 | | | | by Patrick West |
In the words of the disreputable Alan Partridge, Ireland has certainly gone through change.
| The old image of 'horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons, people with eyebrows on their cheeks, badly tarmacced drives' will no longer do: as the fallen TV celebrity insisted, 'Dere's more to Oireland dan dis' (1).
| Partridge's remark, from Steve Coogan's I'm Alan Partridge, was funny not just because it was so disagreeable, but because it was so utterly outdated. Today it is the confident Irish who look on with pity at Britain's prosaic economic performance and its constitutional quandaries, whether they be about devolution or the EU question. Ireland no longer has an inferiority complex when it comes to Britain: at least, when it comes to the economy. But in terms of its cultural values, Ireland is very much stuck in the era of Eamon de Valera. In the moral sphere, many still look to Britain with envy, or have unconsciously transformed Roman Catholic mores into ostensibly 'liberal' ones. For this reason, Ireland is turning into one of the most worryingly politically correct countries in the Western world.
| In October 2000 a columnist for Ireland's Sunday Independent newspaper penned an article questioning the ethics of the Paralympics (2). Mary Ellen Synon wrote: 'We are supposed to imagine that there is some kind of equivalence in value between what the cripples do and what the truly fastest, strongest, highest do. There isn't.' She wrote that the games were 'grotesque' and 'perverse' and made highly flippant comments about swimmers using Brail and the physically handicapped wobbling around a track in a wheelchair.
| Synon's comments might sound shocking - but the reaction to them was even more so. Remember, this was not even the manager of a national football team ostensibly insulting the disabled, but a mere newspaper columnist. The newspaper was bombarded with complaints; Synon was denounced in both in the Dail, and then in the Senate as 'truly offensive'; the Eastern Regional Health Board threatened to withdraw its considerable advertising from the newspaper, while respected Irish Times writer Fintan O'Toole wrote that freedom of the press should be curtailed in such circumstances by criminalising not only incitement to violence but also 'the use of dehumanising stereotypes against entire groups' (3).
| As fellow Irish Times writer Kevin Myers pointed out, her words were quoted as if extracted from Mein Kampf. Synon herself has since disappeared from the Sunday Independent.
| Particularly disturbing was the Sunday Independent letters page the next weekend, in which a number of those who defended Synon's right to say stupid things withheld their names and addresses. And of the vast majority of those who violently disagreed with her comments, only a noble few took up her philosophical standpoint about cultural relativism. Overwhelmingly, they wrote to say (and I quote) how 'hurt', 'shocked', 'deeply upset', 'horrified', they were at this 'offensive' or 'deeply offensive' article. The basic argument was that Synon should not have been allowed to say this.
| | | Many of those who defended Synon's right to say stupid things withheld their names and addresses
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| In other words, Synon had committed blasphemy. If anything reveals how Ireland is still a censorious society that will not tolerate deviant behaviour, then this witch-hunt does. Offending the mores of Ireland's new priests - its liberal elite - is as heinous a crime as uttering a bad word against the country's secular saint, SDLP leader John Hume (for which the Sunday Independent has also been found guilty). Perhaps the worst thing you can say about somebody in the Irish Republic today is that they are 'deeply offensive'. In Ireland, it is rarely 'you're wrong', or 'I disagree', but all too often 'you hurt my feelings'.
| Like Britain's own PC-priests, the Irish liberal elite are fond of a good old session of self-flagellation, a bit of the opening of the old holy wounds. It's almost as if they can't wait for their own Stephen Lawrence so that they can go through the whole self-defamatory ritual. On 10 October 2000, in a bid to raise racial awareness in the country, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin called on people to fight the 'satanic attitude' of racism. And this satanic attitude must be dealt with at all costs.
| In November 2000, Gerry O'Grady, a bus driver in Dublin, was the first person to be prosecuted under the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act: he was fined IR£900 and placed on 12-month probation for telling a man of Ghanian origin to 'go back to his own country'. In the wake of this incident, Peter Cassells, the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions said that unions and employer bodies should expel members who engage in racist behaviour. Meanwhile, to add to his punishment, Mr O'Grady will be required to undergo counselling and attend an 'anger management' course during his probatory period.
| Perhaps Ireland feels embarrassed that a nation of emigrants is now so intolerant to its own immigrants - but such disproportionate proscription is worrying, especially when such a nebulous description of 'racist behaviour' can often mean the odd flippant remark. What people can and can't do in Ireland is increasingly being defined by the state. On 25 October 2000 the came into force, the marketplace counterpart of the Employment Equality Act of 1999, which prohibits all providers of goods and services to the public from discriminating against people on the grounds of gender, age, marital and family status, religion, race, sexual orientation, disability or membership of the traveller community (4). The litigious potential here is enormous. Over-21 pubs, insurance companies that charge more for young men, ladies' night at the disco, buses that don't have wheelchair ramps…and on it goes.
| It seems that the Irish have been so familiar with feeling inferior to the British that they don't know what to do now the money's rolling in. To fill in this vacuum, they look with envy upon the liberal mores of the British establishment. But it works both ways. In recent months we have read much in the British liberal press about how Ireland is a dreadfully racist place. Eminent cultural critic and poet Tom Paulin speaks about how the abuse heaped on his mixed-race son in Donegal proves that Ireland needs its own race relations bodies, while columnist John O'Mahony bemoans how intolerant his homeland has become.
| In the old days it was the Daily Telegraph and the Tories who used to gloat over Ireland's priest-ridden, economically retarded country. Now the British left seems to take satisfaction in admonishing Paddy on how illiberal and culturally backward he is. And the Irish fall for it. Just as the Irish can't break old habits, nor, it seems, can the British.
| Patrick West is the author of Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes it Really is Cruel to be Kind, Civitas, 2004. Buy this book from Amazon (UK).
(1) From the BBC2 series I'm Alan Partridge; episode 'To Kill a Mocking Alan', first broadcast 1 December, 1997
(2) Synon's article was in the Sunday Independent on 22 October 2000
(3) See the Irish Times website
(4) Ireland's Equal Status Act can be found here
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