Sir, - You reported a protest over violence against women outside the Dail on Tuesday, November 25th, during which Ms Mary van Lisehout of Oxfam claimed the right and responsibility to bring violence against women from behind the cloak of "privacy" and into the full glare of international human rights laws.
I couldn't agree more. Violence against any member of society is indefensible, and when the victim belongs to a weaker group it is doubly repulsive. There can be no right to use violence against a woman, and if a man chooses to do so he should be made answerable for his actions.
Another speaker, Ms Berry Doyle, is reported as saying that "in Ireland violence against women had been perceived as family, cultural and personal, because of the Irish attitude towards family. This minimised and trivialised the whole issue by adding to the barriers of silence already surrounding it." Again, I absolutely agree. No cloak of privacy can cover oppression.
You also report that "the acting director of Women's Aid, Roisin McDermott, asked: `Where are the voices of the non-abusing men?' Women alone could not stop the violence."
Here, I can offer at least some partial answers to Ms McDermott's question. Firstly, men of goodwill do not feel free nowadays to comment on women's issues, because so many feminists have opted to ghettoise their movement and declare men incompetent to discuss issues affecting them. Secondly, some of us remember suffering violence as children, not always at the hands of men. Thirdly, some of us are dismayed by the shining bad faith of the pseudo-liberals of our time who appeal, on the one hand, to standards of decency and humanity in (quite rightly) vindicating the rights of women, the rights of gays and lesbians, and the rights of religious minorities (which personally I rather appreciate, being an agnostic), while at the same time rejecting our bond of common humanity in seeking to normalise, often under the spurious cloak of privacy, the lethal violence of abortion. - Yours, etc.,
Cormac O Cuilleanain,
Blackrock, Co Dublin.