The smell of the mob is the wind, its baying fills our ears. One of the great families in Irish life, having been brought low, is now being brought even lower still. No doubt many people shall not rest until Ballymaloe is burnt to the ground, with the Allen clan in the stocks; and then we can truly sup our fill of righteousness.
As the knowledge of the evil that is in our midst gathers, now is the time to take stock, to think, and to speak very, very carefully indeed. For our knowledge is by no means complete: it grows by the day, the week. And we are making discoveries about the nature of man - and I mean man - that few if any of thought we ever would.
The evidence is there on the Internet. Many thousands of men in Britain, and possibly a thousand in this country, have paid just two US-based websites to watch images of children being violated, raped and abused. If we were to process these accomplices to rape through the courts, our legal system would simply clog up; no other business would be heard, and our jails and our psychiatric services would be paralysed.
This from just two websites. But what of the other, as yet undiscovered, websites dedicated to the violation of children for men's pleasure? And just how many men are there in our society whose sexual fantasies are predicated on this ultimate of horrors? We know one answer to this: unbelievable numbers.
Market demand
They cannot use the excuse that they are passive viewers. They are not. They feed the market demand for infantile violation. Without them and their money, these images would not have been made and these children might well have moved inviolate into normal adulthood. They are rapists at one remove.
The mob is no answer to this. There never was an evil yet which was cured by the blood-curdling sanctimony of the mobile vulgus. For the prating masses, with their singular obsessions, and their primeval lust for blood, are probably as much part of our genetic legacy from the Lower Paleolithic as the instinct to kill children.
The mob is a reversion to the primitive: the semi-cannibal hunting-pack of hominids, whooping through the trees in search of monkey, to be torn limb from limb and eaten. Moreover, many anthropologists believe that among Australopithecines the infanticide of rivals' offspring was a common means of ensuring the success of the perpetrators' own genes. Over the millions of years since then, the desire to kill - with perhaps deadly consequences for the culprit - has perhaps been subsumed by a symbolic murder through rape: unseen, undetected, and consequence-free.
Human nature
Even those of us who had a pessimistic view of human nature - and I am in that number - have been astounded by the discoveries which the Internet has made possible. In a way, it has enabled paedophiles to bait a trap for themselves. They create these visual abominations on the Net, and then volunteer their identity in order to join the party. How lost to lust must you be to behave so idiotically? I touched upon this subject last week, not knowing that Tim Allen was going to come before the courts. I spoke in ignorance then; I speak in ignorance now. The thing rising from beneath our feet is what is called the learning curve. Most of us have absolutely no idea what is going on here; but a minority - a distressingly large minority, almost all male - do know something.
The first thing we must do - surely - is, as quickly as humanly possible, install in our sex-education classes a ruthless taboo on children as sexual images. No young male is to be blamed for finding that he harbours these uninvited, unwanted desires for children. But he must rigorously repress them, and he must be aided in this by counsellors, and if necessary, drugs. For we cannot, absolutely cannot, allow these desires to continue to take physical and commercial form.
The sexual reconstruction of Irish life might seem to be a ludicrously ambitious project, especially when proposed by one who is against the linguistic social engineering involved in compulsory Irish. But the price is different. No-one suffers when people choose to speak a language. They emphatically do when deviant male lust is allowed to roam free.
Taboos are not natural things. They are created by a communal subconscious, directed towards a particular end. We now know that the taboo which most of us thought protected children from premature sexualisation, never mind rape, is no longer enough.
For some men - many men - the libido is greater than the taboo. So we have no choice. We must reinforce that taboo by rigorous education, with the certain assurance that those who ignore that taboo, and that education, face the rigour of a truly merciless law.
Allen family
But nothing whatever is achieved by the victimising of the innocent Allen family, except a further triumph of primitive evil. Myrtle Allen is one of the greatest Irish people of the past century. She gave confidence and inspiration, happiness and pleasure, to many thousands of people; and her daughter-in-law has followed her splendid example.
Those who have cancelled cookery courses at Ballymaloe in protest at Tim Allen's behaviour are as much "passive" members of the lynch mob as Tim Allen was a "passive" abuser of children. To show loyalty to this fine and decent family now will one of the vital tests of how civilised we really are. -
KEVIN MYERS