THERE is a problem in rural Ireland which people discuss endlessly in private but which finds absolutely no echo in public forums it is crime who is responsible for it? The Garda press office refuses to comment on the matter, and others dare not speak the truth for fear off being accused of bigotry, racism, fascism. Yet that truth provides the publicly unspoken sub text behind every protest by settled people against traveller halting sites.
No doubt it makes people like me, who live in cities and will never have a halting site next door to my home, feel extremely morally superior to call such protesters fascists. But name calling will not resolve the problem or build a single halting site.
The reality is that rural Ireland is in terror of this wave of crime. That it is the work of a small minority, and that it has been exaggerated out of all proportion by the rumour mills of only limited comfort, as it is to know that only a small minority of the settled community in Dublin is responsible for the crime wave there. What is worrying is that traveller representatives who rightly condemn anti traveller criminality seem strangely silent in the face of traveller crime.
I have heard no calls from any traveller leader calling upon the traveller community to inform upon traveller criminals to the Garda Siochana.
Yet it is in their interest to do so and it is in everybody's interest to understand what is happening within a community which makes certain crimes, so horrible that not long ago they would have seemed impossible now to be more than possible.
Organised Robberies
Most crimes are simply crimes, such as the wave of organised robberies of big houses by a couple of highly skilled traveller gangs, with buyers normally arranged in advance. This plague caused the formation of COP HO Council for the Protection of Irish Heritage Objects, for people vulnerable to robbery (inquiries to Jeffry Lefroy, 043 45165).
In an entirely different category are the tiny band of people responsible for the other kind of attacks on poor old people, living alone in isolated places. These are so bizarre and revolting one attack involved the torture and buggery of one elderly male victim by two male men assisted by a young woman that we are clearly dealing with sick, deranged and wicked people.
This, alas, is not new, and the problems are not unprecedented. A few years ago some elderly women living alone in the Dublin area were attacked in their homes and buggered the offenders, without exception, were disordered travellers.
Accusations of Racism
At which point the whistle is blown and the accusations of racist come flooding in, and it is necessary to state the obvious. Of course the majority of travellers are innocent. They can justifiably reply listen this has nothing to do with us. We are not criminals and the crime wave sweeping Dublin is entirely the work of non travellers.
Absolutely That is the point. That we can say. But nobody dare speak the truth about the identity of the people responsible for most rural crime. Is this right?
It cannot be. Put the problem another way. If there were a series of vigilante raids by non travellers on traveller camps, would it be enough for everybody to pretend that these attacks merely concerned travellers, maybe that some inter familial dispute was involved? Would travellers be content to hear news bulletin after bulletin about attacks on their homes and their persons without some reference to the social group from which the attackers came?
Truth is irrepressible. It is like water on an unleaded roof. It will out, and unless uttered honestly will be contaminated by numerous falsehoods, like debris from a roof valley.
So let us deal with the truth. A hugely disproportionate amount of rural crime is by a handful of travellers. The furniture thieves who raid fine homes are extremely professional and sophisticated people for whom a single burglar alarm is as much an obstacle protection for them as wet newspaper. They have in recent times transformed Irish country life.
Most home owners cannot afford to install the necessary alarm systems, and anyway, rural policing is often so thinly provided that alarms or guard dogs, which can be neutralised by lasers confer little or no protection.
Insurance in big houses is now virtually impossibly expensive fine furniture which is stolen cannot be replaced. It will be a loss to the house, to its owner, to the owner's family, and to Ireland, for these pieces are usually exported often the night of the robbery.
The thieves are in a different category to the assailants in the west who prey on old people. Their deeds are inexplicable and horribly effective they have generated an atmosphere of terror in rural areas unlike anything Ireland has experienced since the 1920s. Rural life is being transformed and nobody dare speak the truth in public.
Unspoken Subtext
In private, everybody acknowledges that certain travellers are responsible. This is not just the voice of bigotry speaking, though of course bigots will revel in it and blend it with lies so that when people discuss publicly the issue of traveller halting sites, there is an unspoken subtext based both on truths and on falsehoods.
It is impossible to differentiate publicly between the two and to denounce falsehood and inflammable libel for when nobody has been able to speak the full truth, it can't be distinguished from the lie. When the truth is suppressed, only falsehoods triumph.