Voices
This is a tale of two women. One the victim of racism, the other the victim of rape. One hounded by the tabloid press, the other traduced by the ultimate quality newspaper. A bi-racial woman spectacularly failed by the royal family. A raped child spectacularly failed by The Guardian newspaper.
It’s hard to believe that this week fifty years ago, women of all colour and creed braved blizzards on the streets of New York and London (and a metaphorical blizzard in the Late Late studio in Dublin), marching to bring women’s rights in from the cold.
Accordingly, the first weapon trained against victims is incredulity followed by denial: “They are making it up.”
Meghan Markle and Máiría Cahill might have expected some sisterly support as they battled powerful forces. Yes, Meghan’s home team cheered loudly, but apart from Regina Doherty, no woman in Irish public life spoke for Máiría. It adds injury to insult.
Racism and rape are the toxic fulcrum on which much of our world pivots. How we handle these horrors is how we should be judged – morally, mentally, societally. Each in its own way is trauma, not just in the immediate, but ancestrally. It’s easy to think that because we have movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, that everything has changed. The events of this last week tell a different story. We’ve come a long way, baby? Have we?
Racism and rape are marked by one common feature: the consistent denial of their existence by the very people who never have and never will experience them. Accordingly, the first weapon trained against victims is incredulity followed by denial: “They are making it up.”
When Meghan Markle claimed on Oprah that a member of the royal family talked about what colour her children’s skin might be, the reaction from sections of the British media was disbelief. Not disbelief that someone in the Royal family would do that, but disbelief in the literal sense – they did not believe her. Then Piers Morgan said what many commentators implied. He wouldn’t believe a word she says. Not about her mental health issues, not about her experience of racism. Now we know that Meghan Markle’s complaint to the CEO of ITV was heard and Morgan has left the building. And OfCom, the British broadcasting regulatory body, took the complaints about him very seriously indeed. Something at least.
Which is more than can be said for Máiría Cahill’s case. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, the very organisation which should have been protecting her – the presumptive setter of standards in media – was the very one turning the knife.
It is very possible that there are people who don’t know the latest developments in Máiría Cahill’s story because RTE, the fount of news for most Irish people, studiously ignored them until Newstalk took it up ten days after the revelations about former Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade.
In a nutshell, Máiría Cahill, a member of a prominent Belfast Republican family, at the age of sixteen was repeatedly raped by an IRA man. On reporting the matter to a friend, she was subjected twice to IRA kangaroo courts, and on one occasion confronted by her rapist, who denied it. In 2010, she waived her anonymity in a Sunday newspaper and in 2014, the BBC Northern Ireland Spotlight programme did a documentary on her case, after which she was trolled unmercifully by Sinn Féin/IRA.
There were complicating factors in her legal case, (as there are in many rape legal cases.) That her credibility is unassailable is clear from the investigation conducted into it by Sir Keir Starmer – now leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition – which excoriated the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service and resulted in her getting an apology from the Chief Constable. Furthermore, the Police Ombudsman revealed that, although they continued to deny it, Sinn Fein had held an investigation into her abuse, suspended the perpetrator, and facilitated his exit from the country.
She became a victims’ advocate and was nominated by the Labour Party to Seanad Eireann.
Shortly after the documentary, Greenslade, the Guardian newspaper’s media columnist, published a column questioning her motives in going public. He said the BBC Spotlight programme had been too quick to accept her story and that she had an anti-Sinn Féin agenda.
Then almost two weeks ago, Greenslade revealed that for over thirty years, while holding down senior editorial positions in British newspapers, he had been a secret supporter of the IRA and its campaign of violence against the British, and the unionist population on this island. In short, he was a double agent. Here was no mere Sinn Féin sympathiser, especially as we might understand that term in 2021. He had made his peace with the IRA’s murderous campaign.
His column on Cahill in 2014 was a shocking smear against a rape victim and several high profile chroniclers of the Troubles weren’t afraid to say so. Malachi O’Doherty conveyed as much in comments underneath The Guardian article where he hinted at his (Greenslade’s) agenda, Eamonn McCann called it ‘ignorant, contemptible and a disgrace to journalism’ and Ed Moloney denounced it.
Figuring Greenslade’s agenda out wasn’t hard for journalists on the ground: having written for An Phoblacht for years under a pseudonym, by 2013 Roy Greenslade was writing under his own name.
