Natasha O’Brien’s shocking case shows Ireland is still a cold country for women | Justine McCarthy

IIreland likes its women strong, provided they are dead or never lived. It is the ones who walk, talk and breathe who are troublesome. There is hardly an Irishman who has not heard of the sexually insatiable Queen Medb, famous for stealing her neighbour’s prized bull, or of Grace O’Malley, a real-life sea pirate, or of everyone’s darling, Caitlín Ní hUallacháin, the mythical personification of Ireland.

Until a week ago, most people had never heard of Natasha O’Brien. The country went about its business thinking itself modern and progressive, unaware that a 22-year-old soldier had already pleaded guilty in the Circuit Court to violently assaulting her. The 24-year-old was walking home from work in a Limerick pub when she came across Cathal Crotty shouting “faggot” at passers-by on the city’s main street. When she asked him to stop, he wrestled her to the ground and punched her twice more until she passed out. Then he ran away and gloated on Snapchat: “Two to put her down, two to kick her out.”

What happened next has propelled O’Brien into the annals of unforgettable Irish women. At Crotty’s sentencing hearing last week, Judge Tom O’Donnell called the crime “utterly appalling” and then suspended her three-year prison sentence entirely on the grounds that the convicted man had pleaded guilty and that a prison sentence could damage his military career. The case might have ended there, had Crotty not chosen the wrong woman. O’Brien left the courtroom and, with exceptional eloquence, declared that the system had failed her.

Last weekend, thousands of men and women marched in major cities across Ireland to demand justice for victims of gender-based violence. On Monday, the Irish Times reported that a naval officer, David O’Gorman, remained in service for nearly a year after pleading guilty to an attack on a woman so brutal that he left her with one eye permanently displaced. Dublin Pride organisers withdrew the Defence Forces’ invitation to take part, and when O’Donnell retired on his 70th birthday on Wednesday, the traditional ritual of lawyers paying tribute to the outgoing judge had to be cancelled for fear of protests.

When Ms O’Brien was invited to attend Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament), she received a one-minute standing ovation from MPs. The following day, the Defence Forces sent a dossier to Tanáiste (deputy Prime Minister) Micheál Martin, listing 68 other cases of servicemen who had been convicted of crimes or who are currently before the courts.

For most of its existence, the Irish state was a cold country for its women. Founding father Éamon de Valera set the tone with his supposed vision of an Ireland where “maidens dance at the crossroads.” In the decades that followed, as Roman Catholic bishops ruled with a backhanded hand, women and girls were condemned to live in draconian mother and baby homes or work in Magdalen laundries for the offence of pregnancy outside marriage – including rape – while their babies were sold for adoption abroad or used without consent in vaccine trials for pharmaceutical companies.

Ireland resounded with echoes of the Salem witch trials. In the 1980s, a young woman called Joanne Hayes was brought before an all-male state court where the gardaí (police) attempted to justify her being considered a suspect in an infanticide investigation based on the fact that she must have given birth to twins conceived by two children. different fathers and gave birth in two different places 50 miles apart. In a village in the Midlands, a 15-year-old schoolgirl named Ann Lovett and her secret newborn were found dead in a Virgin Mary cave. In the south-east, schoolteacher Eileen Flynn was fired for living with a married man, a decision upheld by the High Court.

The formidable women who fought for Irish independence in the early 20th century were erased from the history books. Women’s representation in Parliament was among the lowest in the world, a likely factor in the 1983 referendum that led to a constitutional ban on abortion. Its enforcement was so harsh that British magazines sold in Ireland had blank pages with ads for abortion clinics in the main editions, yet more than 4,000 women sneaked off the island each year to terminate their pregnancies abroad.

The beginnings of change had begun in the 1970s with the invincible Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, which once took a train to Belfast and returned carrying condom banners to the republic, where contraceptives were banned. Then Mary Robinson, elected as a Labour senator, was a lawyer who fought human rights issues in court over access to the pill and gender equality in taxation. When she became Ireland’s first female president in 1990, many women thought we had died and gone to heaven.

Momentum for change grew as women began to tell their individual stories. When Annie Murphy, an American, revealed that she had had a love affair with the Bishop of Galway and had conceived a child whom he wanted her to adopt, the Church’s hold on Irish society began to relax. This was accelerated by later accounts of priests sexually abusing children and how they were accommodated by bishops.

It took nearly a century, but when Ireland became the first country in the world to recognise same-sex marriage in a referendum in 2015 and, three years later, to repeal its abortion ban in another referendum, there was a sense that the country had finally become tolerant and inclusive.

Natasha O’Brien’s experience showed how wrong we were. The judiciary and the defense forces, two bastions of the state charged with protecting the population, have sent the message that a woman’s safety is secondary to a man’s job. There had been foreshadowing of a threatened regression to the ancient Tír na Fir (Land of Men), with anti-immigrant protesters claiming to protect their wives from “uncontrolled single men”.

Last March, Ireland held a new referendum. This aimed to repeal an antediluvian article of the 1937 constitution which enshrines the work of women in the home. It failed spectacularly. Even though the government botched the wording presented to the people, there was an unavoidable sexist undercurrent in the campaign that mothers should stay at home and care for their children. When the result was announced, some anti-referendum campaigners hailed it as a “victory for mothers”.

This referendum and what happened to O’Brien are a stark reminder that, for women, Ireland has even more prejudice to confront before it can legitimately consider itself the fair and inclusive country it imagines itself to be.

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