Wife Beaters Everywhere, Rejoice! You Have A Get Out Clause Provided By Women!

"Professor Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television'. Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent, Fox News."
- Gore Vidal

By Charley Brady

As a tag-end to last week's report from the bat cave may I offer my commiserations to Sir Robert Geldof, late of Ireland, who has had to drop his appearance fee from €85,000 for an expletive ridden talk on how we peasants should be giving more, down to a humble €58,000.

I don't know about you but I have a huge amount of sympathy for this great man. How the hell is he supposed to survive on such a dismal amount of loot?

The recession obviously affects even the saints amongst us.

May I also sympathise with Bono the Great on his back injury? I know that I was a little bit flippant last week and have been told through emails that this could happen to me too one day.

Sorry to upset you, but I've got a year on him and let me tell you that back pain is no joke.

Still, I nearly wept a tear when The Edge almost became human (as opposed to the robot that he appears to be - I've got a theory that he was replaced by an alien years ago) by almost taking the tea-cosy off his head in order to announce that the Exalted

One COULD have been left unable to walk for a couple of months.

He didn't, though, because that would have left we poor mortals with a vision of a bald man and his lead singer who isn't able to jump around the stage any more because of his dodgy back.

Forgive me, but when I heard that Bono had slipped a disk I just thought: Bejeepers, I can afford to slip one but at his height that would take him down to four-foot-six.

Still, this column feels magnanimous enough to wish him well. Where would we be without him?

Now, if it had been an operation on his tongue and he was just left unable to preach and annoy people then I would be happy out.

It was also pointed out to me by Jonathan in Australia that if he were in the same position he would no more give tax to the Irish government than U2 does. You know something? He has a point.

I never thought that I would say this, but since I see taxpayers' money going to bailing out banks and giving humongous pay-outs to people that are being rewarded for being incompetent at what they were paid a ridiculous salary to do, then I think that he's right.

Let's be honest, Enya does pretty much the same thing and the only reason that I think that she doesn't upset me as much as The Mighty Ego does is because she's a quiet and private person, who doesn't lecture us or tell us how to live our small lives. Good luck to her.

When I think that the money that is being taken from us to pay chancers to the detriment of having a better health care system or making better schools for our kids then my blood boils.

Yes, they may be right to avoid taxes as they seem to go nowhere in this benighted Dire- land; but please, the lecturing is something that most us can do without.

By the way, thanks for the emails following last week's piece on your outrageous cowing down to the Muslim community as regards the appalling idea of building an Islamic Cultural Centre on the site of what was once the World Trade Centre.

I wasn't entirely unsympathetic to the Irish here who had obviously read it on the Internet. Two of you thought that I was making a very bad joke since it has had almost zero coverage here. This alone is a complete puzzle to me but then I realise that most people SEEM to be more interested in the break-up of the marriage between Ronan Keating of Boyzone and his rather elegant wife, Yvonne.

I personally have no interest in the marital difficulties of anyone but if our proud investigative journalists are to be believed then this is a catastrophe of the highest order. Well, at least until next week when another one comes along.

I would have thought that this was their own business and doesn't warrant page-by-page coverage - and not only in those often-maligned tabloids - but then that's just me. I want to read real news.

The lack of reporting here on the New York super-mosque is truly remarkable, however.

Thanks to long-time correspondent Patrick in County Kildare who tells me that he puts this column up on his Facebook but I gotta tell you, Patrick, the day that I sign on for Facebook is the day that I hand in my card for the Luddites' Union. I really appreciate it but I personally still have no idea of how to use half the stuff on my mobile phone.

As a matter of fact I have spent many a fretting hour in the dead of night where I was convinced that my laptop was becoming malignantly sentient and was watching me like a miniature HAL.

Even switching it on today I was coo-ing to her: "Baby, you know I love you. Please work with me here. Don't freeze your screen on me again."

I tell you, a psychiatrist would have a field day with me.

For those of you who were kind enough to like last week's piece I hope that you also read Alicia Colons' one on the Opinion pages, which was on the same topic. I've never met Alicia and we sure don't agree on religion but sometimes we manage to swing from the same political chandelier. Sometimes.

But truth to be told, her piece is far better. I'd like to think that it's because she's a New Yorker and I'm not but - and it kills me to say this - maybe it's just because she's a far better writer.

If you want to read an article from a fearless woman who is better informed and far more passionate then check out the archives. You won't be disappointed. In the meantime...

In between "Britain's Sweetheart" Cheryl Cole and her over paid equally narcissistic ex-hubby, soccer player Ashley Cole and Ronan "I want to be President of Ireland one day" Keating hogging the pages, here are a group of guys that I would cheerfully send to prison for life.

It's not the first time that I've said this, but how can any creature who beats up a woman even dare to call himself a man?

I spend a hell of a lot of time in Ireland wondering if I'm just down the rabbit hole altogether (or as journalist Kevin Myers has memorably called it, "Alice in Eireland") but this one takes not only the biscuit but the whole freaking packet.

