Women's Aid recently trawled through the crime statistics looking for the numbers of women murdered in recent years. They found some 107 over 108 months, and they held a minute's silence for these unfortunate victims outside the Dáil last week, write Kevin Myers.
During their long trawl, they presumably found out how many men were murdered - but of course, they didn't bother favouring us with that petty detail.
That's a pity. How many more men than women were murdered over that time? Four times that number? Six? Eight? For the most interesting aspect of the Women's Aid project is that, almost uniquely, it must have revealed the true male-female ratio of murder in Ireland - and its authors were then able to discard the majority victim-group, and publicise the minority, as if women only were being killed.
How does this process feel? What was it like to have a clear body of statistical evidence about the problem of violence in society, and knowingly ignore and even conceal the greater truth in order to highlight a lesser truth? Perhaps it was done quite unconsciously, much in the way that black victims of violence simply didn't register in the white, apartheid South African mind. Or was it conscious? Did they deliberately choose to ignore the fact that many more men than women are victims of violence, simply because they do actually feel that the life of a man is less important than that of a woman?
To be sure, they have good reason to. Have the courts not consistently given that very same impression? Wasn't Norma Cotter, who cheerfully shotgunned her husband to death in bed, allowed to walk free from the court? Have we not seen courts repeatedly treat she-killers with far greater leniency than he-killers? So, despite the clear evidence that there are women who kill their spouses, Women's Aid acts as if women are solely victims and only men are culprits.
Having given us their fantastical history of the past nine years of violence in this Republic, the girls should now give us their own history of the Northern Troubles. This would deal only with all 326 female victims. There would be no Bloody Sunday or Coleraine Street or Kingsmill massacre or Shankill Butchers' serial-killing, because no women died in any of those various atrocities. Only two soldiers and three police officers died. The Women's Aid history of the Troubles would thus fail to notice the 3,300 men who perished in the Northern violence.
But what is worse than these desperately silly women with their bigoted, pathetic view of the world is the fact their ludicrous displays of sexist, man-hating prejudice are taken seriously, both by the media and the Government. What newspaper or television news would solemnly show a picture of men laying a wreath to commemorate men who had been killed in violence in the past 10 years, in a service which very specifically excluded female victims? Needless to say, Women's Aid - like every other self-appointed, self-generating, man-hating feminist quango - is subsidised by the Government.
As intellectually fascinating as Women Aid's creation of the false narrative of the female monopoly of murder-victimhood is the steadfast, unwavering presentation of all domestic violence as similarly unidirectional. Now, we know that this is not so.
We know that nearly half of all domestic violence is begun by women. Erin Pizzey discovered this decades ago, but this truth has been so systematically airbrushed out of our common perception that all you have to do is mention the term "domestic violence", and instantly the image is conjured up of a woman victim.
Figures to justify whatever fantasy feminists wish to perpetuate are invariably plucked out of the sky. Thus the story the other day that 2,500 women in Mayo, or one in four, are at risk from domestic violence at any one time. What does "at risk at any one time" mean? Where does this figure come from? Can there really be only 10,000 women in Mayo? Does factual accuracy really matter? After all, feminology seem to conjure up whatever statistics it needs to substantiate unprovable hypotheses as apparently clinically as economists are able to measure exports and imports. Yet how does such bilge get reported as if it is authoritative fact? Bernadette Byrne of the Mayo Women's Support Services called for a Government policy of "zero tolerance" towards domestic violence. Ah yes. Zero tolerance; some really innovative thinking going on there, I see. She added that 1,200 women had "accessed our services, and for every obstacle we put in place, the violence is further compounded and challenged". No, I haven't got a clue what she's talking about either.
Is there such a thing as female violence against men in the home? Apparently not. So what are the sisters' opinions of Norma Cotter, who slew her husband in bed? Was that violence? Or was it some kind of gender retributive justice? Indeed, is it possible for women to be unlawfully violent at all? And so is two-barrelled Norma the girls' heroine? The Mayo and Dublin statistical phantasmagoria - and no doubt much else beside which I did not see - were part of the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The UN, of course, is the most corrupt organisation in the entire world, whose employees ran the sanctions against Iraq, and in the process made some of them - and Saddam Hussein - spectacularly rich. Always pleased to be lectured and hectored under the auspices of such a bunch of worthies. Most enjoyable.