All in all, the death of Lynette McKeown represents yet another triumph for State policies towards drugs, prostitutes and crime, and we have much to be proud of.
Better still, since it is certain that more young women will go the way of poor Lynette, we may look forward to further occasions of self-congratulation: roll on more dead hookers, even as gardaí continue their perfectly splendid campaign against alcohol-free discotheques for teenagers.
Lynette may well have died because of a drugs overdose. Or, on the other hand, she may well have been killed by one of the unnervingly large numbers of men who hate women - so much that they want to assault or even kill them. And alas for these poor chaps, they cannot always have their way.
For the wholly imperfect state of the law as it stands means that gynophobes can't go round plucking just any women from bus-stops or grabbing them on the street and dragging them off for an evening's light entertainment involving rape and murder. I don't quite know how we reached this deplorable pass, but reach it we did. Indeed, the law actually protects most women from violence and appears to do so quite successfully, for, pace the babbling gibberish from the Council for Women, Law Reform, Equality and Whinging, men, overwhelmingly, are the victims of public violence - with one exception.
This is the class of woman to which Lynette McKeown belonged, and the very class which the aforementioned council seldom, if ever, bothers its pretty little middle-class head about. She was a prostitute. A hooker. A whore. A tart. A trollop. There are no nice words for girls who make their living out of sexual services, and no special department for them in the Council for Women, Law Reform, Equality and Whinging (though you can be sure there are all manner of sleuths looking for differentials between men and women in accountancy, law, medicine, et cetera).
Whoredom is the area in which women suffer the greatest and most systematic abuse anywhere in society, and it is one in which the State not merely connives, but actively promotes it - and does so almost from the time these girls first come under the State's control. One quarter of all of school-leavers are functionally illiterate in English - the highest proportion in western Europe. How much of this is due to hundreds of hours squandered on trying to teach working-class children Irish, I cannot say; and I leave to another day the magnificent contribution of the education industry, which insists that vastly expensive schools should be empty and idle for over half the year, even when it is failing in its primary duties to 25 per cent of Irish children.
No group of people is more vulnerable to the drugs-pusher than the low-achieving, working-class poor. Lynette, from Tallaght, certainly was vulnerable, for a drug addict is what she became. And like most of Europe, we have a cruel and inhuman (and most of all stupid) policy of criminalising addicts. Moreover, we have handed the monopoly supply of what they need to armed criminal gangs, who are too numerous and too ruthless ever to be defeated by the gardaí (who anyway are far too busy closing down booze-free teenage discos).
So the only way girls can earn the money to pay for the drugs which they need is to become prostitutes (the men turn to robbery and violence). Well, deplore prostitution as you will, it exists in all societies, even Iran and Saudi Arabia. Now we could, if we cared for girls like Lynette, provide them with safe places in which to do their dangerous and disagreeable work. But we don't. We do the reverse. We deliberately enforce policies which will make life infinitely more dangerous for prostitutes.
I have written many times about Operation Gladiator, the morally abominable Garda campaign to close down Dublin's massage parlours, and I will write about it again and again and again. Many of these brothels were run by women, most did not exploit the girls, and best of all, they gave them a protected and clean environment. With the State-enforced closure of the brothels, the girls were flushed out on the street, to be easy prey to whatever psychopath comes their way.
Now a question. Why do we not hear from feminists and the aforementioned Council for Women & Whinging on this issue? Why do they not stand up for these girls? Why? Because they're prigs and punishment freaks, whose only real wish is not that the girls be allowed to work in a protected environment, but that the girls' clients be made to suffer instead. Such apparatchiks are not going to criticise the political culture which has elevated them and their tendentious agenda of selective and sanitised victimhood.
On Friday 13th, Lynette left home in Tallaght, and was last seen in the region of Parkgate Street, round the corner from Benburb Street, the main pick-up point for prostitutes in Dublin. And now she's dead, her body dumped - as it happens - near where I live in Kildare.
This wretched woman's fate, in life and in death, is all too disgusting and angering for words. The lowest of the low and the poorest of the poor ends up in a ditch in the countryside, and the institutions of the State effectively conspired to put her there.
Will anyone in Government or Garda pause for a moment in this cretinous pursuit of the unattainable - a drugs-free, whoreless society - and ponder upon their own, entirely avoidable role in Lynette's terrible end?