Una Hardester should be jailed

This is Una Hardester. She works as a human rights activist. But for most of her short life, she didn't give a crap about the human rights of a life she did her best to destroy.

She has admitted that she wrongly accused her neighbour Michael Feichin Hannon of sexually assaulting her when she was ten years old, even though she had never met the man.

As a result, he has spent over a decade living in the shadow of public approbrium, with the world assuming he was a child-abusing scumbag.

In reality, Una made up the allegations to assist her father who was having an ongoing spat with his neighbours, the Hannons.

Her father is a successful American bit-part actor who left Ireland in 2000 with his family after scoring a payday in 'Saving Private Ryan'. Michael Feichin Hannon, on the other hand received a criminal sentence for his troubles and is, in his own words, 'a shadow' of the person he used to be.

Una Hardester finally admitted to her lies in 2006, claiming that her father had prevented her from doing so earlier. She has not explained how her father was able to do so. Michael Feichin Hannon had his case declared a miscarriage of justice and is now expected to gain up to one million euro in compensation from the state.

I want to know why we, the Irish taxpayers, are shelling out for Una Hardester's lies. I want to know why she is not, as she expects, facing jail for perjury and for her false accusations.

Her father is an affluent man and by all accounts appears to have been a major influence both in this case coming about and in delaying its resolution. Why isn't he shelling out the compo to Michael Feichin Hannon?

We've had this with the banks already. Why is the Irish taxpayer underwriting the mistakes of private entities and individuals?

And why is it apparently okay to accuse an innocent man of child sex abuse?

Una Hardester has spent recent years as a human rights activist. It's such a terrible pity that she didn't give more thought to the human rights of Michael Feichin Hannon, which she herself so egregiously destroyed.

She should be jailed.

Kiwis in serial naming atrocity

For some time I've assumed that the world centre of thick-as-pigshit parents was the United States.

Where else would people saddle their unfortunate offspring with such ludicrous names as these?

But no, it appears that the courts in New Zealand of all places have been working overtime trying to persuade or in some cases enforce parents into giving their children proper names instead of ludicrous embarrassing monikers.

They've been forced to intervene to prevent dumb-as-fuck parents from calling their kids Yeah Detroit, Stallion, Twisty Poi, Keenan Got Lucy, Sex Fruit, Fat Boy, Cinderella Beauty Blossom and Fish and Chips (who were twins).

Somewhat surprisingly, they've gone and let some other people who ought not be allowed to breed to name their kids, despite the names being this stupid: Violence, Number 16 Bus Shelter, Midnight Chardonnay, Benson and Hedges (who are very unfortunate twins).

Personally speaking, I don't see how calling a baby 'Number 16 Bus Shelter' is in any way preferable to calling the child 'Cinderella Beauty Blossom.' Both kids ought to be immediately taken into care, in my opinion.

Like they did with poor 'Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii'. Yup, her bastard parents really did call the child that. Fair play for the judge for making the poor darling a ward of court so that the child could get her name changed.

If ever there was an argument for forced sterilisation in a first world country, this is it. New Zealand, hang your strangely named heads in collective shame, for truly your country has the worst-named babies on Earth.

Unless someone knows better?

Mama don't preach

I've been forced to remove the image from this page due to the phenomenally large number of sad perverts out there who are desperately seeking a view of Madonna's snatch.
Dear perverts, please leave this blog alone, zip up your trousers, go have a nice cold shower and then get a life, preferably one with a proper actual living woman in it. Thanks, JC.


The hypocrisy of some people is truly astounding. Michael McDowell lambasting other politicians over their dealings with the press, for example. Or Catholic clerics who condemned people as sinners for having sex outside of marriage while raping children themselves.

But among instances of spectacular contemporary hypocrisy above and beyond the call of duty, the biscuit has to go to Madonna, for banning her daughter from even seeing boys until she is 18 years old. (The child is currently only ten.)

She is worried that boys might lead her precious little Lourdes astray. Not half as astray as she herself has wandered in the past, I would suggest.

Let's remind ourselves of Madonna's own track record. She began her career as a nude photographic model in New York as a teenager, having gone through a number of schools due to her rebellious streak.

A trained dancer, she first got into music by shagging a musician with whom she formed a band. Then she formed another band with another 'boyfriend', and recorded some songs.

She got one of those songs released and got signed to a record label. She then recorded her debut album and got another 'boyfriend' to remix it for her. Since then she has shagged her way through Hollywood stars, basketball players and even women in an attempt to remain in the headlines.

She has made two soft-porn coffee table books featuring herself nude. She has children by two separate men, and one she dodgily adopted in Africa away from the child's own father.

Her eldest daughter, over whom she is now so concerned, is known as 'Lola' and 'Lolita' in the family home.

But now that she's a mumsy, huntin' and shootin' English lady of the manor who writes crappy children's books that are as risibly poor as her acting used to be, she's worried about the bad influence of boys on her daughter?

Wait till little Lola cops what you got up to, Madge. I can't think of a worse influence on an impressionable little girl than a tarty Mum who made a mint being a professional tramp, then turned into a hypocritical prude.

