Our friends over at the Journal compiled a brief but detailed report yesterday on the case of one Mark McAnaw, who has been remanded in continuing custody until March, when he will be sentenced for the harassment of three female Sunday World journalists – Nicola Tallant, Amanda Brunker, and Deirdre Reynolds.
Of note in the report is the lengthy record of Mr. McAnaw in being a threat and a menace to women:
McAnaw has a number of previous convictions and was jailed for nine years for raping a foreign student in Donegal in October 2010.
He was convicted by a jury in 2012 of orally raping and sexually assaulting the student.
McAnaw also has a 1989 conviction for kidnapping and convictions for assaults causing actual bodily harm from a Derry court in 2011.
He also attacked a woman in her home days after they had gone on a date together in April 2018.
In this incident, he was armed with a large kitchen knife when he forced his way into a woman’s home.
McAnaw received a sentence of eight years and four months for this in June 2023, backdated to 2018 when he went into custody.
You’ll note a few things here: Mr. McAnaw was sentenced to nine years imprisonment in 2012, meaning that he should have been due for release in 2021. Nevertheless, he was a free man and able to go on a date with a woman in 2018 – a mere six years after being jailed for nine – and then able to attack her with a knife in her home.
You’ll note too that he received an eight year sentence for this crime when he was finally sentenced for it, but was again at liberty to harass women in 2023.
I often write that the purpose of the justice system appears to be somewhat misunderstood by the people responsible for administering it: The reason we have prisons is so that the public might be protected from people who are a threat to their safety. The Americans understand this, which is why the average sentence for a rape in the United States is sixteen years – with many offenders receiving much longer terms than that. There’s a simple statement of fact to be made here: Had Mr. McAnaw been convicted of his 2010 crime in literally any US state, he simply would not have been a free man six years later and able to commit another.
One reason this is all so very, very annoying is that there’s a cottage industry in Ireland around bemoaning sex crimes and demanding that the public take more of a lead in preventing them. The airwaves are full of Government-funded advertising about sex crimes: Young men are targeted with television ads about revenge porn, consent, and more. The airwaves regularly host discussions about the dangers of predatory men.
All of this would be fine, of course, were the state doing its part.
In the case of Mr. McAnaw, we have the perfect example of how the state – not the public, the state – fails to protect women from predatory men. Mr. McAnaw has a long and established record of being a threat to the safety of the women who encounter him (and in the case of the Sunday World journalists, women who barely know him). He is now 52 years old, so we can say with reasonable certainty that efforts to rehabilitate him in prison have not worked thus far, and that he is unlikely to become some kind of new feminist man after he gets his next early release (as he surely will).
Here’s a case then where the state has identified, without any hint of a dispute, a man who is a real and live threat to the welfare of women in Ireland. And yet, having had him in its custody, the state has decided on multiple occasions to release him back into the general population without him having served the sentence imposed upon him by the courts. That is not even taking into account the fact that the courts arguably imposed very lenient sentences in the first place.
Try raising Mr. McAnaw’s case with a politician and you will get absolutely nowhere, because they will say one of two things: Either that they “cannot discuss individual cases” or that “they respect the independence of the judiciary”. Both those statements are true, but utterly irrelevant – but journalists and opposition politicians are either unwilling or intellectually incapable of challenging them.
The facts are simple: Ireland is a democracy governed by elected legislators. If those legislators wished to change the law to keep people like Mr. McAnaw in prison for much longer terms, then they could. There is absolutely nothing stopping the Oireachtas for legislating for a mandatory 30-year sentence for rape, in the same way that it long ago legislated a mandatory life sentence for murder. The fact that Mr. McAnaw and men like him regularly walk free from prison while still physically capable of and psychologically eager to commit more crimes against women is a political choice, not a judicial one.
In this case, the Gardai did their job. In fact they have done it multiple times, by catching Mr McAnaw and bringing him to justice. In fairness to the courts, they did their job too, as set down in legislation, by sentencing him within the sentencing guidelines. The prisons, in granting him early release, did what the Government expects them to do.
The people who failed in this case are the elected Governments who have presided over this system, which fails in its basic purpose. The reason we have a justice system is to keep the public safe from those who pose a danger to them.
On a very basic level, the Irish justice system – as exemplified by this case – is not fit for purpose. But the Minister for Justice still gets to pose as a feminist.
Such is the world we live in.