Gene Kerrigan: Listowel scandal smells of older, shameful Ireland
An individual handshake might be a compassionate gesture, but collectively it sends a vile message, writes Gene Kerrigan
Related Articles
THERE'S a smell of panic coming from this miserable Listowel scandal ("He's not from Listowel, y'know, he's from five miles out the road"). A town that gave us a lot finds itself being judged and prodded and sneered at from afar. A woman finds herself sentenced to an indefinite period of social exclusion within her own town.
And a few dozen people, reportedly mostly older men, queue up in a courtroom to shake the hand of the man convicted of sexual assault -- a communal display of defiance in front of the victim.
Fr Sean Sheehy, one of those demonstrating solidarity, was asked by Claire Byrne on Newstalk, "What about the victim?"
"I didn't know her," he replied.
There's a smell of small-town viciousness, a smell of tribalism ("It must look crazy", a colleague was told by a local farmer, "but his older neighbours would see it as nearly their duty to show support for the man publicly, whatever they might think about him privately").
Above all, there's a smell of an older Ireland that many thought long gone.
This isn't a Listowel problem, Listowel is merely a dramatic illustration of old attitudes that survived our alleged modernisation.
When I was a kid, in that older Ireland, a young woman raped in a laneway behind the local pub was similarly isolated. Little sympathy for the convicted rapist, none at all for the victim. "She went up the lane with him, didn't she?" She therefore tacitly accepted the supremacy of his sexual needs over her right to deny him.
In that Ireland, women belonged to the men they married. A man could rape his wife and remain entirely within the law. He could beat her, safe in the knowledge that the law would shrug.
I remember, in the late Sixties, being part of a Dublin cinema audience that convulsed with laughter when hero James Coburn trivialised rape. It was merely, he said, "assault with a friendly weapon".
A different country, in a different world. It took a generation of tough women to push back, to change laws and attitudes. The fight for equal pay, for the right to sit on juries, the invention of the word "Ms" -- now seem almost side issues in a world where marital rape was legal.
Danny Foley is reported to be appealing his conviction for sexual assault. Fair enough. His friends belittle the evidence of the victim (another farmer: "I wouldn't have had him down as that bad and I knew him very well"). The priest who shook his hand declares there was a "miscarriage of justice". That is not unknown in this country. But it's not enough to say Danny Foley is a nice guy. Let's see the colour of his evidence. So far, it's threadbare.
The young woman chanced upon Foley in a nightclub. He bought her a Black Russian, she took a sip and felt unwell. She didn't finish it. She was feeling dizzy, they left together. She felt bad and by the time they were picked up on CCTV cameras in the car park he was carrying her away.
The image that lingers is that which the police saw when they came upon the scene in the middle of the night. In a distant corner of the car park, Foley crouched over the woman, she naked from the waist down, her head rolling from side to side, semi-conscious and mumbling.
"I came around here for a slash and I saw yer wan lying on the ground," he lied to the guards. "No one arrived. I tried to get her standing." Later, he learned of the CCTV footage of him carrying her. He changed his story, said that she took off her trousers and asked for sex.
There was no rape. He didn't penetrate her. We don't know what he did or tried to do. She gave evidence of repeatedly passing out and coming to. Struggling to stop him taking her trousers down. The jury believed the woman. So did the judge.
There are a lot of smells coming from this country, right now, to do with sex. We live in a country where bishops still resist the truth that paedophiles found protection at the heart of the Catholic Church. Where the State seeks to stamp out teenage sexual activity by sentencing a 15-year-old boy to five years in jail, for having consensual sex with a 14-year-old girl. Where we deny young girls a vaccine to protect them from cervical cancer -- mostly on cost grounds, but also because some adults feel queasy about it. When fear of the cancer-causing HPV virus might protect their immortal souls, why remove that fear?
An individual handshake might be a gesture of compassion for Danny Foley, a man in trouble. And there's nothing wrong with that. Collectively, in court, it was a rejection of his conviction. "She went into the car park with him, didn't she?" Enough said.
There's only one way that's pushing us -- back to the Ireland in which women were too intimidated to speak up, and men acted accordingly.
- Gene Kerrigan
Originally published in
