In the days of Kevin Myers' youth, the Gallowglass Céilí Band seemed the embodiment of all that was wholesome and virtuous about rural Ireland.
Such musicians inhabited a world which possessed a purity, a simplicity, almost a beguiling chasteness. To be sure, it could at times all be a little too much: there was a po-faced solemnity about those earnest celebrations of our musical identity, at times, a sort of instrumental denial of the carnality of human nature.
But for all that slightly glutinous earnestness, the Gallowglass Céilí Band was a living proof of the treasury of Irish music which had nearly perished in the bleak and terrible 1950s, and was rescued by the music revival of Seán Ó Riada and by the boom in ballads prompted by the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Foremost amongst the guardians of those great traditions stood James McGarr of the Gallowglass Céilí Band.
Five years before the 1966 celebrations, that well-respected musician and pillar of Irish traditional values, James McGarr, had started raping his three-year-old daughter. He raped her most days, year in and year out. No doubt he raped her before he went off to RTÉ to record sessions of Céilí House, the flagship programme of Irish music at the time; no doubt he raped her when he got back. Was there a special rape to commemorate the 1916 Rising? Was there a rape to celebrate her father's birthday? Another rape to mark her birthday? A young life robbed, violated and ruined: a systemic regime of rape from the moment this little girl departed from the shores of babyhood, through infancy, childhood, adolescence and into young adulthood.
The abuse finally finished when she was 18, her father throughout remaining one of the stalwarts of Irish life: as they used to say, a fine Irishman, a good Catholic and a great musician.
And did he feel somehow or other that what he was doing was morally right? You know, he probably did.
The men who raped Mukhtaran Mai in her village in Pakistan three years ago certainly felt they had moral right on their side. Her crime was that her 16-year-old brother had had an affair with a woman of higher social standing. The local council, the panachayat, decided that the appropriate punishment for his conduct was that his sister should be gang-raped. No doubt the jurisprudential majesty at work here was somewhat assisted by Mukhtaran's extraordinary beauty.
She was accordingly gang-raped at gunpoint by four men - in a hut, no doubt to protect their modesty, the delicate little flowers - and then she was made to walk naked through her village, surrounded by hundreds of jeering men. The aftermath is only partly pertinent to the main theme of this column, but it is so appalling that I will briefly outline it.
Against all the custom and tradition surrounding such "punishment", Mukhtaran did not meekly accept her fate, but instead sought legal redress against her attackers. She gave evidence in court, and six of them were sentenced to death; but the appeal court then fully acquitted five of the men and reduced the sentence of the sixth to life imprisonment. The resulting outcry caused the government to hand the entire affair over to the supreme court, where it now rests.
One of the more incomprehensible features of the feminist agenda has been the belief that society creates the differences between the sexes - that if we ordered things just a little differently, then the differences between men and women would largely vanish. But can anyone seriously propose that there is a mother anywhere who could do to her child what James McGarr daily did to his daughter, and as hundreds of other Irishmen have similarly done? Or that a panachayat of women would vote to sexually violate a person because of the deeds of a sibling? Or that hundreds of women would jeer at the naked figure of a person who had just been raped?
We know that this is not so. Sexual abuse by women is not unknown, but it is so rare as to be statistically irrelevant. Women might gather outside courthouses to hoot at alleged sex-offenders - usually with their roots showing, and with toddlers at the knee - but they do not form murderous lynch mobs. They do not gather round to kick the prone body of a young man outside a night-club. They are not the culprits for the harvest of knifings that now bedeck our weekends.
The peculiar, almost defining thing about this issue of gender equality is that such aspects of it are never addressed by the equality industry, presumably because the consequences are so colossal. For if we acknowledge the profound differences in conduct and attitude in such areas, might not other differences exist elsewhere? Might we not be brought to confront the vast truth that women are largely driven by the desire to nurture, and men by the desire for sex and power? No? So consider the abduction test. If a child is abducted from a hospital ward by a stranger, what is the likely motive if the abductor is a he? And what if the abductor is a she? Then ponder the implications - or better still, ask yourself why our political and legal classes simply decline even to contemplate such questions.