It is unlikely that the bones of St Monica will ever be convoyed in honour around this State as have been the corporeal fragments of St Therese of Lisieux. I refer not to the first Monica, the mother of St Augustine of Hippo, but the other Monica, from Limerick: Monica Coghlan the prostitute. She chould be revered by the Church, for her life and her travails are almost proof that there must be a hereafter, where the injustices of this life are rectified, the evil punished, and the good rewarded.
She was, in life and death, the victim of state stupidity, of organised sanctimoniousness masquerading as virtue, of humbug and moral cowardice loudly triumphing over the still, small voice of reason and the gentle promptings of common sense. She was a good woman who loved her son, whom she protected from any knowledge of what she did for a living. The state rewarded her by persecuting her with the vengeful loathing that unrevealed sinners have always shown for the conspicuously "fallen" throughout history.
Moral superiority
If we didn't have prostitutes - and there is no fear of that happening - we would have to invent them in order to make us feel better. There is no other reason why we persecute them so remorselessly, in almost all societies everywhere. They - and the vigour with which we hound them - are the reassurances of our own moral superiority.
The abject failure of the feminist movement to campaign for the decrim ininalisation of all aspects of what prostitutes do - with characteristic vindictiveness, feminists have preferred to broaden the band of criminality to encompass their clients too - merely proves the tenacity of anti-prostitute bigotry. This is so powerful that it reaches into the English language. The worst thing you can call a woman is trollop, whore, hooker, prostitute, streetwalker, strumpet, tart; the politically correct spellchecker on my computer recognises none of those words.
Monica Coghlan was the prostitute with whom Jeffrey Archer allegedly had sex in a London Hotel in 1986. She was the whore who was disbelieved by a libel jury when she pointed him out in court. She was the tart whom the trial judge compared with Mary Archer, of whom in turn he famously and fatuously asked: "Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this, radiance?"
Code of honour
Now, if there were a morality contest between Lord Archer, Tory peer ennobled by Margaret Thatcher, multi-millionaire author, former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, owner of famously grand house, and Monica Coghlan, trollop, streetwalker, whore, hooker and prostitute, it would be a short encounter indeed: our Monica would win hands down. To be sure, given the temptation of the hour, she blinked when she asked for hush money: and in doing this, she broke the code of honour of her profession. But then she had a boy at home to mind, and a bit of money on the side from a man who could well afford it would have spared her some of the deeply disagreeable tasks which she performed for a living.
And perhaps she was motivated by dislike by Archer - in which case, one should applaud her for her discerning taste. As we know, a libel jury did not agree with her, preferring to believe Archer's his assertion that he had offered her £2,000 for no particular reason. He won £500,000 damages from the Star newspaper, which had alleged he'd had sex with her, and she returned to the life of drudgery from which her moment of fame had provided temporary respite. But now she was well known to every police officer, an easy mark and another simple conviction towards the weekly target of arrests to prove how the war against "crime" was being won in London, just as it is being risibly and comparably won in Dublin today.
There is another form of "crime" in which every participant is a consenting adult, namely narcotics. Some drugs - alcohol, cigarettes - are legal, and others - opiates, cocaine, esctasy - are not. Those who consume the legal drugs are protected by the state, which monitors standards and shares the profits. But for reasons which make no sense, other than to feed the rampaging addiction to sanctimony, the state hands over control of "illegal" drugs to criminal cartels, and pursues users with an insensate ardour.
We know that generalised prohibitions of any drugs have without exception failed wherever they have been tried, though aided by the executioner's block in Saudi Arabia, the firing squad in China. But mere failure hasn't stopped state authorities from embarking upon their insane policies of criminalising adults for engaging in consensual transactions: 25 per cent of the male black population in the US will be imprisoned during their lifetimes, mostly for drug-related crime.
Drug addict
Criminalising drugs consumption causes prices to rise and availability to fall; and inevitably, addicts to turn to crime. Last April 26th, one such drug addict raided a chemist's shop near Huddersfield, stealing some valium, temazepan and DF118, a drug used by junkies. He hijacked a Jaguar, which he drove into a little blue Fiesta car, fatally injuring its 50-year-old driver.
Thus did Monica Coghlan, victimised through her life by the law, finally die, her life taken from her by a man who himself was a victim of another insane policy of state sanctimoniousness. Do police officers, in Dublin and London alike, puff up their chests in pride at how they have tormented the Monica Coghlans of this world?
Peace at last, Monica; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.