Our beloved Health Service Executive (HSE) has given some advice to social workers and healthcare professionals that tells them that, hold on here, if you are being beaten to a pulp by your spouse the best thing that you can do is to stay with him. You know, work it out, get through it because if you leave them then that could lead to " a catastrophic event".

Well, there you go, girlfriend and spouse-beating bastards and pond life everywhere; that's what you tell your stupid bitch the next time that she's trying to cover up that black eye or those broken ribs when she's explaining that she walked into a door-again, she's so fr***ing clumsy, the silly cow - just tell her that it's HER fault and that the HSE agree with you that if she dares to leave you then it could lead to a "catastrophic event".

What? More catastrophic than your children watching you kicking seven shades of purple out of her? And maybe - just maybe - thinking that this is the way that men treat stupid women that have timidly asked the wrong question?

Maybe I've been lucky in life but all of the women that I know would have to be hit once - just once - and then it would be the frying pan across your ignorant brainless skull.

Not according to Women's Aid, who AGREED that not to leave the abusive spouse was great advice because if you leave things might get worse.

Women's Aid director Margaret Martin said: "There is a growing awareness that stopping domestic violence isn't as simple as telling the woman to leave.

"While the risk of staying is very high, simply leaving the relationship does not guarantee that the violence will stop. In fact, the period during which a woman is planning or marking her exit is often the most dangerous for her and her children.

"Fifty-one per cent of women murdered in Ireland over the past 14 years have been killed by their current or former partner, with many killed at the point or after the point of leaving a relationship.

"We also know that almost one-fifth of the callers to our help line in 2008 were experiencing abuse by former partners, including stalking, assault and abuse during access arrangements."

This is coming from a woman.

Jesus H. Christ, is it only me that sees something seriously wrong with that statement?

The latest HSE advice to stay on and get your head kicked in by the thug that you were once in love with is being endorsed by the director of the Woman's Aid group?

Here's a simple question-and why we always have to go around the world to get to the simplest solutions I will never know - "why are these pigs not immediately banged up? I know from talking to decent cops that they're all for that solution, so why don't we just change the law? And I mean change it overnight.

"The period in which a woman is planning her exit..."? Most of these women are so shocked the first time that someone that they love, God help us, bashes them one that it doesn't leave much room for logical planning.

As to the restraining orders, well let's be honest, they're a joke. Why? BECAUSE THESE COWARDS AREN'T BANGED UP IN THE FIRST PLACE! So we're back to the beginning again!

"Fifty-one percent of women murdered in Ireland over the past 14 years have been killed ... at the point of leaving a relationship."

I'll let that one speak for itself.

Or is this bull manure simply because a recent report shows that 154 women with their children have been turned away from refuges in 2009 alone? Ah, now we may be getting to it.

We have the loot to give to the banks but not to the schools, hospitals or refuges that are there to protect women who have literally nowhere else to go.

Now it begins to make sense; so let's come out with a bloody crap argument as to why women should stay with their abusers.

This is a shameful situation; and to the many wife-beaters out there, I hope you read this and see what actual men think of you things.

"The risk of staying is very high, but..." Yeah, that says it all.

That leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but I'll try to sign off on a lighter note.

At the moment I'm thoroughly enjoying the great Gore Vidal's 2006 memoir, "Point to Point Navigation." It's as gossipy and filled with wasp-ish humour as you would expect, but here's just one section that made me smile:

"In Rome I usually found the Jesuits not only congenial but often wise. Not long after Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kracow, was raised by the Holy Spirit to the See of Peter as John Paul II, the Jesuits were ready with a joke. The new Pope addresses God: 'Almighty, will there be a married clergy in my time?' 'No, my son, not in your time.' 'Almighty, will there be women priests in my time?' 'No, my son, not in your time.' 'Almighty, will there be another Polish Pope?' And God bellows: 'NOT IN MY TIME!'

"The Jesuits had done their homework. All the potential reforms that had come out of Vatican II were sternly undone by a Fourteenth-Century Prince-Bishop from Poland primarily interested, like Pius IX before him, in papal authority based on the most literal illiberal reading of the Scripture. The result has been a serious shortage of priests in the United States with ever fewer would-be priests on the horizon while the parishioners pick and choose which of the Pope's commands to obey and which to ignore..."

Of course, little has changed under our new Holy Father.

Reading this blew away some cobwebs and so I dug up from my shelves Fred Kaplan's ridiculously overlong biography of Vidal. I found the section that had amused me years ago. On looking for a home in Ireland:

"Ireland," Gore explained, "was because I'd said, when I spoke out about the Vietnam War, that if the war went on I'd change nationalities. Besides the virtuous motive, the unvirtuous one was that you pay no tax. So I could have made a fortune had I shifted over to Irish nationality, protesting the war and saving my money from the government at the same time. But my man, Charley Haughey, who was the minister for finance, fell from power as soon as I bought the house, and I couldn't get the nationality."

Truly, Ireland's premier crook turns up in the most unlikely situations!

Hope to see you all again next week.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net