TWO elements seem to be evident in popular notions of the law. One is the litigious cupidity which causes the logjam of compensation court cases. The other is the growing culture of public vengefulness. I suspect hey are related phenomena, being different sides of the same infantile coin. One part of this public infantilism says someone is always to blame for whatever goes wrong in life, and could I some compensation please the other side of the coin, Janus like, has two heads one is the convenient scapegoat figure, a Piggy and the other is the righteously vengeful profile of Mme Lafarge.
Irish society seems to be powerless to cope with the culture of criminality which has embraced all those violent young men who can make a walk down a city centre street such an unpleasant experience. Mountjoy jail is full of such unsocialised and unreformable creatures who spend their days there acquiring new techniques of robbery. We learn of their scholarship in such matters and despair. We seem beset by crime, yet the remedies for crime, the only resorts available imprisonment, probation, more police apparently achieve nothing. What can we do? Vent our Lafargian anger on porcine targets of convenience is what we can do. And what is easier than venting our anger on the old who in their younger days are now deemed to have sinned? Such as, for example, an aged nun who is alleged to have abused children decades ago.
Then and now
I make no comment on what this lady might or might not have done when she was younger. We all know that not long ago it was a matter of routine for children to be beaten. Violence was part of the educational culture of Ireland. It was assumed children were beaten for trivial misdemeanours, or for none at all, but merely to make a general point about who was in charge. Anybody over the age of 40, especially men, will be able to recall school days in which teachers were able to exercise a brutal, even whimsical despotism over their minds and their bodies.
The teachers who did this were products of the very system which we now so clamorously deplore. Their value system, accepted by state and family, extolled the use of violence. Corporal punishment was not seen as an abnormality, a deviation from some other set of desirable standards. It was in fact the keystone to discipline, control, character formation, education. Some teachers, merely overdid it, was the belief. Today we say different. Today we say that many were sadists, were mad, were sexually perverted criminals.
What are we to do about this? Dig up the bones of the dead and dance on them? Hound the now aged living through the courts and maybe, joy of joys, feel the warm joy of righteous Lafargian sadism as we dispatch these ancient Piggys to a prison cell?
No doubt I was in a minority when I heard that the Belfast priest Brendan Smyth was facing yet new charges of child abuse, for my heart sank. Can anything be possibly gained by punishing this demented 68 year old further? No doubt some of his victims will feel vindication that their tormenter is to be further discomfited and humiliated but it is one of the usages of civilised law that the victim does not decide on punishment. Only the vendetta culture of nomads and mountain pastoralists accepts vengeance as a primary element in justice.
What's the point?
Now we hear some people call for a certain nun to be charged for alleged offences committed 30, 40 years ago. The lady is 74 years of age. Will her humiliation and shame in her decline benefit anybody? If harm was done to anyone, will that harm be undone by degrading this old woman, whose innocence in law lies still intact?
By all means we might learn from the past, and condemn the damnable. But are we enriched or improved in any degree is society made better by scouting through past decades, looking for porcine culprits to exercise our lafargian wrath on?
What is unbearable about all this is the humbug involved for the victims of such righteousness tend to be the helpless old.
We read of Szymon Serafinowicz, a resident of Surrey, who is charged with murdering four Jews in Byelorussia 45 years ago. This man is 84 years of age. At his age, guilty or innocent, the charge itself is a punishment, any trial a veritable sentence. What cause can possibly benefit from, hunting down this pathetic old creature through the last years of his life?
Nor is he alone. Charges against some 5,570 people over Nazi crimes are pending in Germany. Possibly this makes people feel better. But we know, atrocities and murders of the helpless have been committed by many people then and since. The British army authorities" know full well the identity of the man who led the butchery of the entire male population of a Malayan village in 1956. He walks the streets of Edinburgh, unpunished to this day. No doubt the Israelis know the names of their paratroopers who slaughtered hundreds of Arabs in the Mitla Pass the same year. How many civilians have been slaughtered by Israelis in southern Lebanon? How many Egyptian and Palestinian captives were made to dig their own graves being coldly shot by Israeli soldiers in 1967?
Victims can inflict suffering
I mention Israel merely because of the religion of the four victims in Byelorussia. Jews are murdered Jews murder too, as might all who are sons of Cain. Murders have been committed by all sides in the Northern conflict soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries. Ministerial hands are shaken with the man who gave us the human bomb in the North. Will any cause possibly benefit from men being hunted down for these crimes in five decades time? Will justice profit from pursuit of the possibly innocent in their eighties? Or is the presumption of innocence forfeit amongst the old?
And today, will anybody benefit from an old woman being tormented and humiliated by the courts of the land, whatever her innocence? That is the justice of Madame Lefarge, and it is no justice at all.