The fallout from Cathal Crotty’s suspended sentence for an unprovoked assault on Natasha O’Brien in Limerick in 2022 continues to reverberate. Intense scrutiny has focused on the Defence Forces, which informed Government this week that 68 soldiers in its ranks have been convicted of crimes or are currently charged with criminal offences.
An earlier report from the Defence Forces is understood to have contained a much smaller number of cases – believed to be about 20. This was queried by the Government, leading to the revision from the Defence Forces containing the new cases.
On Monday, Arthur Beesley had reported that a Naval Service officer is still a member of the Defence Forces almost a year after he pleaded guilty to a violent attack on a former girlfriend that left one of her eyes permanently displaced. It’s a story that has prompted several columns in our opinion section. On Tuesday, Fintan O’Toole wrote that Crotty’s suspended sentence was yet another example of how Ireland’s judicial system was failing women.
“We have ended up with a distorted system in which hundreds of people go to jail for non-violent offences and the non-payment of fines but violent and dangerous men go free. This is the precise opposite of what the public wants,” he wrote.
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Crotty picked on the wrong woman, Justine McCarthy remarked - “and that is to be his enduring punishment.”
Meanwhile, Colm Keena and David Raleigh profiled judge Tom O’Donnell, who retired this week having delivered the most controversial decision of his long career.
Aer Lingus was the other big domestic story this week. Talks in the increasingly bitter pay dispute between the airline and the Irish Airline Pilots’ Association (Ialpa) broke down on Thursday. The following day, more than 120 flights were cancelled for next week, bringing total flight cancelations to about 390.
The ongoing row is the subject of David McWilliams’s column this weekend. He writes that, while reasonably well-off pilots are unlikely standard bearers for the downtrodden, wages will have to rise to maintain social peace as we enter a new era of industrial turmoil.
In the United States, the build-up to November’s presidential election took a dramatic turn on Thursday night after Joe Biden’s dire performance in CNN’s live debate with Donald Trump raised further questions about his re-election prospects. Keith Duggan was in the studio in Atlanta to witness it all and wrote afterwards that “Biden’s faltering performance spread an immediate sense of alarm through the Democratic Party. On national television, the worst of those private, seldom-spoken fears began to sharpen into something appalling: maybe he is not up to this.”
Elsewhere in our World section, Denis Staunton writes about a Chinese phenomenon: three-minute long soap operas.
Voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls on Thursday in an election that seems certain to return a Labour-led government and to remove from power a Conservative Party that has since 2015 formed a succession of the worst ever British governments. Mark Paul has been travelling across Britain since the campaign began, and this weekend he writes from the Yorkshire constituency of Calder Valley, which has picked the winning party in every general election for the past 50 years.
A change of government in London will inevitably affect Anglo-Irish relations, still recovering from the post peace-process nadir of the Brexit years. In her scene-setter, Freya McClements assesses the state-of-play in Northern Ireland, where 18 Westminster seats are up for grabs.
Vehicle thefts jumped to a 10-year high in the Republic last year, and as Conor Lally reports this weekend, gardaí blame the trend on a mix of “disorganised”, opportunistic criminals and Russian-speaking gangs that dismantle the cars and ship their parts overseas.
In Culture this weekend, two late, great writers are recalled in two fine pieces: Deirdre Falvey’s interview with Brian Friel’s widow, Anne, and Kevin Barry’s essay on Dermot Healy. “Mr Healy passed into another dimension 10 years ago this week but he is still haunting his readers, and in fact he has been haunting us for longer than that. There is an accuracy in his wild fiction that qualifies it as a kind of spiritual reportage on our plight.”
RTÉ has had a difficult year. But its problems are much broader than the gaps in corporate governance exposed by its payments scandal. A strategy document published by the national broadcaster this week underlined the general market pressures that threaten many broadcasters – pressures long worsened in RTÉ's case by a State failure to come up with a sustainable funding model.
But the loss this week of two of Ireland’s most distinctive and best-loved voices, both of them RTÉ stalwarts, was a reminder of the value of the organisation and its central place in Irish life. Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who was buried in Dingle yesterday, was the man who brought joy to summer Sundays. People felt they knew him, writes Malachy Clerkin, and that he knew them too.
Those of us who knew him can attest to the integrity and generosity of Tommie Gorman, a remarkable man whose dispatches from Brussels, Belfast and elsewhere for decades made his one of the most recognisable voices in Irish journalism. Our report from his funeral in Sligo brings out his uncanny ability to make connections with people, while our obituary recalls a life lived at full throttle.
