THIS is about three public representatives, and three very different responses to comments they made on matters of public interest. First, I want to thank Bertie Ahern for speaking to Councillor Paddy Kenneally of Waterford about the councillor's" remarks about taking a shotgun to travellers to such effect that the councillor apologised.
It was brave of the Fianna Fail leader to re-state principle in this area. A lot of people fear and hate travellers and would like to intern, if not exterminate, them. Those people could have been assured, if the Fianna Fail leader had quietly let Councillor Kenneally's remarks pass, that Fianna Fail was on their side. They would have been emboldened in what they said next, and did next.
Nods and winks from the top make a difference. A new book about Nazi Germany called Hiller's Willing Executioners argues that the German people as a whole, and not just a few extremists, were made ready to accept the torture and murder of Europe's Jews by a long, slow process, in which anti Semitic statements were allowed to" accumulate, unrebuked.
No individual anti Semite, probably, foresaw that each remark was a step towards the Holocaust. But when it comes to having a supposedly harmless bit of a wallow in bigotry, the long term perspective is the one to take.
What will what you say today mean for tomorrow? After all, in the end, what settled people want and what travellers want is to live together in Ireland in some sort of mutually respectful way. How does saying that travellers are loath some or terrifying lead towards that?
It merely closes things down whereas "with drawing any suggestion," as Councillor Kenneally" eventually did, that "certain minorities within the community should be treated as outcasts or objects of fear or hatred" wins space. It establishes a diplomatic shelter for such faltering steps as have been taken towards understanding and accepting each other.
Bertie Ahern was right to hold Councillor Kenneally responsible as a politician and a member of Fianna Fail. Private opinion is one thing. There's nothing much you can do about the pundit on the next bar stool. But when people put themselves forward for election, when they seek a representative role, when through their parties they aspire to the condition of legislators, and present themselves as possible governors of all the people well, that's different.
Politicians need to think about what they say a bit more roundedly than the rest of us. And if they have this duty, they have a corresponding right. They're entitled to be listened to with more attention than us on our bar stools.
THIS is why I expect Dick Spring to call in Dr Moosajee Bhamjee, the same as Bertie Ahern called in Councillor Kenneally. I understood this member of the Labour Party to imply, when talking on radio to Joe Duffy, that Brendan O'Donnell should be facilitated in killing himself because it would cost the taxpayer a lot to keep him for the rest of his life.
This was a far more profoundly anti social statement than saying that it is time to run the travellers out of town. Our society operates on the basis that no one is totally worthless. That's why even the most obvious criminals are provided with defenders. That's why there is an ideal of education for all. That's why there are jails and asylums instead of communal graves into which the deviant are thrown. There is no judicial execution here, much less random execution on the basis of randomly expressed opinion.
We leave the final decisions on worth and worthlessness to what we call God that's why the sacraments are never refused to dying terrorists. Dr Bhamjee is not God, and has no place in deciding for us which criminals should be invited to execute themselves and which not.
The rest of his remarks about four year old Brendan O'Donnell being "pampered" by his poor mother, because woman and child clung together so closely in the face of brutality that she stayed in school with him till he was able to let, her go said a lot about the lengths Dr Bhamjee will go to make a point."
He actually conjured up the prospect of lots more Brendan O'Donnells coming along, if little children are "pampered" by their mothers when they start school. This man, through the party of which he is a TD is in a position to influence social policy. It would reassure me if his party leader was known to have drawn his attention to the form of words used by Councillor Kenneally, who "withdrew any suggestion or implication that people should take the law into their own hands beyond the strict right of self defence, or that certain minorities within the community should be treated as outcasts or objects of fear and hatred..."
Joe Duffy let Dr Bhamjee's assertions pass. He seems to let anything pass when there's a male of some standing involved. A week or so earlier I'd listened to "a doctor" as whoever he is called come out with what sounded like a load of pernicious rubbish about AIDS and TB epidemics and the testing of immigrants and so on and so forth.
Maybe it wasn't rubbish, of course. But aren't "experts" ever invited to produce evidence any more? Evidence connecting, say, your mother taking you to school with your becoming a murderer? Evidence that health services so "a doctor" said are buckling under the demands of these apocalyptic epidemics? Do you just have to say something, if you are an important person, for it to be taken seriously?
IF so how does it come about that the ubiquitous Mr Stone, of the Garda Representative Association, wants to silence Eithne Fitzgerald TD He had the gall to rebuke her publicly for writing which she did in total privacy by the way on behalf of a constituent to the Garda.
She is an elected representative. She is a legislator. She is a Minister of State. If she can't query an official action, who can? And by God, if gardai did to me what they are alleged to have done in this case, I'd be looking for action from my TDs, too. A woman was put out of her car, at night, and left to walk home alone to the suburbs from central Dublin, because her car tax wasn't paid. This was, of course, within the letter of the law.
The woman was terrified, of course. We hear more about the allowances paid for the perils of serving in sunny Cyprus, or about triumphant undercover surveillance of the licensing laws on Inis Oirr, than we hear about making the streets safe to walk home through, when gardai have seized your car.
But that's for another day the decline in public esteem for the Garda and the possible connection between that and a certain shall we say intemperate element within the Garda. "Intemperate" was the word Bertie Ahern and Mr Kenneally settled on to characterise the councillor's remarks. A good word. I hope to hear it soon used by Dr Bhamjee and by P.J. Stone, when they, too, acknowledge that they, too, went over the top.
