Prime Time Investigates - will this exposé of a collapsed child protection system have any effect?

With children left at risk, there is little hope for change

Taoiseach Brian Cowen has told the Dáil that new Minister for Children Barry Andrews will be following up with the HSE the findings of last night's RTÉ Prime Time Investigates programme on children at risk, says this story on RTÉ. (Scroll to the bottom of the RTÉ story for a link to the programme).

But the Health Service Executive and its predecessors, the health boards, have known for years and years that the child protection system is in collapse. Barry Andrews can whistle Dixie for all the good it's going to do. And on tonight's follow-up he was doing just that, informing a sceptical nation that our child protection services are 'cutting edge'. That's the HSE line and the old health board line too - all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

For as long as this amoral organisation is running child protection services we will get nowhere. The job just must be given to an independent body with its own statutory underpinning and funding. How many children must be destroyed or die before this happens?

Quite a lot, actually.

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School retreats, 1960s Jesuit-style

Days of silence at Manresa House

The Tubridy Show this morning featured school retreats which seem to be very pleasant affairs involving boosting pupils' self-esteem and all that sort of thing. Ryan Tubridy even mentioned allegations about a retreat which resulted in several pregnancies - and frankly I think someone was pulling the wool over his eyes on that one.

I went on a school retreat in the late 1960s when the Christian Brothers in Naas took us up to Manresa House, a Jesuit-run retreat centre in Clontarf.

All I remember is that:

(a) We were not allowed to talk for three days.

(b) Each morning at breakfast we listened to someone reading the lives of the saints on tape.

(c) Every night a gaunt man in a soutane burst into our rooms trying to catch us using transistor radios.

(d) One classmate had a crisis of some sort and was sent home. This was never explained.

(e) A priest who came in to give us a talk declared when we stood up on his arrival that "When I enter the room, boys, you don't stand, you kneel." He then went on to roar and shout about a girl in a miniskirt whom he had seen on the bus. Something to do with her tempting boys to "destroy a temple of the Holy Ghost." She being the temple, of course.

That's it. God bless you all.

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The DUP - change of leader, change of hairstyle?

Peter Robinson with small animal on top of head (left) and traditional look (right). Still likes great big specs though.

What is it with men and hair? We adopt a hairstyle and stick with it for far too many years while the women are changing their look every six weeks. Consider Peter Robinson, soon to be leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. That sticky-up hairdo looked just about modern when he adopted it and it was certainly an improvement on his traditional look. But it's reached the stage now where it looks like a small, distraught animal perched on top of his head. When he takes over from Big Ian, I hope Peter will fall in line with the rest of us who have reached a certain age and opt for the number two haircut until, well, death. And as the number two is favoured by large loyalist chaps in teeshirts it should give Peter street cred as well as getting rid of the wee, spikey animal.

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Dublin's Gay Pride Parade teaches blogger a lesson

Watching the Gay Pride Parade in Dublin yesterday I learned something about myself and something about gay people.

I had gone into town to get my Mont Blanc fountain pen repaired when I was stopped in my tracks by Gay Pride. The last time I went into town to get something repaired was Last year when I was stopped in my tracks by the aftermath of a Republican riot. Like most Irish people I will pick Gay Pride over those green gobshites any day.

Anyway, the Gay Pride parade had its usual quota of the flamboyant, the colourful and the outrageous. But 90 per cent of the participants looked like such ordinary, rainy-day people that I found myself thinking "They're not gay - they're only here for a laugh."

So I learned I had a prejudice whereby I expected gay people to be startlingly camp and that some part of my mind thinks that if you are "ordinary" you can't be gay.

What I learned about gay people is that 90 per cent of them are as far removed from the camp scene as are heterosexuals.

Does the camp scene suit heterosexual society by portraying gay people as odd and marginalised? Is it we straights who are most entertained by camp-ness? And how many gay people grind their teeth in frustration when they see the feather boas, the fake tans and the blonde wigs on the television news?

Current or former partners kill two women a week in the UK

Roughly two women a week are being killed in the UK by current or former partners, according to this article in The Guardian. This represents 46% of all female homicide victims, as compared with 5% of male victims. The article is on the background to a new British Asian film, Provoked, on the subject of domestic violence.....

Lying low

Just Like A Man is lying low until next Monday 12th March (things to do) but there's a good discussion going on about this entry if you want to get involved in the meantime.....

Guys: why hide from Karen?

Speaking to students at a seminar on stress at the Law School attached to the Law Society in Dublin last night, I was struck by the absence of men in the attendance. The student body is made up of roughly equal proportions of men and women but the attendance was over 90 per cent female. That men experience stress at least as much as women is obvious but we still seem less willing to come out of the woodwork and say so. Anyway, we had a valuable evening with Karen Ward (right), a holistic therapist who runs the Rhiannon Clinic in Dublin and who is also a presenter on RTE's Health Squad who spoke on nutrition and exercise; with Brother Richard Hendrick, a Capuchin Friar working in Dublin in the areas of youth ministry, meditation and holistic health; and myself on mindfulness and the pressures we impose on ourselves through unrealistic expectations. So expect the next wave of female lawyers to be more chilled out than their male colleagues.....

Vista - a guy thing?

Reading on Wired the other day about the underwhelmed response to the launch of Vista, the successor to Windows XP, I wondered if it's exclusively men who read this sort of stuff. How many women will you see staring lovingly at the compute magazines in Easons? Not many - in fact, hardly any, ever. My conversations with women on this topic suggest that to the female of the species a computer is something you use to do specific things like work, buy airline tickets or communicate with friends. But the computer itself carries no allure whatsoever for them. Men, on the other hand, look at a computer and see a world of possibilities - it's a sort of magic box. Which leads me to wonder if a world in which the woman's view predominated would need one new operating system after another and ever more gigabytes of RAM? Or would we be happily working away on, say, Windows 98? And would we be one iota worse off? Probably not. Having said all that, can I just point out to all the guys reading this that you can see screenshots of all Windows operating systems from Windows 1.0 here. Drool, but don't let the gals see you doing it or, well, they'll snigger.....

Celebrity Big Brother: sensitive men, tough women

As Celebrity Big Brother trundles along in all its dubious weirdness, it's noticeable that some traditional stereotypes are absent from the programme. Certainly the most sensitive person on the set is a man, Jermaine (right) and the other men seem far closer to the sensitive than to the tough end of the scale. All the tough guys on the programme are women - Jade (who is undergoing bullying by media since her eviction), Jo and Shilpa for example. This Celebrity Big Brother has been mighty unattractive but at least it's challenging stereotypes.....