STOCKBROKERS. Let us consider stockbrokers. What are these people? What do they achieve? Is there anything about their lives which justifies their existence? Do they enrich society in any sense? Are they not an excrescence on society? Is their life without any ennobling intellect, bereft even of the steadying instinct of animals?
They are merely predators who regard other people's wealth and property as a suitable target for their larcenous instincts. Theirs is a life which marauds upon other people's property, one of money without production, of appetite ungoverned by restraint, of enrichment without personal cost, theft without prosecution, ruination without remorse. It is simple. They are parasitical rubbish.
Tell me. Do you think the expression of those sentiments about stockbrokers - invented for the purpose of this argument - would cause a Garda investigation? Do you think half a dozen of the hardest working members of the force, in the area of greatest crime in the entire land, would be seconded into the investigation of the above paragraph and its author? Do you think that other journalists would be contacted by gardai and asked to make statements with a view to prosecuting me for saying the above?
Different standards
Because effectively that is what has happened to Mary Ellen Synon, columnist with the Sunday Independent, who earlier this year wrote a column which was highly critical of the life style of travellers. She used language about them which was very similar to the above. Had she directed her attacks at the professional classes, at beef barons, at stockbrokers, at barristers, solicitors, at journalists, you can be quite clear she would not have come under investigation by the Garda Siochana. She wrote about travellers; and she is now being investigated with a view to prosecution.
What kind of time wasting idiocy is this? What political priorities are at work here? And who directed that hard working detectives, whose job in the North City centre is already trying enough, should be squandering their time and their intelligence on this preposterous assault on freedom of speech?
Because we can be sure of one thing. The men - and no doubt women - making this investigation" are doing so not at their initiative; nor at the initiative of their superiors. The directives for the inquiry did not come from within the force. They came from political quarters. Simply, this is political interference, designed to curtail freedom of speech, for politically correct motives.
The era of the police enforced, politically correct press laws has now apparently arrived, and the weapon being used is the Incitement to Hatred Law, which has never been employed before. Was that its author's intention? That it be used to muzzle journalists who express opinions which politicians and others dislike?
The issue here is not whether or not Mary Ellen Synon expresses opinions you approve of or dislike. The test of your tolerance comes in your acceptance of opinions which you find revolting. Provided that it does not incite to crime - and nobody would possibly suggest that Mary Ellen's sentiments are criminal - then she should be allowed to her speak her mind, no matter how much you dislike die contents of that mind. The expression of unpopular or distasteful opinions is not a matter for the criminal law.
Yet it has been made so by some individuals or groups in this Government. Who? Why? The unfortunate gardai investigating this sorry affair are probably as much at sea as anybody else. They are public servants. They obey orders. They have orders to Investigate this matter and submit a report to the DPP's office, which I understand is not the initiating body for this squalid matter.
The issue is this. Mary Ellen Synon has a low opinion of traveller life. She sees nothing attractive or engaging about it. She is not alone in her opinion. Few of us believe that there is anything remotely enviable about the lives of the overwhelming majority of travellers. I have yet to meet the person who can lay his/her hand on the heart and say: I wish I was born a traveller. Quite the reverse. Most of us are pleased not to have been born a traveller, and live in hope that a travellers, halting site is not constructed next to our houses.
Incitement to hatred
These are facts. But they are not politically correct facts. Politically correct, right on values permit the public expression of low opinions of Americans, English people, middle class, heterosexual males, and other "oppressor" groups. One can, dismiss Los Angeles as a toilet - as Michael Colgan did last Saturday on The Late Late Show - in this culture; but to say that a traveller encampment is a sewer - as Mary Ellen did - is tantamount to racism and incitement to hatred.
The truth is that both are correct. One truth is palatable; the other is not. And when we area dealing with opinions, one set - the politically correct - is acceptable, and the other - the politically incorrect - is not, and causes those who are PC and in power to initiate police enquiries.
This is not a trivial matter, nor is it just an absurd waste of valuable time for some of the most professional and dedicated police officers in the land. It is deeply sinister too: for how can this issue, one of the most taxing and complex in Irish life, ever be dealt with if the PC lobby is trying to convert the Garda Siochana into a Speech Police whose apparent job is to ensure that only PC words on the topic are uttered?
We can hide behind sanctimonious falsehood; we can prosecute those who speak their minds openly; we can pretend that relations between traveller and the rest are coloured solely by the inflammatory words of the unrepresentative few. We can even throw Mary Ellen Synon into jail and nourish her on occasional pieces of mouldy porkfat. It will not after the truth and telling the truth, not pleasing the PC lobby, is the primary duty of newspapers.