Mommy knows best, even when she doesn't

Further evidence that courts all over the world believe Mommy knows best, even when she doesn't came with the news today that the High Court in Lahore, Pakistan, has ruled that Misbah Rana must leave her loving, affluent family and return to a bleak housing estate on the Scottish isle of Stornoway to live with her mother.

When I first wrote about this case, I noted how the child had sought her sister's help in fleeing her mother's care, and fervently desired to live with her father in Pakistan. This fact was confirmed again in court, when the child burst into uncontrollable weeping when the verdict that she would be forced to return to Scotland was announced.

It seems that the great social experiment of our era - the eradication of fathers from their children's lives - is continuing apace, even in countries previously seen to have tendencies to rule in favour of fathers, such as Muslim Pakistan.

Despite the fact that Misbah (or Molly as she was once known) has repeatedly acted and stated that she wishes to live with her family and father in Pakistan, where he is an affluent and caring man well respected in the community, it seems that the courts in two countries are insistent on ignoring her wishes.

Instead, they wish to foist her back into a bleak, windswept housing estate that is riven with drugs, and where she suffered racism, into the care of a mother who refused to even attend the hearing in Pakistan such is her love for her daughter.

A mother whose marriage fell apart after she had an affair, a mother who is apparently physically unwell, a mother who is accused of plying her own underage daughter with alcohol, a mother whose son Adam, Molly's older brother, left to return to his father as soon as he turned 18.

How is any of this in the interests of the child? Her interests have been expressed and utterly ignored. Instead, the British media were more than happy to accuse her father of abducting her, and reprinted her mother's lies that she was being taken to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. Thankfully, now that the full truth has emerged, their tone has changed somewhat.

But despite the augmentation of the media coverage, the facts remain heartbreaking. A child must be separated from the environment and family she loves because her selfish mother, who was not even inclined to attend the hearing about her daughter's future, wants her back.

And that's that, because Mommy knows best, even when she doesn't, in the eyes of the law the world over.

Chocolates, Sting Rays and Orla Barry

Via SluggerO'Toole, I notice that a Belfast Professor had his building society account emptied by tech-savvy thieves who spent the proceeds on Thornton's chocolates. That's £15,000 worth of Thornton's chocolates.

They also bought £5,000 worth of Tesco vouchers, because every little helps, I guess.

Now, while my usual concerns about online and telephone banking apply once again - ie it's a scam operated by the banks to keep their overheads down and actually makes your money much less safe that it was when they had branches and human beings overseeing it - I am also bamboozled as to why the thieves would need so many chocolates?

And from BBC, news of another stingray attack on a human. When Steve Irwin, the Aussie crocodile worrier, died, we all were told how stingrays were peaceable creatures that never seek to cause harm to humans.

Well, this latest attack involved a stingray leaping on board a boat to stab the 81 year old captain in the chest, just off the Florida coast.

"It was a freak accident," said the local fire chief. Hmmm. Didn't they say the same after Irwin's death? For peaceable creatures, they've got some blood on their stings. Maybe the loopers who went out and chopped the stings off rays after Irwin's 'accident' were right after all.

This morning, I was tuned into 'Life! with Orla Barry' on Newstalk 106. Not my normal morning listening, I'll freely admit. But it was certainly a revealing insight into the concerns of a modern female radio listenership.

We had what seemed to be a 40 minute discussion about childcare in Ireland, during which not once did anyone make the point that if parents find childcare costs too high, they should consider having less kids or staying at home with the brood they've already produced instead of expecting other taxpayers to stump up.

"Even after the thousand euros, parents still have to pay 91% of the cost of childcare," bleated one creche owner. Erm, what were you expecting? That single, gay and childless taxpayers should pay more tax to keep other people's children being raised by third parties?

This was followed by a slot with a sex therapist about married people not having sex. Apparently, loads of married people in Ireland are having no sex because they're living busy lives and have the kids to deal with too. Not because they're turned off each other.

Perhaps this is why they're really seeking ever more money for childcare, it seems to me. What they really want is an extra hour in bed to canoodle.

However, as Orla has now threatened to foist Irish Times hackette Roisin Ingle upon my delicate ears, I'm turning her off. Ingle's pointless self-obsessed column is indicative of all that's gone wrong in Irish journalism these days.

She was once wonderfully satirised on boards.ie, and how she has the gumption to show her face in public after that, never mind keep writing more of the same is beyond me. Her 'column' makes me so angry that I fear listening to her live would be more than I could bear.

What is the law for?

I read in the Irish Daily Mirror a heart-rending tale of a Belfast mum who has been separated from her only child.

Her bloke took the child and legged it to his homeland of Algeria, whence there is no chance of his extradition.

Dawn Andrew's helplessness in the face of the fact that her child has been effectively abducted from her makes you wonder - what is the law for if it can't prevent things like this occurring, or at least fix them once they've happened?

Anyone who remembers the Chancery opening of 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens will recall the physical and metaphorical fog that surrounds it. The Nineteenth Century British law court was a cold, bewildering house for the common man to find himself in.

