Major Myers to ground control

For many of us, the Kevin Myers scandal of a few days ago has gone away to be replaced with an other news stories like the Michael Jackson trial, the sort of running story that the networks love.

For me, Kevin Myers never goes away. There he is, sitting in the far right hand corner of every other days Irish Times editorial page daring me to read his obnoxious views which are diametrically opposed to my own and expressed in his bickering, condescending tone. Like someone who passes a car crash on the way to work every morning, I can never resist, though I know it's not good for my long-term cardiological health.

Though his column is labelled "An Irishman's Diary" it's pretty clear to all concerned that Myers is at best an Anglo-Irishman with all that that implies for his attitude to what Myles Na Gopaleen referred to as the plain people of Ireland (except Myles was being ironic).

Myers' apology for his description of children born outside wedlock as "bastards" carried all the conviction of a heroin addict promising a judge that he'd kicked the habit.

Sure enough, after all the fuss had died down, he was back to his old tricks again, complaining that he wasn't able to download pornography quick enough through eircom broadband.

But Yesterday it seemed he showed a flicker of remorse by writing an unusually non-mysogynistic piece praising the women of Belfast for standing up to his old friends in Sinn Fein.

So Far, So good. Bizzarely enough, the London Independent had a two-page spread earlier in the week praising strong Irish women like Mary Robinson, Maud Gonne and Countess Markeviec, though oddly enough, Queen Maeve didn't make the cut.

Then Myers went on to say that if women were running the world, that there would be a lot less pain and suffering, as wars are all started by men.

Hmmm. It's certainly true that woman newspaper columnists never use words like bastards to describe children, as they can understand what it's like to have a child in their womb for nine months.

It's certainly true also that most of the fighting and killing in the course of history has been done by men.

At the same time most evolutionary psycholgists argue that woman always go for men with a higher status, and that up until very recently status was attained primarily through the use of violence. It might help to explain why women still often go for bad boy types instead of effete psuedo-intellectuals like Myers who can only act tough behind a typewriter.

Then it's been argued that today women make better soldiers, as the ability to multitask and co-operate is more important in modern combat than physical strength or agression, two qualities that men have in abundance. (Not everyone accepts this argument).

So what does Myers have to say in defence of his argument? Apparently, he thinks that if Margeret Thatcher and Mary Harney had been leading Britain and Ireland for the last ten years, there would have been no killings in Northern Ireland in that period.

Excuse Me? Is this the same Margeret Thatcher that Declared war on Argentina over the Falkland Islands, sold £25 Billion worth of arms to the famously feminist house of Saud, then declared war on an enemy within, which turned out to be miners who were trying to keep thier jobs? Who commisioned Polaris, a Nuclear Missile system powerful enough to kill everyone on the planet? Who let hunger strikers starve to death in the H-Block? Who kept the Ivory Trade going by allowing Hong Kong to export Ivory? Who claimed all the credit for the defeat of the Soviet Union?

As for Mary Harney, she paid €300 to listen to Henry Kissinger, the worst mass murderer of the last fifty years.

It ought to be as clear as the nose on Myers face that these women, far from being pacifists, are part of a long tradition of women who go out of their way to prove that they are tough enough to compete in a man's world. Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth I, Boudecia, Jeanne Alexander, and now, Condoleeza Rice all fit this mould.

But perhaps, far from over-compensating for his "lapse" the other week, Myers is perhaps, being a little sarcastic?

It would be particularly ironic if he was, and it wouldn't be at all unlike him, and Geraldine Kennedy failed to notice.

I get the impression that the stuffy old paper that is the Times thought they were making a radical departure with the appointment of a woman editor. She hasn't shaken things up at all, though, the only difference that I notice is that another bearded, right-wing nutter called Mark Steyn has been given a column to foist his weird views on us. The paper remains conservative in style and news-heavy in an age when most people seek features and nuance.

Kennedy already allowed John Waters to ask for her resignation in a column, when it might have been easier to ask her to her face.

Perhaps women might be better at multi-tasking, but the Times might have picked the wrong woman. If she took a stand and sacked Myers I might change my mind.