The one possibly mitigating factor in the tragic life and death of Lynette McKeown was that as a society we might learn how we had marginalised and victimised that poor young woman.
She was a drug addict, like a great many people from our sink-estate underclass, and because of our insane, unworkable narcotics laws which have created a drugs monopoly for criminal gangs, she could not pay the high prices which resulted. So she went on the game. She became a prostitute, selling her body to those appalling men who cruise Benburb Street looking for sex.
But, of course, the plying of her trade in a public place was a criminal deed; moreover, she had to do it in such a public place, because An Garda Síochána closed down Dublin's brothels, where she might otherwise have worked in safety. Many if not most of these were run by women, which is as it should be. But the effect of the Garda operation against safe-sex houses was to flush the girls out on to the streets, and into the warm and loving arms of male pimps. One night last month, Lynette went out to work and never came home. A week later, her naked dead body was found near Eadestown, Co Kildare.
It takes a particular kind of mind to condemn a drug addict or a sex-worker for being what they are but, alas, it is not an uncommon mind in Irish life. Maybe it is that kind of mind which enables our law-makers to contemplate the atrocious conditions of working girls yet accept with apparent equanimity the repeated and remorseless police campaigns which can only worsen the girls' lives.
So Lynn's was an actuarially certain death, in which our democratically answerable institutions broadly conspired. The State created the circumstances in which it was easier for her to be murdered than for other working girls, such as solicitors, accountants or PR-executives. The death of such middle-class women in comparably needless circumstances would, of course, have triggered an uproar from the Council for the Status of Women. But from that august body of females there has been a mysterious and all-encompassing silence both about Lynette's death and about the remorseless process by which sex workers have been hounded by gardaí from the safety of brothels on to the streets. Perhaps it should more properly be called the Council for the Status of Women (But Only Those Who Are Not Whores).
I didn't hold my breath waiting for much support when I wrote about this before, and hence I didn't die of anaerobia. Publicly defending a prostitute is something our gallant band of letter-writers (June Levine aside) is unlikely to wish to be seen to be doing. However, I was sure I would never hear a suggestion that the media should have kept quiet about Lynette's personal circumstances - but in that regard, I was gravely mistaken.
Addressing a legal conference about defamation last week, a solicitor named Catherine Ghent declared that a report in the Evening Herald that Lynette was "a drug addict who worked the streets as a prostitute to feed her habit" was a very damaging statement which violated the dead woman's constitutional right to privacy. The victim had never been charged either with the possession of drugs or with prostitution. The impact on the living, especially on Lynn's 20-month old daughter, could establish for Lynn a post-mortal right to privacy.
In other words, the law should posthumously be able to silence the media about those very aspects of Lynette's life which had helped bring about her end. Thus the legal icing on the law-made tragedy of Lynn's terrible life and death. So, post mortem, Lynn would acquire a respectability in society that was so vigorously and priggishly denied her in life. Instead of being a blameless junkie and prostitute who was hounded by the State, she would be transformed into a convenient female fiction for whom the Council for the Status of Women (But Only Those Who Are Not Whores) could now, of course, freely take up cudgels.
It requires a particularly Irish legal mind to suggest that something becomes a truth only when the law says so, which is effectively what our friend Catherine Ghent is saying. However, such legalistic hubris shouldn't surprise us one bit. Our law-makers meekly surrendered much of their executive and inquisitorial powers to the law practitioners years ago. Moreover, we already have the most oppressive libel laws in Europe, which helped conceal the very skulduggery that those legal gold-mines, our numerous tribunals, now labour so expensively to uncover.
Catherine Ghent's proposal would in effect mean that the legal profession be given even more editorial power over what we read, and that only when court, law and lawyer have validated an allegation may it achieve historical veracity. By which standard Hitler killed no one, Stalin had no hand, act or part in the Gulag, and Gerry Adams was never in the IRA.
Where would Ms Ghent's thesis leave the Birmingham Six? Why, they were not guilty, then they were guilty, but then finally they became not guilty.
Courts don't establish the truth. They establish a series of forensic probabilities which in accumulation lead to a legal outcome - which is not the same thing as truth. The great Niall McCarthy SC, RIP once declared that the greatest injustices perpetrated in our courts resulted from the acquittal of the guilty. Such imperfections might match the often wretched requirements of the legal profession, but the noble bar of history works by other, less evidentially precious standards.