Ladies, you’re TDs, so some decorum please
THOSE of us of a certain age will mostly remember the late Dún Laoghaire TD Monica Barnes as a passionate champion of women’s rights. In her time in Dáil Éireann, female TDs were in very short supply and, along with the likes of Nuala Fennell, Gemma Hussey and Máire GeogheganQuinn, she was a pioneer.
Barnes was vocal in her opposition to the Pro-Life Amendment but she flew the flag for equality on other fronts. When she entered politics, cervical cancer was a shameful secret because, in the eyes of a puritanical Church, the disease was penance for promiscuity.
The law on rape was only changed to include marital rape in 1981, the first time she ran for office, and the rejection of divorce in a referendum later in the 1980s reflected the prevailing view of marriage as a vital form of protection for dependent wives and children.
Nowadays, those antediluvian notions can be seen for what they are and women expect equality as a given. Granted, things are not perfect but it’s doubtful there’d be so many women in the Dáil now without figures like Monica Barnes whose powers of persuasion helped trigger an often slow-burning movement for change.
She was a large and jovial woman whose engaging charm often hoodwinked unsuspecting adversaries into believing she was a pushover.
Her Dáil colleagues, though, knew differently; she never gave an inch to diehard conservatives like Oliver J Flanagan.
YET for all Barnes’s impatience with antiwoman prejudice, a mammoth bulwark to progress compared to the Lilliputian hurdles of today, she never in public upbraided her rivals, poured scorn over them or subjected them to dripping contempt.
To my knowledge, she certainly never behaved like some of the members on the Oireachtas Health Committee who savaged the HSE’s Tony O’Brien and the medics in charge of the cervical testing crisis last week.
Deputies Kate O’Connell and Louise O’Reilly can be impressive at times, but their dramatic showboating in front of the HSE showed them in a poor light. They clearly fancy themselves as fearless feminists but, while they shrieked about the scandal being a women’s issue and railed against men being in charge of their health, they ironically sounded more like Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton.
Like Trump, they appealed to the lowest common denominator, concentrating on scoring media soundbites rather than on the far harder, but more worthwhile, slog of actually researching issues around cancer screening.
Questions about whether the errors in reading the smears could have been prevented – and about the emphasis on accountability in the HSE – went unasked in their eagerness to fume on behalf of ‘the women of Ireland’ and sigh rudely when hard facts or medical information threatened to disturb the seamless flow of their vitriol.
The stroppy behaviour made Cork’s Margaret Murphy O’Mahony, and even Ruth Coppinger, seem paragons of civility as the former tried to find out more about the practical provisions for women, and the latter tried to resolve the suspicion that bargainbasement prices earned the US labs their CervicalCheck contract.
THERE is no excuse for this latest HSE crisis, particularly the dreadful way women have been kept in the dark. But there has to be an explanation for how a culture of incompetence and cover-up created the debacle. Our well-paid deputies have a duty to discover it. They are expected to hold public bodies to account, an exercise normally achieved through the power of reason. Any loudmouth on the street can shout insults at Tony O’Brien. We don’t need them in Leinster House, and certainly not on a taxpayerfunded salary of more than €90,000 a year.