Madam, - Kevin Myers's suggestion in relation to Travellers (An Irishman's Diary, October 13th) - that we have "created a dependent community within the Irish State which has now become pathologically dysfunctional" - has set me thinking about the status of one of our largest communities, often referred to as the "settled community".
It is clear that members of the settled community are implicated in the majority of reports in your pages over recent decades. While we do not see headlines such as "Settled politician in multi-million euro planning scandal", or "Priest from settled community admits 30 years of child sexual abuse", it is clear to the discerning reader that it is indeed settled people to whom reports of this kind refer. It is acknowledged that widespread corruption has been found within the ranks of the settled community in the political and business élite, the police force, and the Church. Again, although this is rarely spelled out, it is clear that it is women from the settled community who we have seen lying unconscious and drunk in casualty wards, settled men who have been involved in violent drug feuds between settled gangsters, settled fathers who have raped and abused their children, and the settled population generally who parade through our courts each day.
We have also recently come to realise that deeply troubling and problematic attitudes to alcohol, leading to widespread nightly public order offences, are seemingly an ineradicable feature of the settled lifestyle. Their settlement patterns and land holding systems have despoiled the environment, and the State can no longer cope with the filthy rubbish and household waste they blithely continue to generate. We can deduce from all this that settled people are drunken, violent, dirty and corrupt, and that their lifestyle is thus pathologically dysfunctional.
Despite this, however, the settled community seem to feel it is their inalienable right to have the State provide housing for them or to subsidise them in the acquisition of private housing, to support their right to do what they will with "their" land, to educate them, frequently to degree level, to build, staff and maintain hospitals for them, and to transport them via road, rail and bus. In general, over many decades, we have all colluded in the continuation of profligate, wasteful, polluting, corrupt, violent and drunken lifestyles. To make matters worse, much of the funding on which the settled community has become dependent has come from the pockets of EU taxpayers. As Kevin Myers remarked in relation to travellers, surely only "political weak-mindedness" causes us to fail to recognise that our unquestioned support of settled lifestyles should not continue unchecked. - Yours, etc.,
SOPHIA CAREY,
New Row Square,
Dublin 8.