Travellers score own goal, observed the Sunday Times in a report on the £60,000 worth of damage done by itinerant families to a GAA pitch in south Dublin. The implication, of course, is that the Travellers are responsible for the mess, when they are clearly not: they are victims of statism. Travellers have been turned into handout-addicts, and the State and all its self-appointed Traveller-groupies have created a dependency culture which is responsible for the appalling conditions left by departing Travellers.
A false terminology has posited just two population groups, one "settled" and the other Traveller. But who invented this language but Traveller-activists? There is not a "settled" community, as any visit to Darndale and Dalkey will swiftly show.
Social exclusion
We even acknowledge this linguistically. "Traveller" takes upper case, "settled" community doesn't, because we know the concept of a "settled" community is politically-correct hokum. Indeed, some of the loudest and most sanctimonious twaddle about Travellers and the "settled" community comes from those who are usually bawling about the social exclusion of the poorest of the "settled community" in Irish life - and meanwhile who do their damnedest to make sure they live near neither.
There isn't one debate about this, but two. One is conducted among the professionally compassionate classes, secure in middle-class suburbs free of Traveller intrusion, who complain of how little the sc has done for Ts, and what a scandal it is. And there is the other more anguished debate, which goes on in working-class housing estates and country towns, and which is all about whether Traveller caravans are going to be parked on the local GAA pitch, how long will they be there for, and who in the name of Jesus is going to clear up after they've gone.
There is no point of contact between those two debates: they exist in parallel worlds and are conducted in unrelated languages in which even if the same words exist, they do not have the same meanings.
And now we have to endure the saccharine horrors of the gruesome "Citizen Traveller" campaign, a masterly combination of condescending humbug and patronising simplification which elevates the culture of dependency and blame-transference to high art: the picture of a spotless little girl in her school uniform with her satchel, standing before a caravan, with the slogan, "Stop the Evictions. Deliver the Accomodation Programme"? Then the killer punch. "Her school says first-class pupil. Her site says second-class citizen." (Is there such a thing as a first-class site? And who provides it? The State? Or her family? And if it's the State, can I have one too, please?
Evictions
So here we have the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform paying for advertisements denouncing evictions, which are usually superintended by its own officials, of illegal squatters. Essentially, the civil servants dealing with "equality" and possibly "law reform" are publicly telling their colleagues in "justice" across the office not to do their job.
Do the officials who commission these ads, or try to enforce their message, ever get headaches? Dublin Corporation already spends £500,000 a year merely maintaining halting sites for 340 families, cleaning the lavatories and removing litter: nearly £1,500 per family per year, or £30 a week. This is hardly oppression: for halting sites are provided free of charge, regardless of the means of the Travellers, though of course no money at all is spend on maintaining the hygiene of council house tenants' homes within the "settled" community. In other words, apartheid in its strictest legal meaning: aparthood, brought to you by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
Yet such Traveller-directed services don't stop Travellers travelling - according to Mick Fagan, of South Dublin County Council, most of the Travellers who destroyed the GAA pitch at Ballyboden are transient traders with State-provided homes elsewhere; and by God, they know the law. They challenged the legality of eviction orders, and remained on site, continuing to dump their rubbish, only to vanish when the case finally came up before the court: and quite right too.
Working the system
They are working the system, if you can call that intellectual slum of loud-mouthed piety, uncertain political will, moral confusion and legal loopholes a "system". They have been encouraged to do that, both within their communities, and by the various State-assisted agencies which have grown up alongside Traveller communities like scrap-yards. And they are not stupid. Once any humans understand that laws which apply to others don't apply to them, they will not obey them.
Much of the Traveller problem is to do with choice. Whose choice is it that Travellers travel? Whose choice is it that their children are raised in caravans, without running water or lavatories, and that so many of them leave school in their early teens? Whose choice is it that hundreds of Traveller males gather annually for bloody faction-fights over some ancient tribal dispute? It is not mine, or the State's: so whose is it? Instead, that ludicrous confection, the Department of Justice, Law Reform and Equality publicly espouses a one-dimensional tale of victimhood and oppression, in which everyone is guilty of everything, except members of the Travelling community itself.
Self-appointed interlocutors between the Travellers and the State have primed the culture of dependency which has done so much damage to Travellers' perception of the world. By appointing themselves as Traveller spokesmen or women, they are saying that Travellers are unable to speak for themselves.
Travellers, beware "settled" ones bearing friendship; of all your enemies, they are the deadliest.