I WAS on Inis Meain for a few days over the New Year. It got dark - very dark, to a visitor not used to the island - from about 4.30 p.m. onwards.
As you walked along the windy road people could be upon you, sometimes so invisibly that you only knew they were there by the sound of their breathing. Sometimes footsteps gained on you. Or the lights of a tractor showed a man and a dog coming along the road towards you.
The stars burned brightly in the great black sky, and I realised why I hadn't seen the stars for years. Because I hadn't walked around in the dark, because I hadn't felt safe. I'd forgotten what it was like to move around at night, stopping to look up at the sky.
Two more women battered to death in the last two weeks. Nineteen women killed last year. And the refuges for women only battered - not, this time, to death - crammed with terrified and angry women.
Something goes wrong the man doesn't get what he wants, or perceives some other outrage, and the sleeping giant of his physical strength grunts into life. It can't be easy to batter someone to death. You have to be raging with hate and fury to do it. But there seems to be no shortage of men full enough of hatred to do it.
Men kill women because they can. But when things are equal - when everyone has equal access to handguns, and women have equal opportunities for murder - men still kill far more women than women kill men.
The potential violence of men towards women - the readiness with which they will rape and batter and murder - is part of the context within which the equable and affectionate relationships between the mass of men and women take place. But as far as I know men rarely talk about male violence, or initiate debates on it, or introduce legislation about it, or form organisations to tackle it, or stand as candidates on the issue of it, or attempt to mount big attitude changing campaigns about it as they have done about other life threatening matters.
MEN just do this sort of thing, we're told. If a girl takes a lift home at night in a car with two men in it - two low human beings, fellow creations, made like her of heart and mind and soul - she must understand what is likely to happen to her. No one takes responsibility for this fact, extraordinary though it is.
Men don't. It is shunted on to the agenda of women's committees. Being afraid to go out the door because you are a woman is supposed to be a woman's problem. It is a woman's problem, but its solution is not. Its solution lies with humankind, but primarily with men.
We know more about violence than any humans before us have known. Soldiers have raped in war before, but only now can one sit at home in Ireland and watch on the television Muslim parents weep over their daughter, zombie like in a German hospital, broken by months of gang rape by Serb soldiers. Children disappeared before, but before we can escape it we see the photo of the anguished face of the child who was rescued from Daniel Dutroux's torture cages.
One of the ways one can now imagine Ireland is as a landscape dotted all over with the sites where the bodies of murdered women have been recently found.
Poor Mrs Livingstone in her suburban house in Malahide. The beloved daughter who walked out of her warm bungalow in Portlaoise and whose body was found out in the lonely bog, in a ditch of mud. The public toilets in Loughrea. The path from the bus to the edge of the houses in Blanchardstown. Another murder, and another flag in the map. A boreen winding up a rushy hill in west Cork. And the bright apartments of the new modern Ireland on Dublin's Liffey Street. Their initiation. Their first intimate murder.
Mass blame of men is useless as well as sexist, and deeply offensive to the majority of men who have nothing whatsoever to do with physical violence. However, the majority of men do probably consider women to be inferior to men, and therefore in their deepest hearts estimate women's lives as of lesser value. Such an attitude is enshrined in the religions and laws and social customs of the world.
Men have never combined to assert the equality of women as they have combined against other injustices. The Taliban in Afghanistan are men, and the Islamic enforcers in Algeria are men and the Pope and his clerical servants in Rome, blandly instructing the women of the world to defer to them in decisions about child bearing, are men.
It is hard for women who think of what has been made of the world not to fear men, and to hate their power, on the record of what men have done and do.
ONE may not fear or hate any man just for being a man. But as for men in general . . . I won't read Marilyn French's The War Against Women, for instance, because I don't want to know any more about what is done to the women and children of the world in the prostitution and pornography industries of the planet to take one example.
I wouldn't be able to go on believing that a real, visceral respect for women, which might affect the rate at which they are murdered by men, is possible. Is maybe possible.
A ploy that might lessen the anger involved all round on the subject of male violence would be to excise the word "male". We could attempt to ignore gender and to transpose the whole problem to the plane of civil rights. Relatively powerless citizens (who happen to be women), are being murdered by relatively powerful ones (men). It is in the interest of every citizen to make a determined effort to stop this, and not to write it off as part of human nature - to propose that half the citizens of this State are innately more violent than the other half.
In Canada, apparently, government has not been ashamed to run a huge educational programme calling for zero tolerance for physical violence. It is almost unimaginable that our hide bound and self satisfied Dail would do any such thing. But I suppose there's a chance. Another approach would be to ally this cause to other causes that hinge on the abuse of power, such as cruelty to children and to animals. Another would be to place the murder of women where it belongs, on the spectrum of the denigration of the female that operates at every level from the instant a girl child is born until the male priest officiates at her burial.
Another, of course, would be to bring up your daughters to be as wary of the opposite sex as they would be of savage animals. To switch on their security alarm every time a man - especially a man who has been drinking - comes in the door.
But that's ridiculous, isn't it? And terribly insulting to men? But then - what are our daughters to be told?