In those days, there was one law to protect the rich, and no law for the poor except the aforementioned 'Don't fuck with the money people' law.

Divorce, as another Dickens novel depicts it, was unknown for ordinary people. They had to stick together in shitty marriages even though it was hundreds of years since one of their kings had slaughtered his way through a series of wives, divorcing some of them and even founding his own religion accidentally as a result.

Of course, these days we can get a divorce in most civilised countries. It didn't come through some respect for the rights of the individual, though. It came through the feminist movement, which saw divorce, like contraception and the torching of lingerie, as part of the armoury required to establish the liberty of women.

Now, in many places, women are still no more than chattel. Try walking through Mogadishu or Tehran in a bikini and see what happens if you doubt that. But we don't often hear a lot from feminists about the legal rights of the sisterhood when the sisters happen to be dark-skinned, Muslim and from outside the Western World.

Instead, they're keener on tweaking the laws in Western Europe and North America to protect the rights they gained for themselves and to prevent the overhaul of antique laws here that give them an artificial advantage over menfolk.

As a singular example, I offer child custody. Four decades or more since the countercultural wave of feminism, I still hear no outcry from women about why men don't get to look after the children after divorce or separation.

I do hear them demanding ever more state funding for creche and kindergarten places, where working mommy can leave her little one in the care of a third party all day. And I hear them demanding the house from departed Dad to raise the kids in. Not to mention a stipend of his wages from here to eternity, no matter whose fault the separation was.

But I don't hear any calls for the radical overhaul of child custody and family laws from that quarter. Why? Because the old patriarchal assumption that raising kids is women's work suits them on this occasion.

Now, men moved over in the workplace to accommodate women in the last century. Sure, it took a few millennia. Sure, it probably only happened because women got to vote, then were needed to work in factories because men went to war yet again. Men are dumb, they like fighting and they kept women suppressed for a long, long time. We know this already.

But men love their children, and cannot understand why, after four decades, the feminist movement and women in general have decided to fail their kids by refusing to move over in the home and accommodate men who want to look after their kids.

I've met guys who separated from the mothers of their children and had to move into a one room flat or back with their parents in their Forties and even Fifties because Mom got the house in the separation, because they had kids, and well... kids should go with mom, don't they?

Not necessarily true. There are endless statistics to indicate that children raised by single mothers do worse at school, are more likely to become involved in delinquency, drugs, alcohol abuse and get in trouble with the law. This is not to say that there aren't great people raised by brave and steadfast women on their own. But the trends indicate that raising your kids in a one-parent atmosphere can be deleterious to their upbringing.

But it gets more interesting than that. Not many people realise that children are many, many times more likely to be sexually abused by the new partner of their mother than they are by their father. This fact gets lost in screaming tabloid tales of men who preyed on their offspring.

Even more interesting is that when children are raised with their father as sole parent, they tend to do better than average on all of the same indices that their peers raised by Mom do worse at. Like school performance, academic achievement, avoidance of substance abuse or lawbreaking.

Don't believe me? You don't have to. You should dip into Adrienne Burgess' book 'Fatherhood Reclaimed' and read her research for yourself. A lifelong feminist, she set out to do a number on deadbeat Dads who leave their partners and kids in the lurch to go drinking and whoring.

Instead, she happened across the biggest social scandal in our modern times - the inflicted divorce of children from their fathers by women and the antiquated legal system that still assumes Mom knows best.

Her book should have caused an outcry when it was first released a decade ago. Instead, it was ignored, and we raised a generation of ASBO-achieving hoodies.

And those deadbeat Dads - a term incidentally that is way past its sell-by-date now? Well, in Britain and Ireland many of them are trying and failing to get to see their children, unable to force the mother to facilitate their relationship with their kids even with a court order, because no judge wants to be seen in the press sending a Mommy to jail.

But dare he miss a maintenance payment, there's a court order on his property, and the relevant government agency will be docking cash from his payslip.

Other dads are unable to even establish where their children are, after their mothers skipped the country with them in tow. Thousands spent on detectives and trips to foreign countries looking in vain for their children, trying to guess their height, their look now they're older.

But the mainstream media would rather depict endless stories of distraught Mommies like the one above, who stupidly got involved with someone from a fundamentalist Muslim background and a dusty foreign land, then were gobsmacked when he didn't return to their council flat with the kids after a holiday in Dar al-Islam.

We are told that Mommies are the victims, not Daddies. Daddies are cash cows to be milked and ignored. Except when they are morons in superhero outfits getting in tabloid trouble.
And people wonder why the male suicide rate is through the roof.

We need a radical overhaul of our legal system in this regard or we need to rethink what civilisation means. We are involved in a massive and unprecedented experiment involving the mass deprivation of fathers for children. The early results are in, and it is not an experiment that we should continue.

If this mass shortchanging of the next generation is not sufficient to convince the powers that be to change the duplicitous, overbalanced and secretive legal system on the issue of childcare, then perhaps men should start converting to Islam and take their little ones on an extended holiday to Algeria.

If it doesn't rectify injustice, but institutionalises it instead, what's the law for anyway?