ANYONE who had a heart would have to weep at the terrible, tragic squalor and degradation of it all. Did our politicians really imagine that the abortion issue had gone away? Did they think that, miraculously, no other cases would emerge which would end up before the courts that the so-called right to travel would be enough to deal with every eventuality?
Whether they believed this or not, they acted as if they believed it. Like the three monkeys, they shut themselves off from reality. They tried to ride their luck, and it lasted for a while. But it couldn t last forever.
And so the story surfaced last week that a 13-year-old traveller girl was pregnant. It was as a result of being raped, we were told. She was in the care of the Eastern Health Board, but there was confusion as to whether a statutory body of this kind could release her in order to travel to England to have an abortion, since abortion is against the law here. It was, legal representatives for the Board contended, a matter for the courts to decide.
Once the first story had been written, it was self-evident that the usual suspects would become involved. It was self-evident that pressure would be exerted on the girl, and on the family of the girl, by Youth Defence and the rest of the anti-abortion mob. It was self-evident that good sense and compassion and feeling for the real victim at the centre of the awful tragedy the 13-year-old pregnant girl would be sacrificed.
The media s role in this was in many ways shameful. The Star set the tone with their headline: I WANT MY BABY. This would have been questionable even if they had spoken to the girl herself but they hadn t. Reading the story it became quite clear that this claim was based on hearsay. And as the week wore on, the evidence mounted that in fact the opposite was the case that despite the pressure which was being exerted by anti-abortion agitators, the girl s parents and even official representatives of the Church, the pregnant 13-year-old herself was firm in her conviction that she wanted an abortion.
By the weekend, the Sunday World was quoting the father in terms that were like a bizarre parody of the earlier Star headline. I want my grandchild, he was reported to have stated. It was just one more emotive line in a saga that had become blood-curdling in its unremitting Kafkaesque bleakness.
The Irish Times too made at least one highly questionable editorial decision, printing a photograph of the two caravans in which the family involved live. The accompanying story was well intended, highlighting the appalling conditions in which the 13-year-old had been living and into which any new child would be brought. But printing that photograph made the specific identification of the family and therefore the 13-year-old herself inevitable and as such involved an invasion of a child s privacy that no amount of rationalisation can justify. It didn t happen in the X case and it wouldn t have happened if a similar saga had been developing around a family in Foxrock. But the same respect isn t required where travellers are concerned that seemed to be the implicit message.
The grim truth is that the media haven t got a hope of getting next or near the truth in relation to a story a tragedy of this kind if it s stuck on the news agenda and becomes part of a feeding frenzy. It is one of the more nauseating aspects of the business we re in, that journalists are required to do this kind of work to put their foot in Lavinia Kerwick s door, as one media correspondent put it to me. Too often the result is reporting that s ill-considered, misleading and ultimately damaging to the unfortunate individuals at the centre of events.
It s awful to talk about someone else s tragedy serving a useful purpose but what s certainly true is that the media in Ireland must now begin a process of serious self-analysis in order to avoid the kind of sensationalism, intrusiveness and manipulability that has been evident throughout the coverage of the case.
Two other things. The money must be found to work with travellers to effectively counteract the appalling circumstances in which many of that beleaguered community live. And finally, no one has the right to impose on a 13-year-old girl that she must have a child conceived in violent (or even statutory) rape not the courts, not Youth Defence, not even her parents. It is vital, above all, that her right to bodily integrity should be fully and finally vindicated.
Any other outcome to the legal wrangling would be grotesque beyond words.
Niall Stokes
Editor