Bertie Ahern will never have any conviction as a politician unless he gets three to five in Mountjoy. On the bright side, the Labour Party's Kathleen Lynch will give him a letter of recommendation for his parole board. Sure, she’d do it for anyone. And that’s what makes me sick.
If you’ve never heard of her, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, or the sheriff of Nottingham, you’ll soon hear of her in song and legend. The TD for Cork North Central wrote a letter vouching for the character of constituents of hers, the parents of a convicted rapist. The son, Trevor Casey, was sentenced on Friday to 13 years imprisonment for the rape and sexual assault of the two teenage sisters of his former girlfriend.
Kathleen's brain must have been totally scrambled. On one level, sending a letter to a Judge who is sentencing a rapist of young girls is stupid, ill-conceived, and insulting. On the other hand it's even worse. It's dangerous, meddling and seditious, and it seriously compromises the separation of the legislative and executive powers of the state and it jeopardizes forty years of progress in women’s rights and the rights of victims of sex crimes.
Given her fame as a pop star Women's Libber and darling of the Irish Left, Ivana Bacik’s silence is notable. Her silence, however, is nothing when compared to the deafening screech of nothingness coming from Labour boss, Eamon Gilmore.
Labour is the oldest party in the state. It’s the one not borne out of the arbitrary lines drawn in the civil war. It has an ideology. It’s the party of James Connolly, Jim Larkin, Michael D. Higgins, Mary Robinson, that guy from the Phoenix Park scandal...okay, so they’re not perfect, but at least they could pretend to know right from wrong.
As usual, there was no demand for Kathleen Lynch's resignation. No public example making. No press conference saying that Labour doesn’t tolerate its TDs being dumb shits. The Labour leader couldn't even manage an angry note scrawled on the back of a beer mat from Toner’s Pub. Everybody wanted the issue to go away, just like Bertie wishes Des O'Neill would vanish.
By behaving like all the other hard-necked chancers in Leinster House, Kathleen Lynch, lobbed a grenade at her own party's already wobbly credibility. The Gilmore gang are now in serious danger of a second rate rehash of Ahern and his ten years of Shyster-ism . Right now, too many politicians behave with the moral instincts of a sewer rat. A Bit of straight thinking from them, before it's too late, might just trick us into thinking they stand for something resembling decency.
Besides, this is a clear moral issue. Do those who committed the worst of crimes deserve to be “got off the hook”? Or should the legal system be let do its work so that rapists will get their comeuppance.
