Unless I am gravely mistaken, the only reason why Pablo McCabe and Nora Wall have been released is not because they are innocent of the charge of rape, but because a prosecution witness was called who shouldn't have been. In other words, if the case had gone according to plan, that witness, P.P., would not have appeared in court, there would have been a successful prosecution, and Nora and Pablo could well have been in jail for just about the rest of their lives.
So how many other innocent people have been successfully convicted simply because the prosecution case was not flawed by the inclusion of an inappropriate witness?
"Human error"
"Human error occurs inevitably in any system and in any organisation," remarks the report from the DPP's office to that of the Attorney General, Michael McDowell. "What is important is to take reasonable measures to identify such errors when they occur and to avoid or at least minimise any undesirable consequences which flow from them."
This prompts the question: what does "undesirable" mean? Because the consequence in this case of calling a witness who should not have been called has in the long run been the acquittal of the two accused whom many people are convinced are entirely innocent. Far from blaming human error in this case, we should be grateful for it - and grateful too that a tabloid newspaper published an interview with P.P. in which she claimed she had been raped by a black man in Leicester Square in London.
This accusation, surfacing for the first time in the press rather than in court or during the Garda investigation of the alleged rape by Mr McCabe and Sister Wall a decade ago, vitally affected the credibility of a witness whom the DPP had never intended to put in the dock. The extraordinary good fortune resulting from this series of accidents is unlikely to repeat itself the next time an unjustified charge of abuse or rape is levelled at a religious, or anybody else for that matter.
In other words, though it might not seem it, Pablo McCabe and Nora Wall are incredibly lucky. How many people are there in jail who are not incredibly lucky? How many false allegations of abuse have there been? Where there has genuinely been abuse, how many innocent people have been charged with that abuse? What are the levels of proof which are accepted by investigating gardai and by the courts in such cases? How do they compare with the evidential standards expected in other cases? And is the example, brought to my attention by a reader, in which abuse was "discovered" by a "counsellor" whose diagnostic abilities were based on her skills as a spiritualist medium, typical or otherwise of the standards of proof required in such cases?
Mud sticks
For there is no legal definition of "counsellor"; anyone can set up as one. As we have learned from America, it is possible for "counsellors" to create in the memories of adults either abuse which didn't happen, or to level blame for abuse that did happen on innocent people. There is in effect no "not guilty" verdict in such cases: the mud sticks, and child abuse is the vilest, most stinking mud of all.
We have heard much about States of Fear". This television series provided a necessary insight into the culture of violence and brutality which existed in some religious-run institutions, as indeed it existed through Irish society as a whole. But as children once lived in fear, so today are many middle-aged or elderly religious living in new states of fear - fear of being wrongly or maliciously accused of child abuse two or even three decades ago.
You do not have to look at the Wall-McCabe case to find how baseless charges can be made, or how frivolously they can be viewed. A couple of years ago, a young Irishwoman on holiday in Cyprus accused two Irish soldiers of rape. They were arrested and charged; but an investigating police officer was suspicious of the woman's story, and began to question her closely. Finally, she confessed: she had made the rape allegation up. She was charged with wasting police time and making a false accusation of rape, and she was sent briefly to prison.
Feminist outcry
The truly terrifying aspect of that story was the response in Ireland, which wasn't that maybe sometimes people who say they are victims are not victims at all, and that they might simply be motivated by spite to misuse the law for their own ends. No indeed; there was an outcry from Irish feminists that the false accuser had been imprisoned. The actual offender was turned into a victim, and the processes of justice which had revealed her criminality and had very properly punished her for it were themselves reviled. The conviction sent out the wrong signals, said the feminists: the poor woman should never have been prosecuted. The subtext was: the people whose lives she wanted to ruin were only men.
One might add: or only religious. How many innocent people are in jail on perjured evidence? How many innocent people are in jail after evidence from quack counsellors? How many people are in jail because gardai were not properly trained to investigate such cases? And not least of all, how people are in jail because the prosecution didn't come to their rescue by inadvertently calling an improper witness?