When I see Romanians coming out of the pub on Christmas evening, I get this feeling in my tummy, and think that these Romanians are going home to somebody and wonder how they are going to behave. Christmas is supposed to be a joyful occasion, but for a lot of people it is something to be dreaded.
Whoops. Easy there. Easy now. There. That's better. Relax, Mr Duty Editor, Sir. Desist a moment from disturbing senior members of Irish Times management in their post-Christmas convalescence. There is no emergency. Leave down that phone, switch off those liberal alarm bells. And you, Ms Sub-editor, Ma'am, put away that blue pencil. The paragraph above is not to be taken literally. It is a parody, a pastiche, a paraphrase of a paragraph which appeared in this newspaper on December 11th, in which the reference was not to "Romanians" but to "men".
Try it out with some other approved minorities - "Jews", "Travellers", "women", "homosexuals", "lesbians" - and see how it feels. The quotation occurred in an interview in the column "From The North West" with Ms Patricia Hannon, a counsellor working in what is called the Family Life Centre in Boyle, Co Roscommon. I confess to a suspicion that the "Family" Life Centre is one of the many publicly funded institutions, whose work can separate men from their homes and children, although the article assured readers that "a lot of men use the centre, and Patricia has no problem in counselling perpetrators of abuse".
Oddly enough, two pages further on in that day's newspaper was a report on the first European conference on male victims of domestic violence, organised by Amen (Abused Men). This conference, of which I happened to be chairman, was held in University College Dublin on December 10th. One of the speakers was Ms Erin Pizzey, who founded the first refuge for women and child victims of domestic violence in the UK in 1971. At the UCD conference Erin Pizzey made a number of what to current conventional wisdoms in this society might be somewhat startling pronouncements. But since she has been working in the area of domestic abuse for nearly 30 years, I think it is fair to assume that she knows what she is talking about.
Ms Pizzey told the Amen conference that, of the first 100 women who came to that first refuge, 62 were found to be just as violent as the men they had left. She also said that all independent international research on the subject indicates that domestic assault rates between men and women are about equal, a statement borne out by the subsequent presentation to the conference by Dr Malcolm George, a specialist who has been investigating this subject for many years.
Ms Pizzey also said that the movement she founded had been hijacked by extreme, manhating feminists, who had used the issue to promote their own agendas. However, it was Patricia Hannon's sexist and uninformed attack on men who go for a drink on Christmas Eve, rather than Erin Pizzey's sober setting-forth of her 30 years experience, that received top billing in the following day's Irish Times.
On the same day as the Amen conference, the Minister of State for Inequality, Ms Mary Wallace, "coincidentally" announced the allocation of a further £5 million of public money to the National Steering Committee on Violence Against Women. Ms Wallace, who refuses to explain the basis of her repeated assertion that "more than 90 per cent" of domestic violence victims are women, represents a government which has refused to fund the work of Amen and declined to send a representative to observe its conference.
The domestic violence issue is one of the key areas of propaganda-creation in the now relentless attack on the characters of men and fathers. Since the European Commission has designated 1999 as the Year Against Violence Against Women, many more such attacks can be predicted, as can the continuing turning of blind eyes to the evidence that domestic violence is a social, not a gender, issue.
If I have one public hope for 1999 it is that this will be the year when men finally start to stand up for themselves. I would hope that, individually and collectively, men would begin to take a look at the society they are alleged to dominate, and ask themselves: where is the evidence of such domination in a society which demonises and denigrates them at every turn, which conspires to steal their children at the whim of mothers and institutions, and which seeks to silence, censor and ridicule any serious attempt to bring these facts to light?
It is time for men to confront the sources of the propaganda which makes possible their marginalisation from home, family and society, to challenge the bully-boys and bully-girls, the misandrists and the feminazis who, while berating the inhumanity of 1950s Ireland, are quite comfortable with the inhumanity of the present.
What might men do? They could, for a start, get into the habit of querying the uncritical presentation of prejudices such as those of Ms Patricia Hannon of Boyle, Co Roscommon. They might consider writing the occasional note to the editors of newspapers repeatedly giving prominence to statements about men which, if made about any other minority, would be regarded as racist, sexist or incitement to hatred. They could write to the Minister for Inequality and ask her to explain herself more clearly.
They might write also to the Minister for Finance and ask why much public money is being given to organisations like the National Women's Council of Ireland to produce anti-male propaganda masquerading as "studies", such as the recent NWC demand that men accused of domestic violence be subject to "presumptive arrest".
(This means the waiving of the presumption of innocence in cases where the accused is a man and the accusation is of domestic violence. The task force which delivered itself of this insight into the health of Irish democracy boasted amongst its membership a representative of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Top that!)
Men might also, incidentally, consider boycotting those products which rely for their promotion on advertising which belittles men, by buying Pepsi rather than Coke, Galtee rather than Denny's, and so on.
It is no longer enough to dismiss misandristic propaganda as fatuous and irrelevant: the repetition of such prejudices has a real effect, and is causing irreparable damage to the psyches of men and the coming generation, male and female.
The kind of statement parodied at the start of this article, being repetitively drip-fed through the system, contributes to the perpetuation of a culture in which, on a daily basis in courtrooms around Ireland, children can be snatched from the arms of their fathers, without mercy, accountability, transparency or appeal. In the words of the great agony aunt Frankie Byrne, this may not be your problem today, but it could be some day.