The media should withdraw from electioneering and go back to doing its job

FOR TWO decades, Christine Buckley has been an ever-present voice in the Irish media. A former victim of abuse in St Vincent’s Industrial School in Goldenbridge, she is now the director of the Aislinn support and education group for survivors of industrial schools.

As one of the key voices of those abused by personnel of the Catholic Church, her perspectives have been disseminated far and wide. Until last weekend, it was unthinkable that any contributions of hers on the subject of paedophilia would be ignored.

Last Sunday, the Irish Mail on Sunday(for which I also write a column) carried an interview with Buckley concerning the recent controversy about the 2002 interview given by David Norris to Magillmagazine.

Having read an unedited copy of the interview, Buckley said that Mr Norris “does not appear to see the moral dilemma in abusing a child, the psychological impact, the emotional impact, the shattered life”.

As a supporter of David Norris in his battles on behalf of homosexuals, she felt a sense of betrayal: “I’m just terribly, terribly disappointed. There’s a huge naivety, I believe, here, and I think that’s the issue I have most concerns with. I don’t think, for example, that David Norris would ever attempt to abuse a minor, but there’s nothing here that would lead me to believe that the whole issue of abuse has actually hit the ventricles of his brain.”

She said that for a presidential candidate to have used what was acceptable – “if it was” – in respect of the sexual “education” of boys in classical Greece as an example for today’s Ireland was “kind of disturbing”.

She said: “There’s no nonsense [talked] about paedophilia – they’re monsters”.

I have closely monitored the Irish media over the last five days and, to my knowledge, nothing of Christine Buckley’s contribution has been reported.

RTÉ did not mention her intervention. The national newspapers, including this one, ignored it also.

Last week in this column I related the facts of my involvement, as consultant editor of Magillin 2002, in working with Helen Lucy Burke in seeking to persuade David Norris to withdraw his comments about paedophilia from the interview before publication. I got just one request for a radio interview about this article – from The Eamon Dunphy Showon Newstalk 106.

I had promised a programme on another station, which had badgered me for several days after my name was mentioned in this connection on RTÉ Radio One’s Liveline, that I would talk on air after my column appeared last Friday. On Friday morning, a researcher from the programme in question told me that my column was “too factual” and that they had decided not to proceed.

If the comments in Magillwere uttered by, for the sake of argument, Michael Lowry, would he have received a supportive editorial in The Irish Times, talking about a “smear”? Would the public be presented with selective and tightly edited versions of his comments, interpreted in the most benign manner imaginable? Would legions of journalists swarm onto radio panels to fret about the impact on his electoral prospects?

Suppose Lowry had asserted that there was “something to be said” for the Victorian practice of sending children up chimneys? Suppose he said that there is “a lot of nonsense” spoken about sending children up chimneys, and that, once a child agreed to be sent up a chimney, we should not become “hysterical” about it?

Suppose he said that prosecuting someone for sending children up chimneys nowadays was more damaging than actually sending the children up the chimneys in the first place? Would commentators seek to persuade us that he had been engaging in an “intellectual” or “philosophical” discussion?

This episode helps us to understand why many people no longer trust the media to do the job it claims to do and perhaps also why newspaper sales are dwindling at an alarming rate. Once, in journalism, you first outlined the facts. Today, this happens only when the facts are useful to the agenda journalism has tacitly, quietly, agreed upon. In the new dispensation, facts signify only what the “regime” desires.

Last weekend, I received an e-mail from a woman, a lesbian, who said that she normally disagrees with me, but not here.

“Hasn’t anyone been listening?” she asked. “Hasn’t anyone learned anything? The Catholic Church dealt with its scandals by first protecting its own, issuing denials, asking for proof, pointing to the excellent record of accused clerics, minimising the seriousness of the issue, arguing the finer points of clerical law and finally blaming the victim or the messenger. The Norris case is being handled in the very same way by liberals who would roundly criticise a cleric coming out with the same statements. I know because I would be one of them.”

Sin é.

Until yesterday, with the revelation in the Daily Mailof another skeleton in the cupboard and then David Norris’s car-crash response on Morning Ireland, the media consensus appeared to be that this story was closed. Now the media must pause, wipe the egg off its face, withdraw from electioneering and go back to doing its job.