As certain as the yolk in the egg is the price one pays for criticising any of the feminist quangos in this country - and if this does us any service, it is to remind us of the powerful current of intolerance that runs deep in Irish society.
This was once rooted in Sinn Féin republicanism and the Catholic Church, and is now most active in dogmatic feminism and doctrinaire liberalism. And though feminism uses different words and social tools from those deployed by the adherents of Rome and Tone, the intention is the same: conformity, acquiescence and abjection.
The latest display of this hysterical feminist intolerance of dissent was prompted by a recent Diary criticising the State-assisted Woman's Aid - there is of course no such thing as Men' s Aid - for its well publicised march to commemorate the 108 women victims of violence in the past nine years. In fact, I hadn't been aware when I wrote my piece that Sinn Féin had participated in this grisly exercise in sexual apartheid - which makes the whole affair utterly surreal.
Was the ghost of Jean McConville, mother of 10, present for this jamboree? What about Caroline Moreland, mother of three, abducted and held for 10 unspeakable days before being murdered by the IRA in July 1994? And was Sinn Féin allowed to be present merely because these women (and many others) had been murdered before the time-span chosen by Women's Aid to select its victims? In that case, no doubt Rosemary West could have been present to deplore violence against women, perhaps carrying posthumous letters of support from Fred West and Peter Sutcliffe.
I expected an epistolary lynching for my column, and the sisters, in all their arrogant, blind stupidity, didn't let me down, God bless their little knickers. Moreover, there was a singular theme which united most letters and which ran: Why is The Irish Times printing such stuff? The writers were genuinely incredulous that their newspaper should carry opinions with which they so violently disagreed. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would have felt exactly the same if he had opened his copy of the Irish Catholic and found an article on the merits of vibrators.
Another common weapon of feminist censoriousness is to dismiss what the girls don't approve of with the R&D argument: that it is a mere rant or a diatribe - why, maybe even both. Such misogyny, they imply, doesn't deserve a cogent reply, but a metaphorical belt from a sisterly crozier instead. And this time round, the crozier was accompanied by the playground sneer: Why doesn't your columnist (na-na-na-naaah) look at male violence for a change? Excuse me, but that - God help us - is what the sisters have been bloody well doing for decades, and with some justification. The streets of Dublin are not made dangerous by groups of drunken young women - though they are often disagreeable enough - but by young men. Males in early adulthood can be extremely lethal creatures, which is why I - me, rather than the letter-writing feminists with steaming coming out of their nostrils, and probably every other orifice - have described testosterone as the "plutonium of hormones".
The need to control of young men was why Jacob devised the patriarchy - not as an instrument of repression of women, but as a means of protecting them from male aggression and male desire. Only an utter cretin would maintain that men and women are equally violent or equally lustful.
Equally, only an utter cretin would maintain that what we see in our streets is a straightforward reflection of what we see in our homes. Domestic violence is radically different from public violence, as Erin Pizzey discovered over 30 years ago. She has often reiterated that only a small majority of domestic violence emanates from men. Roughly speaking, the responsibility for domestic violence is equally divided between the sexes.
But of course, in all their gnashing frenzy, the sisters decline to answer that unanswerable truth, and instead continue to portray victimhood as a one-way street, never acknowledging the men who are beaten and abused by their wives. They don't admit to Gary Cotter dead in his bed, cold-bloodedly shot by a wife who - almost typically - then walked free from a court after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
So, the Sisters of Erin trawl through the statistics and come up with whatever fantastical picture they want, without ever addressing the uncomfortable truth as revealed by Erin Pizzey herself. That is such a monster that they simply ignore it. And when I repeated the figures of casualties from the North - that only one tenth of the victims of the Troubles were women - one sister sneered I had already pointed that out - so why did I bother repeating it?
Well, firstly, do not the sisters endlessly repeat their same refrains? And secondly, it tells us a central and irrefutable truth about Irish society - that even in civil war, terrorists generally refrain from violence against women. So when it occurs in the home it is a contradiction of an almost universal moral consensus. But the sisters, aided by a culture of cowardice in our political and legal classes, have distorted that benign consensus to create a wholly false picture of who is responsible for domestic violence.
That is bad enough. Yet almost worse, in a way, are the sisters' frenzied and vicious attempts to silence anyone who publicly dissents from their malignant, hysterical fantasies. And indeed, one day they might even succeed. But sorry, girls: not yet.