Well, there we have it. We can stop our national introspection into causes of suicide in Ireland, and the fact that men under 35 account for 40pc of all suicides in this country.We don't have to worry about the real and uncomfortable circumstances surrounding our national attitudes to suicide because we have found the scapegoat we all want -- and, quelle surprise, it's the internet that's to blame.
Suicide, and the apparent role the internet plays in it, has become something of a hot button issue among Ireland's chattering classes in the past few days.
This follows the self-inflicted deaths of Dubliner Nicholas Jameson, 24, and Barry McGlade, 20, from Omagh, who met up on a suicide-related web forum and, in a terrible inversion of the more prolific dating web sites, arranged to meet and kill themselves together.
It's a sad case, obviously, but the hysterical reaction to the news that the internet was involved in the story only serves to show the prejudice and ignorance which still surrounds the web.
According to one commentator last Friday: "The internet is a pit of seedy, dangerous and deadly content. We have a duty to the more vulnerable in our society that access to damaging material is made as difficult as possible."
The thought that youngsters find solace on suicide websites is a terrifying. That kind of response is typical of the rubbish which has been spouted in the last week and it needs to be addressed.
Firstly -- and it's remarkable how, after more than a decade of internet use people still can't grasp this fact -- you cannot censor the web. It's impossible.
For God's sake, the whole point of the internet originally was to make it entirely cellular. In other words, if one part of it is shut down, it simply starts operations elsewhere.
So, in theory, if you manage to disable access to suicidemethods.com, it just becomes suicidemethods.co.uk or any of the other innumerable domain names available to people.
So if the practicality of shutting them down is impossible, what about the morality of trying to silence them?
Anyone who has covered the issue of suicide and self-harm related websites will know that far more people are actually talked out of their actions by their fellow forum members, whose members can talk to each other without fear of being judged.
And, obviously, if someone wants to kill themselves then they shall kill themselves, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
If anything, we need to change the way we, as a people, deal with the issue of suicide and we need to stop lionising those who choose to top themselves as some sort of collective of tortured youths.
As anyone who has ever been touched by suicide will tell you, some people who kill themselves are, in the words of Joan Rivers, selfish bastards who deserve condemnation for their actions, not pity.
Rivers became a shining light for many of those who have been left to pick up the pieces of a suicide when she spoke openly of how much she hated her husband Edgar Rosenberg for what his suicide had done to her and her family.
Many of those who are left behind feel guilty for feeling resentment and hatred for the individual's decision to kill themselves; Rivers brought about a catharsis which helped numerous people I know.
Yet that sentiment is nowhere to be seen in a media which seems obsessed with infantilising young men to such an extent that a 24-year-old man who chooses to take his own life is described as "a vulnerable youngster.
If people in the media were as concerned about the apparently growing trend of young, male suicide -- the figures for which, it should be pointed out, remain rather vague -- then we need, as a society, to start reiterating the fact that real men don't check out just because things are getting a bit tough.
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