Has justice really been done for Phoebe Prince?

The papers are full at the moment of the idea that justice has been done in the matter of Phoebe Prince's suicide. Criminal charges have been brought against nine teenagers, including statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment and stalking.

The New York Times report stated, "The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers."

But one of the shocking pieces of information to emerge from this tragedy is that school teachers and administrators were indeed aware of the bullying and did little or nothing to prevent it. While Prince lived, the crimes were known about, but went unpunished.

Given that some teachers were already aware of the bullying, what would have happened if Prince had reported it to them? Would they have punished the bullies or reported their activities to the police? And if Prince had gone to the police, would they in turn have brought charges, or seen it as a school problem?

It seems that the main reason why these teenagers have been charged is not because they committed crimes of statutory rape and harassment, but because Prince died.

Dublin, then & now

A mother takes a walk with her child along Dublin’s North Wall quay. Both have auburn hair, and the water glistens a deep blue. This is modern Dublin, evident in the woman’s business-suit and the child's stroller, which must be worth several hundred euros.

It’s one of the striking images in the "Dublin, Then and Now" exhibition currently on show at the Irish Consulate in New York. The exhibition brings together images of Ireland’s fair city from 1963, and 2003, clearly showing the change that has occurred in between. The photographs, collected by the Irish American Heritage Museum, will soon tour around the country: on March 13, they move to the Commodore Barry Club in Philadelphia and after that to other Irish centers, possibly touching in at Fairfield Connecticut, Buffalo New York, Mineola and San Francisco.

Chairman of the board of trustees at the Heritage Museum, Edward Collins, says the exhibition is an emotional experience. “People who have a chance to see it should see it because it will move you,” he told me. “It’s a moving exhibit. The photographs are stunning: the way Marvin Koner captured life is very poignant.”

Most of the photos are by Koner and date from 1963. Black and white, they show a city so transfixed in time it could be America in the thirties: street urchins peer curiously at the camera; a father gives his son a taste of Guinness in a pub; an old man sits alone on a pier, pulling a dark coat around him against the cold. The photos show both what Dublin has gained and what it has lost.

The 1963 pictures contrast with nine modern photos by Declan Corrigan. In full color, Corrigan’s photos portray an ubermodern, multicultural city, full of businessmen, clinking glasses, and wealth. They were taken in 2003 at the height of the Celtic Tiger dream.

In many ways the 2003 images are already out of date. In 2010 Dublin is a different city again, consumed by financial anxiety and recurrent scandal. It may be time soon to take another set of photographs that document the changes of the past seven years: the exhibition would be called Dublin Then, and Then, and Now.

[For more information see the Consulate General of New York]

Patti Smith, Ireland and the Catholic Church

Patti Smith is a rocker, poet and memoirist and, having read her memoir "Just Kids," I can also tell you she is Irish -- in ancestry at least. She grew up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and her family was poor; she tells how as a child she would play games with her siblings, taking the roles of Catholic against Protestant.

"We fought the wars of our Irish grandfathers, the orange and the green. We wore the orange yet knew nothing of its meaning. They were simply colors."

When Smith moved to New York, aged 20, she was homeless and a little lost. Soon, however, she found a partner-in-crime, Robert Mapplethorope. He too, was of Irish-English heritage, from a devout Roman Catholic family.

Smith, whose mother was a Jehovah's Witness, famously proclaimed on her first album that "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." Mapplethorpe's mother had wanted him to be a priest, and he struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality. His response to Catholicism was even more extreme.

Smith says, "His dual nature troubled me, mostly because I feared it troubled him. When we first met his work reflected a belief in God as universal love. Somehow he got off track.... He had broken from the Church, now it was breaking within him."

Mapplethorpe went on to create disturbing and extreme images, which were sexually obscene and often visually beautiful.

He isn't the only artist to have a troubled but creatively fruitful relationship with the Church: James Joyce is another (Have you read "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" recently?).

The Catholic Church abuses hardly need extra discussion here, they were terrible indeed. Yesterday, though, Irishcentral's publisher Niall O'Dowd wrote about the good works the Church has done.

Perhaps there will come a time when we'll acknowledge the Church's positive side -- not just in the form of the kindly priests and nuns who did work within it; but also in the inspiration it gave to our artists.

If nothing else it gave them something to rebel against.

Ireland's war on women

You wouldn’t expect a country like Ireland to be accused of breaching human rights. Our little green nation is best known for its rich culture and friendly customs. We’ve never invaded another country or annoyed anyone too much.

But on Thursday the respected international advocacy group Human Rights Watch published a report saying Ireland deprives many of its citizens of their basic entitlements.

The report is called “A State of Isolation.” It tells how the government blocks the way of women who look for information on abortion or seek care abroad.

Marianne Mollmann, women's rights advocacy director at HRW, said such women “are actively stonewalled, stigmatized, and written out."

Today in Ireland, abortion is allowed if a woman’s life is at risk. But otherwise a woman who has one potentially faces a life term – yes, life – in prison.

It’s a good time to recall that the Irish government has not yet agreed to compensate the women who spent decades, some of them a lifetime, imprisoned in the Magdalene Laundries, often for crimes that included getting pregnant or giving birth.

Not that government policy has prevented terminations. Every year thousands of women and girls (7,000 by one estimate) travel from Ireland to other European countries in order to end their pregnancies. Officials may have tried to stop abortion, but all that has happened is that the country has inadvertently outsourced it.

In this sense Irish women have been lucky. The price of a botched backstreet abortion is high: in the developing world 68,000 women die of complications every year, according to a BBC report.

