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April 30th 2008

 

With their daughter missing for almost 12 long, weary months, they deserve our sympathy and not our condemnation.

'I have little support for them'

By JON GAUNT

LAST week I said that I believe the McCanns are guilty. Guilty of child neglect and no amount of soft news articles or TV documentaries is going to convince me or, judging by my mailbag, the majority of Sun readers otherwise.

Obviously, I have enormous sympathy for their plight but I am afraid like the majority of parents in this country I have little support for them.

Of course, they didn’t deserve to lose Madeleine and the real villain in this whole story is the person who abducted her but the fact is that if Gerry and Kate hadn’t failed in the first basic responsibility of all parents, the protection of their off spring, than Maddie would still be here today.

I’ve found the McCanns�?reluctance to admit their grave mistake both unsettling and weird and it has taken the best part of the last 12 months for Gerry to even concede they were in the wrong. But in the wrong they most certainly were.

I also believe if this had been a Sun reader on holiday in a caravan park who had been drinking in the camp bar when their child was abducted, the Press would have been less supportive and more aggressive in their coverage.

This thought has been echoed by lots of you including "Sxgirl" who posted the following on MySun after my article last week:

"I am a young single mum and if I had gone on holiday with a bunch of my friends and left my son (who is the same age as Maddie) alone so I could have dinner, no doubt I would have been had up for child abuse/neglect and the public would have been in uproar. I don’t understand why these people have received so much public support.

"Yes, the heartache they’re going through is unimaginable to me, but that is why I would never put my son at risk as they did. Checking on them every half hour is clearly not adequate! They should be held accountable for their actions and stop blaming everyone else for not protecting their children."

From the other end of the age spectrum, Sun reader and granny Marion Barret wrote to me and said: "Children put their unconditional love and trust in their parents to keep them safe, their safety is the most important thing. I feel so sorry for the twins without a sister, however, I struggle inside to feel anything but anger for the parents."

Failings

I agree with both these readers and thousands of others who have expressed similar views.

However, the mainstream media has treated these two doctors with kid gloves, even when it was clear the British public were not buying the story. Internet sites were full of criticism of the couple but the mainstream Press reported little of this, suppressing all criticism of the McCanns and their parental failings.

The British public sympathise with them but do not support them. If they did, the Find Madeleine fund would have raised millions more.

However, there are still massive unanswered questions, some of which are only just beginning to surface. Why did they not use the nanny service when they could afford it? How many times did they go back and what kind of responsible parents still go out on the drink when their three-year-old asks them why they didn’t come in to the bedroom when they were crying the previous night?

Do you remember when you put your first baby to bed with a listening monitor and sat downstairs watching the box almost with subtitles on so you could hear every heartbeat?

If you heard an unexpected cough or belch you would sprint up the stairs faster than druggy Dwain Chambers on steroids to check on your little angel. That’s called parenting, isn’t it?

I wonder if the McCanns were as casual with their passports and valuables when they went out at night because as far as I am concerned there is nothing more precious than your child and they appear to have had scant regard for their safety.

That’s why I called last week for the McCanns and the Tapas Seven to return to Portugal for the reconstruction and for the Portuguese plods to stop spinning and leaking and either charge the McCanns or clear them.

I’ve also found the globetrotting and the calls for an Amber Alert system slightly distasteful and I’m sure I’m not only one who thinks when I need tips on child protection from those two I’ll ask.