An Irishman's Diary

What would we do without Niall Crowley and his equality police? They've brought more joy to the nation than Th'Unbelievables, …

What would we do without Niall Crowley and his equality police? They've brought more joy to the nation than Th'Unbelievables, Father Ted and W.B. Yeats combined. Is there a stone unturned, a tree not uprooted, a bin unrummaged through or a laundry basket unpored over in the holy quest to prove that this is a gravely unequal society?

Niall Crowley is now complaining that only 3.5 per cent of the Equality Authority's complaints under the Employment Equality Act related to sexual orientation. Furthermore, he fumed, not one single case had come to a conclusion before the Tribunal. Instead of welcoming this as evidence that Ireland was what most of us know it to be - an infinitely more tolerant society - he declared it was proof that it was such an intolerant place that homosexuals daren't complain about discrimination.

Interesting logic. So the most devastating proof of Irish bigotry would be if there were zero complaints of discrimination over sexual orientation. Instead of complaining, these untouchable queers toil in the dung-heaps to which they have been consigned by society, silently enduring the abuse and the injustices heaped on the homosexual under-caste. Even as the equality police stand on the dungheaps pleading for complaints about inequality, the poor oppressed homosexuals avert their eyes and continue silently about their vile duties, while the rest of us goad them.

But if Niall Crowley thinks that "only" 3.5 per cent of such complaints is too low, what is the correct proportion for discrimination over orientation? 10 per cent? 20 per cent? One hundred per cent would be just plain greedy: no room at all for women, and the small people, and the large people, and the people with large noses or half a moustache, and the Chinese and the Muslims and the Afro-Caribbeans and the transsexuals.

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Still, you could look at it another way: if many homosexuals who had been discriminated against because of their sexual preferences stayed silent, weren't they being just generous? Weren't they enduring their discrimination in heroic silence so as to allow other discriminated-against groups to enjoy a larger share of the victimhood pie? What warm, generous giving people they are!

However, one conclusion is not possible for the ideologues of the equality police - the truth: simply, that most people don't care about these things any more. Or conversely, they do, but not quite in the way that the equality police think.

What would modern Dublin 4 parents prefer their son to tell them these days: that he was homosexual, or that he was going to become a Christian Brother? And do they want to hear their daughter is going to live with Clare or the Poor Clares?

Yet is being a Christian Brother or a Franciscan priest or a Poor Clare nun not a sexual orientation of a kind? Is not abjuring sex and living in celibate communities a very clear statement of orientation?

So have the equality police actually investigated the degree to which these groups might have been themselves discriminated against on grounds of their sexuality?

Or is it just possible that they don't fit into the officially approved victim groups which the equality police are determined to discover and vindicate?

Nor is sexuality merely a matter of orientation. What is the equality police's attitude to circumcision? Is it acceptable to circumcise boys but not girls? Explain this please, because you can't say circumcision has no effect on boys' sexuality: ask any man who's been circumcised in adulthood. Then be good enough to explain where equality comes into it.

And if immigrants from Sudan want to circumcise their daughter as an expression of their ancient tribal culture, what is the position of the equality police? Do they allow the Sudanese to express that culture? Is that not then sexual oppression of the girl? Or do they impose their western, liberal principles and forbid the circumcision? And is that not cultural imperialism?

Not surprisingly, in the absence of any hard questions at all from our political classes, the equality industry is growing remorselessly, as more and more forms of discrimination are daily discovered, like new insect types in the jungle canopy.

Moreover, the religion of victimhood will be vigorously proselytised among arriving immigrants, even as the breadth of discrimination will be widened indefinitely, as the new Crowley interpretation of it takes hold: if you don't complain about discrimination, then this is the most damning proof of all that you are both being discriminated against and being intimidated into silence.

The melancholy truth is that no politician has the nerve to axe the equality police; and meanwhile they're never going to report to the Government "It's okay: we've done our job, you can wind us up now." For the central purpose of any government-funded organisation is, at least, to survive, and preferably to grow, regardless of function or need.

If there'd been an Anti-Slavery Authority in 1922, left to its own devices it would still be toiling away today, reporting on the deeply suspicious - indeed very worrying - lack of any evidence whatever of slavery or cotton plantations in the Deep South, from Limerick to Waterford.

But the Equality Agency doesn't deal with anything as tangible as slavery but with a mercurial abstraction which defies all definition. Yet this mental quicksilver is being used to judge issues, rather like a witch-doctor in Liberia mumbling some juju to settle a tribal dispute.

No chance, I suppose, of the Equality Authority going out to Monrovia to bring a bit of long overdue equality there?

Niall Crowley would make a perfectly topping district commissioner until, oh, about 2024. Tiffin, anyone?