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Gerald O’Carroll replies to Niall Behan’s
piece on abortion in Ireland in the May issue
of Village
Dear Editor,
The trouble with a title like Abortion, A Woman’s
Right is that it takes a line, and that realisation
in the potential purchaser affects his decision to
purchase, for he/she fears bias in the treatment of
all stories, not just that on abortion.
The group-think disallows a range of rights;
those of husbands/partners/boyfriends – includ-
ing the thought that they might have rights to
begin with – are disallowed.
Grandparents have no rights.
The group-think disallows the thought of pain
in those who have had abortion and now devote
their lives to either regret and no healing, or heal-
ing and fore-warning of younger women against
abortion.
You see, mine is no theory talk. Pain is a fact. I
refer not to what happens to the child/foetus in an
abortion (since he/she is said to have no rights) but
to the tangible pain in a world that has presided
over the practice of abortion for fifty years since
the US Supreme Court imposed it on the states
(states have no rights to dissent either).
You see, the group-think prohibits not only
enquiry into the effects on women themselves and
the wider family, but any enquiry into the collat-
eral effects on our world; it also rules against any
terms that would capture those effects, since they
are to be denied.
Does Village Magazine plan an edition on the
hurt caused to women, or to the western world
in particular?
Yes, the concept of rights is a very interest-
ing one.
Yours sincerely,
Gerald O’Carroll
Please address letters to: editor@villagemagazine.ie
Village reserves the right to edit letters. Village offers a serious right of reply or
clarification to readers.
Village is pleased to announce:
An editorial board comprising:
Michael Smith
Editor, Village
Bride Rosney
Former Director of Communications, RTE
Joan Fitzpatrick
Former Director, Clarendon Communications
Niall Crowley
Former CEO, the Equality Authority
Contributing editors:
John Gormley
Former leader, the Green Party
Joanna McMinn
Former Director, the National Women’s Council
Niall Crowley
Former CEO, the Equality Authority
whistleblowers. It is also time to consider the introduction of pre-trial
hearings that would force prosecutors to show their hand at an early stage,
flushing out frivolous cases and reducing delays. Such hearings would deal
with complex issues such as disclosure, admissibility of evidence and dis-
putes over documents and expert evidence before a single juror is empanelled.
There should be a debate as to how prosecutors should be more democrati-
cally accountable. Rudolph Guiliani and Eliot Spitzer both made names from
aggressive prosecutions of white-collar criminals, though it seems clear that
US-style elections would introduce an undesirable majoritarian populism
to prosecution functions.
A law is required, as in the UK, to compel witnesses (as opposed to sus-
pects) to co-operate with serious fraud investigators. 1j3Many powers to
procure co-operation and information from are on the statute books: there
is little evidence that those powers have been used or fully tested. The powers
must be reviewed immediately to see if they can be improved by reference
to the experience of other jurisdictions such as the UK.
Indeed last year Minister for Justice Alan Shatter introduced the Criminal
Justice Act 2011, which sees witnesses being compelled to provide infor-
mation to Gardai across a broad range of white collar/fraud categories if it
might be of material assistance in preventing the commission by another
person of a relevant offence or securing the prosecution of any person for
a relevant offence.
But above all we need a change in the ethos of the criminal justice system.
A rigorous programme of training for judges, lawyers, Gardaí and officials in
the Office of Corporate Enforcement, Central Bank, Competition Office and
Director of Public Prosecutions and Revenue offices must be initiated as soon
as possible. The law on corporate crime and corruption is no longer really
the problem. The problem is not the rules, it is their enforcement.
Nothing enshrines inequality in our society so well as inertia in pros-
ecuting white-collar crime. As a first part of a continuing series we look
[pp24-29] at why bankers and people fingered by our zealous, if over-priced,
tribunals have remained with one or two exceptions free, the beneficiaries
– apparently and so far - of impunity.
