear upon their deliberations.
He described the case as a "clash of two cultures". "This is a relatively recent matter that Ireland will have to deal with now that we have a significant migrant population. You are not asked whether this form of procedure is acceptable in Ireland. If you start thinking along those lines, you are doing Mr Igbinidion a great injustice." He added that Mr Igbinidion did not have the benefit of being tried by peers who would understand his background and culture.
Excuse me, but why should an Irish jury be told they should not bring the values of their "white, Western" civilisation to a case? For the values of our civilisation are precisely why we have a jury system. The people of Ireland - not the people of Tibet, Peru or Lapland - and their values are represented through the jury. We have a binary justice system in Ireland. The court provides the legal component of a trial, while the jury provides the social component.
And as for the accused man not having the benefit of being tried by his peers who would understand his background and culture - well, there would have been two ways of ensuring that he might have got that. The first was for him to have stayed in Nigeria, and I rather wish he had. The second was for the jury to be chosen on racial - and specifically Nigerian - grounds.
But no doubt, that is not specific enough; maybe he should be tried only by members of his own tribe, or better still, by his own trade - he was, we are told, a fourth generation circumciser. Maybe such folk can better sympathise with bunglers who cause children to bleed to death after needless operations.
So after this case, are we to have two laws in Ireland? May you ineptly circumcise an Irish boy-child and cause him to die if you are African because of your "culture", but not if you are Irish? It would seem so.
Irish law, we may guess on these principles, counts less than the culture from which the accused comes - but only up to a point. For if the dead child had been female, I believe that no jury would have been told not to bring their white, Western values to bear on the case - or if they had been, we may equally be sure that the judge would now be dangling from the nearest lamp-post in the bar of public opinion.
Moreover, the issue is not simply one of bungling. Do we protect the integrity of a child's body or not? The penis has a foreskin for protective reasons as sound as the existence of female labia. The violent and permanent exposure of a little boy's glans for religio-tribal reasons is an antiquated barbarism which both permanently changes the sexual sensitivities of the victims and endangers their health. Merely because Jews also do it doesn't make it right, or immune to criticism.
One of the problems about a new multi-ethnic society is that immigrants cannot always recognise the difference between social norms and profound, though non-legal, taboos. Some of our norms - saying hello to strangers or thanking bus-drivers - are mere quirks. Others are so central to our way of life as hitherto to be beyond the need of law. One of these is the integrity of our children's bodies, free from mutilation by freelance butchers on house-calls.
So, as waves of immigrants arrive, we shall simply have to incorporate at least one taboo in our legal code. We must make all circumcision illegal, unless by doctors for sound medical reasons. No doubt our ideological multicultural feminists will declare it still acceptable to mutilate male genitals, thought not of course female; but girls, girls, what about your equality agenda? If it is lawful to remove a baby boy's foreskin, then why not a girl's labia or even her clitoris? You cannot justify one and not the other.
It will inevitably become an issue here. In Britain, some immigrant Somalis insist on circumcising their daughters, and if not by some local harridan of a witch-doctor with her rusty, trusty razor blade, they send them abroad.
And if you blindly accept the fashionable theories of value-free multiculturalism - as most soft-focus Irish lefties do - then what is to prevent immigrants in Ireland celebrating their "culture" by mutilating their children's genitals? Not our legal system, clearly.