"VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IS A CRIME", declared the banner behind Willie O'Dea at the launch of a poster campaign just before Christmas. Well, at least he and the fatuous "National Steering Committee on Violence Against Women" (of which he is "chairperson") were certainly right not to include any suggestion that violence against men was equally criminal, writes Kevin Myers.
The day before Willie O'Dea unveiled his cretinous banner, the Central Criminal Court allowed Norma Cotter to walk free after she had pled guilty to the manslaughter of her husband. I've waited two weeks for this injustice to the memory of the man she shot in his bed to be commented on by just one feminist, one pseudo-egalitarian, one TD, one woman even. Not a pip. The silence of her dead husband's grave.
Let's swap the victim for the killer, and see how it plays before the risible NSCVAW. This is how events didn't go that January night in 1995. Corporal Norma Cotter, a peacekeeping veteran of the Lebanon, had spent the day on sentry duty at Portlaoise Jail. Later she and her husband Gary went drinking with friends. Around 1.30 a.m., saying she was tired, she went home. He stayed up drinking.
He returned home at 4.30 a.m. and vomited in the bedroom. A row followed, and she banished him to the spare bedroom. They rowed again next morning over who should collect their son Christopher from his grandparents. Gary Cotter went downstairs, loaded their newly acquired shotgun, returned and shot his wife dead as she lay in bed, helpless.
Now what would have happened to Gary Cotter if he had done this? Would he have been allowed to walk free from the court, as Norma Cotter did, having been given a sentence which neatly matched the time already spent in custody? And if he had, can you imagine the hysterical outpourings from every single State-subsidised feminist agency in the land? But of course this didn't happen. For poor Gary Cotter, who'd been on sentry duty serving his country, who'd gone home earlier from the night's drinking, who'd been woken by his vomiting wife, and who was later butchered as he lay in bed, is not a Person With Ovaries, and by NSCVAW standards is therefore of lesser account.
Norma Cotter was initially found guilty of murder in 1996. However, that conviction had been quashed on appeal and a retrial ordered. There was no second trial, because as it was about to begin, Cotter pled guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter.
The judge, Mr Justice Peart, said it had been "suggested" Gary had sometimes hit his wife when drinking whiskey. Whence this "suggestion", please? There was no trial, and therefore no evidence. What are we coming to when someone seeks to avoid the perils of a trial, but then seeks to gain an advantage by making an unsubstantiated implication, uncontested by cross-examination, that somehow the dead man had it coming to him? This is having your jurisprudential cake and eating it.
Happily, the judge refused to accept this "suggestion" as acceptable evidence. Good man, judge. How reassuring to know our judges can still spot the difference between evidence given on oath and mere scuttlebutt innuendo.
However Judge Peart added that the sentence for the "heinous" and "tragic" killing was mitigated by Cotter's guilty plea, because it was her first offence, and because she had a son and a daughter to care for.
Hold on there, judge. The crime was heinous: your word, meaning "highly criminal or wicked, utterly odious or atrocious" (OED). Yet you think the sentence was mitigated by her guilty plea? But she had originally been found guilty of murder, and was she thus behaving prudently in pleading guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter? If so, is adopting a sensible course of self-preservation - so denying the court the chance to hear any evidence against her - to be judged as being so splendidly meritorious that she was allowed to go free?
And the other factors, such as there being no trail of dead husbands behind her: well, what a saintly girl. Moreover, she has a son and a daughter to care for, the girl by another man - plucky fellow - who has since left her: a wise fellow also.
But she was already a mother when she chose to shoot her son's father. Is this to be an acceptable plea in future? May mothers, as of right, walk free from courts after killing fathers of their children? If so, shouldn't we have a constitutional amendment on these lines?
"The events of that night would have left its scars on many people," said the judge, confusing his nights with mornings, "and I don't forget its effects on Gary Cotter's family and friends." The night left no scars; it was the events next day which did, and on Gary Cotter most of all, when he was gunned down with ruthless deliberation.
Had Norma Cotter been the victim, Gary Cotter would almost certainly be in jail for life, and Willie O'Dea and his ridiculous committee would be uttering some solemn gibberish about justice having been done.
It hasn't. Here is a simple fact for the NSCVAW to consider, and then of course forget. Roughly half of all domestic violence is initiated by women; and the vast majority of victims of all violence in Ireland are men. So why is the political culture of this State so dedicated to promulgating the complete opposite of reality? And how did this feminist flat-earthism come to be incorporated into the official ideology of Ireland?