Slugger O'Toole

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Latest comments from Turtle (see all)

Turtle has commented 4 times (0 in the last month).

1. Comment on 2005 Liam Adams is still working (unknown his MP brother)in West Belfast and talking to the press…
   on 22 December 2009 at 2:55 pm

   I agree that we need to know what the RUC and social services knew, and what happens in the general case. However this is not an easy issue. Parents had their children taken away on false allegations in England and Scotland around about the same time period, undoubtedly doing damage to the child. Some of the, now adult, children are involved in current legal action.

   We need to thrash out exactly what the rights and responsibilities of the police, social services and doctors are, and exactly what should be needed to prevent someone working with children. If failure is not stopping abuse then in many cases social services have failed, but social services at least across the water have also shown the capacity to fail the other way, acting when no abuse has occurred.

   It’s easy to run with the crowd. Real wisdom is difficult on such an emotive issue.

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2. Comment on 2005 Liam Adams is still working (unknown his MP brother)in West Belfast and talking to the press…
   on 22 December 2009 at 11:50 am

   Regards timelines etc, I’m bemused that the RUC positively vetted a person who had statements concerning sexual abuse made against him?

   More needs to be said about this. Per UTV Spotlight the alleged victim and mother reported this to the police and then later dropped the accusation. How far did it go?

   On the one hand protecting children is important. On the other I wouldn’t want to live in a society were a mere accusation would automatically as a matter of course lose a teacher of someone else who works with children their job, no matter how spurious or non-evidence based (e.g. the accused had never even been alone with the child). So there are two sides.

   Did the RUC do their job properly?

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3. Comment on Raging against the machine is a ‘Protestant thing’…
   on 21 December 2009 at 11:58 pm

   So if your motive in downloading Rage Against The Machine was to humble the Sony behemoth, you have failed.

   I doubt that was anyone’s motive though. The motive was to humble the X Factor behemoth, not the Sony behemoth.

   Also none of this really hurts Simon Cowell’s WALLET, unless people who would have bought the X Factor single said no I think I’ll buy RATM instead, which is pretty unlikely. Getting a number one doesn’t make you any money as such, selling records does. So not only did Sony not lose money, they sold a million records instead of 500 thousand.

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4. Comment on “when I learnt that he was a member of Sinn Féin..”
   on 21 December 2009 at 11:37 pm

   Not only that Danny, I noticed last week in the news that a young man 25 was jailed for 2.5 years for downloading child porn.

   Apparently his wedding was called off and he wept in tears at court.

   Thing is, these were not contact offences and the sentence was on a moral principle of wrong doing linked with viewing sickening images and the presumption of a possibility to offend.

   Take Aine’s case, where the victim is plain and the offence real. What happen’s to Liam Adams. No court, no wedding called off, no cancelled family – in fact the exact opposite.

   Gerry Adams must have known fine well that the situation was a sin, it was an actual and active wrong doing, a good Catholic himself apparently, he should know that the actual offence merits custodial sentencing in whatever jurisdiction.

   What do we get out of this comparison, Liam Adams an alleged contact offender running around free, it would seem to carry on and have kids and families unabated, while on the flip side a sick voyeur of child abuse (with no actual contact offences) gets 2.5 years inside.

   This is a problem with criminal law in general. Child porn downloading is provable. There is an evidence trail on the hard drive. While I don’t know the specifics of the case you are discussing, not all child porn is “sickening abuse” really either. At the extreme “tame” end the definition includes pictures that were legally published in national tabloids such as the Sun and the Star 15 years ago (i.e. topless 16 and 17 year olds) or the modern day equivalent produced by “sexting” on mobile phones. Child porn panic has also veered into the bizarre with the like of the Simpsons cartoon case in Australia. Also the well known Wikipedia Scorpions album cover case, which probably led to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people breaking the child pornography laws out of sheer curiosity, who are probably no more likely to commit contact offences than would be a random trawl of the electoral register.

   However possession of the images is relatively easy to demonstrate, so the police can chalk up an easy conviction. I’d like to think that the police would give a slap on the wrist to someone merely with a Wikipedia page in their browser cache but in the current frenzy frankly I’d be worried.

   On the other hand Liam Adam’s case is not so easy to prove, and even now there is the possibility that he is innocent. If we abandon this legal principal entirely, then there is the possibility that any one of us here could post a political opinion that rubs someone up the wrong way such that they track down our identity and accuse us of a child sex offense to our neighbours or coworkers. Do you think that anyone has the right to do that to YOU and that you should be put on the sex offender’s register for a mere allegation? What if you’re a teacher?

   The law’s an ass.

   It has to be really though doesn’t it? Some crimes are more difficult to prove than others. Easy to prove possession of cannabis, hard to prove a rape, which is a crime that could hinge on the mental states of the two people involved and might even be ambiguous if we had CCTV footage of the entire event.

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