There was a fascinating exchange in the Dáil yesterday morning between the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and the leader of Aontú, Peadar Tóibín.
Referring to the Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, Mr. Tóibín said that she was “focusing on the culture wars and forgetting about the bread and butter issues that are actually affecting so many people in the country”.
In response, the Taoiseach mounted the following defence, as recorded by Jane Mathews for the Journal:
“I’m not sure what you really mean by the cultural wars, but if anyone’s distracted by them Deputy, it’s probably you – not Minister McEntee.”
He continued: “I know Minister McEntee from the time she was working in this building as a PA to her father. I know Minister McEntee, I know what her number one priority has been as minister and it is cracking down on domestic and gender-based violence.”
The Taoiseach said murder and manslaughter statistics for this year show women being killed “by the men they know”, not gang land related crimes.
“That she has made that a priority shows how serious she is about the serious crime of gender and domestic based violence,” the Taoiseach said.
The problem with this defence of Minister McEntee is straightforward, one would have thought: If she is so focused on the problem, and has been during her time in office, then why is the problem getting worse, not better?
Indeed, per the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (a Government funded campaign group), the problem reached new and unprecedented levels this year:
The Government must urgently review its policy on domestic homicide as violence against women has “reached crisis levels in Ireland”, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) has said.
The commission has called for action after an “alarming rise in the number of women killed in Ireland” last year.
Violence against women reached record numbers in 2022, with the highest number of violent deaths since 2007.
In 2022, 11 women died violently and two more have been killed so far in 2023.
It does not speak especially well of the Minister’s competence, one would have thought, that the problem on which she is primarily focused is getting worse and worse, rather than better, on her watch.
That might well be, however, because the Minister is focused entirely on the wrong problem: Bringing a law and order approach to a problem that is ultimately caused not by a lack of policing, but because of the societal changes that this Government is so proud of having wrought.
For example, according to most reckonings, part of the increase in gender-based violence can straightforwardly be attributed to the cultural impacts of immigration, with the institute for public policy remarking earlier this year that “Gender-based violence affects women from all ethnic and social groups but younger women are among those most at risk[ii], as are women who face multiple discriminations and marginalisation due to their ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and immigration status, such as Traveller, Roma and migrant women”.
That is one of the contradictions, by the way, that is inherent to Irish liberalism: You get in trouble if you suggest that immigration is linked to an increase in domestic violence, but you don’t get in trouble if you phrase it in such a way as to say that “migrant women are more at risk”, and that therefore migrant NGOs need more resources to tackle the problem.
But immigration is far from the only problem: It is also self-evident that sexual crimes have risen in line with cultural changes that have led to an increase in people’s average number of sexual partners, particularly at a young age, and in line with an increase in family breakdown, and later and later ages of marriage and children. The Minister has nothing to say about any of this, because we appear to want a society that is entirely free from the side-effects of increased sexual freedom.
In fairness to McEntee, she is not entirely to blame here, except in so much that like every other progressive, she is wrestling with the contradictions of her own ideology: On the one hand, we have a society swimming in violent and degrading pornography; on the other hand, while we are willing to regulate so-called “hate speech” to protect people from dangerous ideas, it would be anathema to attempt to regulate pornographic speech to protect young women and young men from dangerous ideas about sexual pleasure.
This, I suspect, is what Tóibín means by the culture war, which so seemed to confuse the Taoiseach. There is a determination in the Minister to deal with largely imaginary problems that are a hangover from the Ireland of yore – like alleged racism, for which there is little evidence in Irish society – while ignoring the cultural problems that plague the Ireland of today. If she wants to tackle violence against women, then every right thinking person would support her.
But she is not tackling it: It is getting worse. And she, and her Government, are entirely unwilling or unable to come to terms with the reasons why. If they can’t blame the Church, or Irish men, then they become suddenly blind to every other cultural problem we might have.
As defences of the Justice Minister go, this was a weak effort.