The European Court of Human Rights is currently considering the case of three Irish women who argue their rights were denied because they were forced to abort outside their home state: one was a former substance abuser whose other children were in care; one wished to avoid an ectopic pregnancy (where the fetus develops outside the womb); the third became pregnant while undergoing chemotherapy and feared for her own well-being, as well as the child’s.

This decade has seen a plague of problems afflict Ireland: sex abuse revelations in the Catholic Church, political corruption, and more recently, an economic crisis, the housing boom and bust, and some environmental issues too. Many real crimes have occurred and gone unpunished.

The phrase “war on women” gained currency to refer to the experiences of women living in places far away from Ireland. But Ireland should take heed. It’s time to give women a choice in this vital matter. This is 2010, not 1950.

Haiti puts Ireland's troubles in perspective

It's only Wednesday but this is already an astonishing week. Ted Kennedy's death has proved the Republicans' gain. Scott Brown will stand in the way of the healthcare legislation Kennedy himself fought for and desired. In Haiti, meanwhile, a great crisis plays out that puts our concerns in the US or Ireland in shadow. The death of Irishman Andrew Grene brings the tragedy even closer to home.

Monday was Martin Luther King day and I went to a tribute to King at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Gospel singers sang their hearts out. There was talk of problems and progress, and (muted) praise of Obama. But mostly people spoke of Haiti. Brooklyn has the largest diaspora population of Haitians in the world. The actor Danny Glover -- of "Lethal Weapon" and "The Color Purple" fame -- was keynote speaker, and he wondered what MLK would think if he were alive today (he would be 81). Glover's voice cracked, as he said King would ask why Haiti was so badly treated by history.

Like Haiti, Ireland has a closely-bound diaspora community. We've all known that unnerving feeling when it seems every Irish person is somehow connected to us, or to someone that we know. When I read the obituary of Andrew Grene I realized I had taken a class on Shakespeare with his half-brother, professor Nick Grene at Trinity College Dublin. But the Grene name was doubly familiar: I had also read translations by his father, a respected academic at Chicago University, unaware till now that the two Grenes were related.

Monday of this week was officially the most depressing day of the year, according to a report in the Irish Times. I can see why the Irish in particular might feel this. The country is on the brink of financial collapse, it has experienced a raft of scandals, and its famously bad weather has been even worse than usual.

But perhaps we Irish should be learn to count our blessings too.

I can't help but think about what one of the pastors said, also on Monday, at the Martin Luther King tribute. He joked that his gospel-singing congregation in New York are never in bad form. They simply tell him they are "too blessed to be stressed."

Why I love Sarah Palin

And no, it's not her politics.

Sarah Palin is a love-to-hate figure, a woman of absolutes and contradictions. The glowing skin, the perfectly made-up face, the sexy spectacles combined with political power -- as a working mother of five, she's a modern woman who does it all. With only a few cracks on the surface to show for it.

I've just finished reading her autobiography, "Going Rogue," and it's a masterwork. The language is eloquent and flowing, so different from the faltering grammar of her unscripted speeches. Take this evocation of Alaska:

"With the first light covering of snow about to descend on Pioneer Peak, I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

She has little truck for vegetarians like myself -- "if God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?" she contends, in italics -- yet she manages to make oil-drilling sound almost like a good idea, and her foes seem like fools. And Alaska! Alaska is an intoxicating landscape, an oasis of true America in a troubled world full of "Others."

You'd almost wonder if she wrote the book herself.

She tells us that she did: "It's very quiet in the little apartment I'm in for a couple of weeks as I work on this book, and the curtains are open to invite in the California sunshine."

I imagine Palin will attract even more viewers to Fox. She reached out to her audience in a recent tweet: "What would America do w/out Fox News? I'm so thankful for the opportunity to work w/team committed to fair&balanced reporting.Please join us!"

I'm not saying I'd like Palin if I met her, and if she were vice president I would have left America long ago. But were she to disappear entirely from our TV screens, had she just snuck back to Alaska and stayed there after the election, wouldn't we miss those sharp red suits, the up hairdo, the rouge, the smile?

Without Palin the world would be calmer and less complicated. But surely, too, it would be a less entertaining place?

Iris Robinson, feminist icon?

Women heading towards 60 do not usually have affairs with teenage boys. That's one of the things that makes the Robinson scandal so mesmerizing -- that, and the fact, of course, that the trio of money, religion and politics are involved. But turn the story on its head: A politically powerful woman chooses to go against convention and follow her own desires. Amidst all the sleaze, could we take something positive from it?

Out of all the newspaper reports I read on the subject, just one touched on this aspect of the story. In her analysis of the Robinson family's turmoil, the Sunday Tribune's Northern Ireland reporter Suzanne Breen noted, "from a feminist perspective, perhaps Robinson's affair with her toyboy is to be savoured. How many aging men enjoy young sexy girlfriends without anyone batting an eyelid? And as a woman of pensionable age, her libido is surely to be celebrated."

She went on to point out several problems with such an interpretation: the creepy fact, for instance, that Mrs. Robinson had known her lover since he was nine years old.

It's a cliche that men are less likely than women to be mocked for dalliances with their juniors. That's why 'toyboy' makes such a good headline, but a word for 'toygirl' does not exist. So I'm tempted -- just tempted -- to see something admirable in Iris' bucking of the trend.

But feminism is about true equality between the sexes. If Robinson had stood for this principle, if she hadn't been self-righteously homophobic, things would be different. So my question is sadly rhetorical, rather than realistic. Is there any way we can see Iris Robinson's defiant affair with a younger man as a feminist act, or the woman herself as a feminist icon? There's one answer, and it's a simple no.