Rosemary McLeod: Banks affair a trifle compared to Irish atrocity

John Banks

I wince at the way hawks circle a dying beast, even when the beast is a politician, even when it's John Banks they're after, and the meal won't exactly be delicious.

None of the players in his downfall was an ingenue, batting eyelashes in wonderment at the wicked way of the world, and I don't buy the games Kim Dotcom is playing while he fights extradition. He doesn't like Banks. He doesn't like John Key. Let's hope Hone Harawira's got a parachute.

It puzzles me how leftish people, so often reared in the cosy middle class, sniff at Banks' rags-to-riches story. Because he sees the world through a right-wing prism, they put him down for what he couldn't help in the first place and fought commendably hard to escape.

Many people with stories like his don't buy the view that welfare would have been good for them and see it rather as a trap that keeps people like them down. I'm not wedded to either idea. I know Banks is an oddball, but you have to give credit to someone who emerges from a background of jailbird parents, gets himself through college working nights in a bakery, and makes his start in business at the bottom, washing dishes.

As for his heinous crime, so worthy of extensive coverage of every nuance, was it really such a horror story? Soliciting political donations is not illegal.

But what emerges is that it's illegal to claim you forget accepting cheques at Kim Dotcom's palace, amid huge statues of fighting men, and bevies of lounging beauties.

Seriously, this is the stuff of comedy.

Banks seems to prefer animals to people, and I'd often agree. He's been no fan of gay rights, which takes his thinking back to the mid-50s, but he's not alone there, either. That stern character, ex-Pope Benedict, is a cat lover who, it emerges, used to live with four of them. He, too, held out on gay rights, so there's a lofty comparison, a connection that isn't flattering to either of them in the light of current events.

If the Banks affair didn't impress me much, I'm horrified at what has unfolded in Country Galway, Ireland, a country where the Catholic Church has long held women in a tight fist.

When 796 bodies of babies and young children were discovered in Tuam, thrown into a disused sewage tank, responsibility immediately pointed to the nuns of the Bon Secour order, who ran a state-funded home for single mothers and babies from 1925-61.

It was their job to look after them, though conditions were harsh, and the mothers had to earn their keep on the understanding that work would atone for their "sin".

The death rate for mothers and babies in such homes was four to five times that of the general population. As far back as 1944 a report on the Tuam home noted children who were pot-bellied and emaciated, mentally unwell mothers, and appalling overcrowding.

Nothing was done, which implicates the Irish Government as well.

We have yet to uncover the stories of homes for unmarried mothers in this country, but they won't have been pleasant places here, either, such was the repression women lived under when having an illegitimate baby was a big deal, and sex outside marriage turned women into sluts. There was no censure for the men involved. Women and children have always paid, and the Catholic Church, while judging the morality of people's actions, was no more enlightened than anyone else.

Now Tuam's local priest says we shouldn't judge past events by the standards of today.

So it was somehow okay to throw dead babies and children into a disused sewage tank and drop the lid? Somewhere in his world, maybe, but never in mine.