NEWTON'S OPTIC:I AM WRITING this letter in support of Kathleen Lynch, who is currently on trial in the court of public opinion.
The first point I wish to make is that Ms Lynch comes from a respectable home and while she might regard that observation as judgmental I have no compunction in making it.
As is so often the case, Ms Lynch's problems began when she fell in with a bad crowd. In 1985 she joined a small Cork-based gang with a history, known as The Workers Party, part of which subsequently changed its name to Democratic Left and then again to the Labour Party, due to feuding between rival members.
While I realise that the details of these provincial gangland squabbles can be difficult to follow, the key point to note is that through it all Ms Lynch remained merely a footsoldier and took part in nothing of any seriousness. Her activities appear to have been restricted, at worst, to acts of petty bravado such as criticising sexism in politics, calling for more women in the Dáil and mocking Mary Coughlan in the Dáil for her "colour co-ordinated" dress sense.
It is true that Ms Lynch was briefly regarded as the gang's legal expert. It is also true that in 2006, following the statutory rape of a teenage girl, she called for the existing legislation to be replaced with "a modern law which provides adequate protection for the young". However, I feel that this only shows the extent to which Ms Lynch was out of her depth in comparison to her associates.
Unfortunately, as a result of her involvement with this gang, Ms Lynch did develop an addiction to votes, which as you know is a very common problem in people of her class. She was forced to go cold turkey in 1997 after a community intervention, but by 2002, having moved to another part of town, she was back on the votes again and running with her old crowd.
Votes, known on the street as "Xs", often lead to dependency on State handouts and a downward spiral into the sort of squalid lifestyle that ordinary people find difficult to imagine. You might wonder how someone like Ms Lynch could commit the act of which she is accused but the answer is sadly obvious. All she was probably thinking at the time was: "Where is my next vote coming from?"
Despite her addiction, or possibly because of it, Ms Lynch has undertaken a great deal of community work with the disabled in recent years. In fact, she is so committed to the welfare of disabled people that she has spoken out against defining disability on a "medical model". By equating the actually disabled with the actually not disabled, Ms Lynch has demonstrated a capacity for compassion which I hope she will now find in others.
In asking you to take all this into account, I concede there is no reason for you to take any of my points into account. The intervention of a newspaper columnist in the court of public opinion is something of an ethical grey area.