Carol Hunt of the Sunday Independent in Ireland (www.unison.ie) is, I think, rather like John McCain.
It isn’t that she doesn’t care about male suicide.
She does.
It is that she just doesn’t get it.
She mentioned my book “Preventable Death” in a piece on Sunday 7th September 2008.
She spent most of the column fulminating about the cover design.
Now I can no more take the credit for that book cover than I could a Rembrandt.
As our American cousins would say ” he hit it straight out of the park!”
I did say that I wanted the death certificate with cause of death ” feminism” on it. However the rest of the design and how my idea was brought to the cover was all the designers.
The reason I wanted such a mocked up death certificate on the cover of preventable death was that it summed up the central thesis of the book.
Interesting there wasn’t a single relative that I interviewed for the book-female or male-who complained about the book cover.
Feminism is indeed in the dock over the hundreds of our young men every year who die by their own hand.
However so many in public life owe their position to loyalty to that world view that even heaps and heaps of young male bodies every year brings them face-to-face with their very own Lord Denning moment.
To finally come around to the proposition that everything they believed about men, women, society and all of human affairs since their adolescence through university education and o0n into their professional lives-to believe that all of that was wrong.
That all of it was based on a nonsensical ideology.
That is such an appalling vista for them that it is better that these young men continue to die just as the Birmingham Six were sent back to prison in 1988 rather than Lord Denning have to face up to the reality that the entire English criminal justice system fitted up six innocent men simply because they were Irish in 1974.
Male suicide in Ireland, that body count of hundreds of young men every year, is the innocent man quietly incarcerated without a voice.
This is a huge miscarriage of social justice.
It is becoming more difficult for feminists like hunt to remain silent on the male suicide issue.
What we are witnessing in Ireland is an entrenched ideology, in social policy power, fighting for to retain its privileged position.
It isn’t a pretty sight.
