IN THE prison at Arbour Hill this week lies a young man, surrounded by men who have raped and abused children. This man is not himself a rapist. He has not deliberately abused anybody. He was himself raped through much of his childhood by an adult cousin. But he is a prisoner in a jail where the only treatment which is given is to sex-offenders.
There is no available treatment for rape victims. And this man will spend the rest of the year in jail, surrounded by men who have raped, and who are receiving treatment; he has not, and is not.
But David Kerins is doubly disadvantaged. He is - or was - a garda, and as such does not belong to the victim classes. It is true that during a fit of madness, be assaulted a woman; and the second strand of his misfortune is that he did not assault just any woman but the daughter of a US senator and a friend of the US Ambassador, Jean Kennedy Smith.
David is not friendless. His family have stuck by him and he became engaged to be married earlier this week, and I know from the response to an item on Radio Ireland last week that many people sympathise with his plight. They and his family know that absolutely no cause - other than a vindictive and politically correct feminism which reduces the world into stereotypes of male aggression and female victims - is served by David spending another day in jail. His imprisonment is seen as a frivolous and wholly unnecessary proof that our courts care about women, especially American women.
Facts not disputed
The facts of this case are not in dispute. David got drunk with an American policeman this time last year, during the visit of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy to Dublin. He returned with the American to a flat in Dalkey where the American was staying. Having helped the American's wife put the policeman to bed, David went berserk, assaulting the woman, and also assaulting two young women he found upstairs, tearing the top off one of the girls and smearing blood from his cut hand on the girl's back.
Throughout, be kept asking, "Where is he? Where is he?" I speculated last week that it was the act of putting the American to bed which triggered his fit, but I have since been told that David thinks that his surge of madness might have been sparked off by the American accent: the cousin who raped him was American, and had come to Ireland to escape trouble. So. We are back to America again. The man who raped him was American; the woman with the powerful connections whom he assaulted with such dire and inescapable consequence was also American.
Fled to South Africa
There is much to this story we do not know. David has no memory of the fit of madness, which ended only when over a dozen gardai arrived and were able to subdue him. He stupidly fled to South Africa, but then voluntarily returned. Of the total of 26 cases heard when he sought bail - cases which included charges of rape and murder - his was the only request for bail which was rejected.
Because he did the decent thing and pleaded guilty to the sexual assault, little evidence was presented in court about the broader circumstances of the evening. The guilty plea is puzzling: for how can he be said to have had the mens rea at the time to be guilty of any crime? And David that night was motiveless, insane, and barking mad, and the struggle to subdue him was so violent that he needed hospital treatment for the injuries which occurred during it (in addition to other, self-inflicted injuries which resulted from his smashing a vase and an electric heater in the flat).
His attack on the women was not out of desire for sexual gratification. It was a random, purposeless insane deed, of the kind that Dr Brian McCaffrey told the trial court was a common enough reaction to the sort of abuse David had suffered when he was nine.
He was buggered repeatedly when he was nine. Nine. Do you remember nine? Do you know any nine-year old children? Go and look at a school playground. Set your eyes on a group of under-10s on the hurling pitch. Look at your nine-year-old niece or nephew, son or daughter, and imagine that gross violation being inflicted on that young body, that blameless mind, not once, but repeatedly, on pain of death. That is what an American did to back in 1974 in his home in Sligo.
David did not seek revenge and he has not tried to take the law into his own hands. He was not like the young man in Wexford who calmly and deliberately murdered his father who had abused him, and who last week walked free from a court. David's mistake was a) going motivelessly mad b) being a male who attacked two American women. Had the perpetrator been a woman who had been buggered repeatedly in childhood, do you think that woman would have been sentenced to three years' imprisonment for doing what David did? Had the victims of his madness been Irish and male, rather than American and female, do you think the case would have gone to court?
Justice and decency
If you had been the victim, and you learned what had happened to David, would you really have been interested in ruining his life further? Would you not say: Justice and decency cannot be served by imprisoning this man? For his behaviour was outside himself; it was beyond his control; and was unrelated to the normal intellectual and physical motives for crime.
What he did will not be remedied by imprisonment. No doubt the young Americans were exposed to a truly terrifying experience, but punishing David more will not undo that terror. What is done is done, and only a cruel culture of sexual vindictiveness would seek expiation by creating more and purposeless suffering.
Who will stand by David Kerins now? What gardai have the courage to defy the US/feminist lobby? What politician will have the decency to declare that David has been uniquely victimised? By any standards of decency, merely the public knowledge of the rape he suffered is humiliation and punishment enough. It is time to let David Kerins free.