Trial by media puts society in the dock
By John Boland
Saturday May 28 2011
I seem to be more troubled than some readers about the now-routine practice of trial by television. Writing last week about the Prime Time Investigates probe into the taxi industry, I expressed my unease at the singling out of an African man who was double-jobbing as a Dublin bus driver and a cabbie. Was he the only person in [broken link removed] engaged in such practices, I wondered?
Accused by one emailer of being a politically correct bleeding heart, I incurred the wrath of another for appearing to condone the fact that the person in question was putting the safety of passengers at risk, which wasn't my intention at all. I merely felt that the programme's expose of a couple of individuals who have never been charged or even arrested for offences alleged by reporter [broken link removed] seemed invidiously selective.
This week's Prime Time Investigates (RTÉ1) adopted the same name-and-shame approach -- and the same tactic of cornering the offending person with a camera crew and a reporter armed with a microphone.
In this case, though, I shouldn't have felt unhappy with the techniques being employed -- after all, the subject was clerical paedophilia by Irish missionaries in [broken link removed], which should immediately forfeit any sympathy for its perpetrators.
Yet something still niggled.
Although there was no doubting the sincerity or honesty of the distressed young Africans being interviewed, none of the priests named as abusers has been convicted of any crime and most of them haven't even been charged.
That may be the grievous fault of a system that allows clerical authorities -- from the papacy down to heads of religious orders -- to cover up sexual crimes by its members, but it also allows the media to act both as police force and sentencing judge, which seems to me a troubling outcome.
As if mindful of this unsatisfactory situation and of the fact that the film's thrust mostly depended on unproven accusations, reporter Aoife Kavanagh prefaced the individual stories by mentioning "allegations" of abuse and rape, though she then proceeded to speak of them as unarguable facts. And they probably were, though is "probably" good enough when a priest who's confronted by her outside a Galway church and accused of the sexual abuse of a young Kenyan woman denies any knowledge of the woman in question or the crime with which an RTÉ reporter is charging him?
It's a vexing question. I'm well aware that the clerical crimes with which we're all now familiar might never have come to light if it weren't for the diligence and tenacity of crusading journalists, and it would take a very blinkered person not to see that if clerical sex abuse was rife in [broken link removed] it was almost certainly even more unfettered in Africa, but even those accused of paedophilia are entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Or is that unsayable?