"LOVE, Brett, kill the children for me, okay?" Wickedness sometimes becomes indistinguishable from farce, and that line seems to be pure Joe Orton. Alas, it is not. It was a genuine - request from one child killer, Timothy Morss, to his lover Brett Tyler to bump off a few - now redundant Filipino kids - they had been using for sexual purposes.
It is worth remembering these lines, "Love, Brett, kill the children for me, okay?" because they remind us of the authenticity of evil on this planet, existing alongside love, sometimes so closely as to be indistinguishable - "Love, Brett . . ."
For evil does exist, it is a real thing, and we have met it in Belfast and inhaled its stench in full measure in Beirut, in Bosnia.
There are, of course, evil women; but there are many more evil men, just as men are more everything other than carers. Maybe because men sense our earness to evil they tend to react most strongly to it.
An evil woman like Myra Hindley, for example, is allowed to associate with fellow (women) prisoners in a way which would be inconceivable for a male child killer.
Much in demand
As a sexual partner for a little lesbian nookie, she apparently is much in demand, which might cause us to wonder, and worry, about how intoxicatingly fascinating evil can be, and how near it is to the sexual libido.
For Irma Grese, the sexual instinct and her desire for evil were probably indistinguishable. A concentration camp guard at 19, by the age of 22 she was in charge of the female inmates of Auschwitz.
She used to take pleasure watching operations without anaesthetic, especially the removal of breasts, and had as her lovers two of the foulest men in the foulest epoch this world has seen - the notorious medical experimenter Dr Josef Mengele and Josef Kramer, whose illustrious career spanned Auschwitz, the nearby Birkenau, Mathausen, Dachau and Belsen.
Ilse Koch used to flog prisoners in Buchenwald from horseback. She had gloves made from the skins of dead prisoners and she used to order that new prisoners with interesting tattoos should be put aside for future use as gloves. Grese was executed at the end of the war; Koch was not.
Now what does one do with the likes of the Kochs and the Greses, the Tylers and the Morsses of this world? Normally I am against the death penalty; but with creatures such as these...
Conscienceless sadists
Tyler and Morss, the murders of little Daniel Handley, are wrongly named paedophiles. They do not love the children. They hate them, as Grese and Koch hated their victims. Tyler and Morss are paedophobes, conscienceless sadists who planned the abduction, rape and torture of nine year old Danny very carefully.
Would the world be a better or worse place if such men had gone to the gallows instead of to life imprisonment? It will probably cost the British taxpayer some £400,000 a year to keep these fine fellows in jail for the rest of their lives, which could easily last another half a century. Possibly you could think of no better use for £20 million or so; I can, just about.
One could say the cost is irrelevant; and it is, until a child dies because there isn't enough money for a dialysis machine or an old person festers in bed for want of a hip transplant. Yes, that's a simplistic equation, but most of us function at a fairly simplistic level, and even simplistic questions deserve serious answers. So is it right to take the life of a convicted child killer in order to save money?
The question sounds barbarous because it is barbarous; but that, of course, is the nature of evil. The only response society can make to evil is an evil of some kind; we know the prison cell is built and maintained at a cost, resulting in an injustice somewhere else the unbuilt old people's home, the unheated school.
Execution is simply judicial murder. Evil always begets an evil of some kind, as we are no discovering in the rawest possible way with vigilante lynch mobs in Dublin.
Tyler and Morss were caught in part due to the efforts of that fine priest Shay Cullen, of whom the Irish Catholic Hierarchy is no doubt justifiably proud. When the Tyler Morss house was raided, three children were found to be living there - possibly the children Morss had in mind when he sent his charming billet doux to his loved one.
The trail led back to England and to the poor dead abused child, Daniel Handley.
Daniel Handley was nine when he was murdered, the same age that a certain young altar boy in Dublin was when his paedophobic parish priest, Father Patrick Hughes, began to rape and abuse him, sometimes nearly killing him, and his silence was assured both by Hughes's priestly power and by pornographic photographs which Hughes had taken of him.
Sent to another parish
This rape and abuse continued for four years before the Dublin archdiocese found out about it. Hughes was not charged, not imprisoned, not punished, but merely sent to another parish. Last year the victim received £50,000, paid from Hughes's own resources; but as for Hughes himself, where is he?
In America, where the Dublin archdiocese sent him. Why is this man immune from the law? Why can he get away with brutally violating a little boy? Why has the Dublin archdiocese done nothing to impose the rule of law on this wicked male factor?
How much money has been used in covering up the trails of worthless scum like the creature Hughes, has been spent on keeping Hughes out of the clink? How many other boys did Hughes abuse and violate, how many other lives did he ruin? And why has the Department of Justice done nothing to bring this paedophobic rapist to book?
Before we get self congratulatory over Shay Cullen and his war against child abuse in the Philippines, these are questions about child abuse in Ireland to which we should be getting answers.