But the huge courage it takes for a rape victim to go public was ignored by The Guardian. Extraordinary when you consider it brands itself as liberal, just, and compassionate (they give journalists from other groups masterclasses on trustworthiness.)
Máiría Cahill sent a solicitor’s letter.
The big question is why did Greenslade’s editor at The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, treat Máiría Cahill in such a callous and cavalier fashion. Why did The Guardian under his tutelage so spectacularly fail a rape victim?
It’s a question which is very pertinent to the Irish public and body politic right now because Alan Rusbridger holds an important position on the Future of Media Commission set up by the Government last September. The four men and six women on that commission are in the business of setting standards for the rest of the Irish media. And all week Alan Rusbridger has wriggled at the end of a hook whose claws pierce many levels of accountability in the treatment of victims.
And the Commission as well as the relevant minister, Catherine Martin, have backed him, despite the fact that his apologia pro vita sua runs the gamut from ignorance to negligence.
He says he didn’t know of Greenslade’s political leanings, though Greenslade was writing openly and under his own name in An Phoblacht long before he penned the smear piece on Cahill. This was well known in British journalistic circles. Besides the politics of Northern Ireland are not virgin territory to Rusbridger. He tells us that as part of a peace process exercise in trust he met with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
He says he didn’t read the article. Despite what readers assume, it is absolutely true no editor can read every line of his newspaper, though most newspapers have a collegial line of senior editorial executives whose job it is to alert the editor to unsafe copy. Allowing for failures there too, there is one fact I thought to be irrefutable. Legal letters are always brought to the editor’s attention. Except in The Guardian where apparently a solicitor’s letter from a rape victim was not deemed suitable for the editor’s attention.
Rusbridger says he had a lot going on. Things like international news and developing the digital strategy of The Guardian (he didn’t quite say saving the world, though his peace process story implies it.) Yes, Alan Rusbridger knows all about the digital revolution in journalism. In retirement, he sits on the Oversight Committee of Facebook.
And yet, despite his knowledge of the corrosive power of disinformation on the internet, he let Greenslade’s lies about Máiría Cahill sit unflagged, unchallenged. Every time anyone Googled the name Máiría Cahill, the Roy Greenslade piece discrediting her came up. All those years he let that sit there. Seven years of besmirchment.
This is the man telling Irish journalists how to practice journalistic ethics.
It is probably fair to say he will not be advising the Commission on the basic standard for reporting or commenting on victims of rape and racism, the first principle of which is unless you’ve walked in a victim’s shoes, you do not understand.
Rusbridger should have apologised in 2014. This week an apology was dragged out of him in increments. Instead of “attaching” himself to The Guardian’s apology and issuing addendums, he should issue a simple apology in human terms. If this is beyond him, he should cease forthwith from his role shaping the Irish media of the future.
Let me suggest something which might be acceptable.
“I, Alan Rusbridger, deeply regret publishing the article. I cannot possibly understand the horror a rape victim suffers and I have been thinking a lot about the limitations of my own understanding and privilege in this area. And my own unintentional complicity in denying a rape victim a voice, in the same way we all must own our own unintentional complicity in being part of a racist society.”
It would be a good template for the Commission. Carelessness risks retraumatising. For victims of racism and rape that can mean flashbacks, depression, obsessive thoughts, anger as well as the psychic pain of guilt and confusion. And there are few exceptions.
Incredibly, there are those who say Meghan Markle is not a victim because of her privileges.
Coverage doesn’t have to be about race to be racist: the British tabloids repeatedly pitted her against Kate Middleton, always deploying a double standard and with a nasty subtext of painting her as a bully. The Tale of the Tears tells it all. For years, it was reported that Meghan had made Kate cry. But the Royal family – and undoubtedly the royal correspondents – knew the reverse was true: Kate had even apologised. But nobody, not the family, not the correspondents, ever attempted to put the record straight. Treatment like this could drive a saint to violence.
Privilege doesn’t protect you from racism. The peace process is not a reason to harbour IRA sympathising journalists. Saving the world does not preclude respecting the suffering of a single victim. And feminists, if no longer oppressed, should not forget the atmosphere in which their forebears fought the good fight.
The stories of Meghan Markle and Máiría Cahill reflect the shocking reality of our world back to us. It turns out to be a black mirror.
