What I like best about the seizure of part of Ennis Town Council's headquarters by Traveller squatters is the dumbfounded silence of the professional travellologists, the professional hand-wringers who for so long have dominated all discussion on the issue of Travellers.
They introduced the entire sancti-babble of US sociologists to the issue, with notions of "culture", "racism", "marginalisation", "social exclusion". They have been aided in their grisly project by the pious babble from the new priesthood of career liberals, who dominate the Irish media and who have been determined throughout to prove that Travellers could only ever be victims.
But the travellologists and the curates of the politically correct fell wonderfully silent after Travellers occupied the grounds that were about to be used for a reception to welcome the Russian Special Olympics team to Ennis, which then had to be cancelled.
This was too grotesque for parody. Yet it did not occur in a vacuum. That Travellers could even contemplate moving their caravans on to such land at such a sensitive time merely proves that they have drunk deep at the well of bien-pensant fatuity, wherein they have imbibed all sorts of notions about their "rights", and none whatever of their responsibilities. Thus "society" is something which they draw from, but to which they make no contribution.
Who can blame them for thinking this way? For the most part, they are unlettered, and know little about the world the rest of us live in, one of taxes, duties and binding social obligations.
The travellologists have not told them of that world of personal restraint and discipline. Instead, they have told Travellers merely of their "entitlements", and of the direct action they can take to ensure they get them. Occupation of vacant land is one of those ploys.
Had anyone else tried to occupy land intended for Special Olympics use, we can be sure the Garda would have moved in pretty sharpish and ejected them, perhaps with the aid of a truncheon or two if need be. But if you want proof of the discriminatory laws which now govern the relationship between Travellers and the society which subsidises their existence almost at every turn, it was in the non-existent Garda reaction to the Ennis occupation.
And this wasn't at the expense of middle-class people such as the readers of this newspaper, who can probably take a knock or two, but of some of the least fortunate people in the world: the intellectually handicapped athletes from Russia. It is all quite beyond the realm of fiction - and it put into the shade the otherwise astounding story of the three gardaí who found a group of Travellers barricaded in a Mayo pub after closing hours, and who then left them there.
Yet frankly, if I'd been in the Garda patrol, I'd have done exactly the same. There were 20 Travellers in the bar, helping themselves to drink, and who clearly knew the limits of the law. Even if arrests were possible - and, in the circumstances, they weren't - what would happen then? The Travellers might be charged with various offences and then would be given bail; but if they largely go by the same name, and they live in a halting site (and, in the Mayo case, one apparently outside the jurisdiction), where it would next to be impossible to serve an arrest warrant, what real good would come of a decisive Garda intervention?
This appalling affair doesn't even bring us close to the issue of four-year-old Elizabeth Heapes, run over and crushed by a Traveller's car in the course of one of those colourful expressions of Traveller culture called a "faction fight", which she had wandered into. Elizabeth's injuries were cruel: she suffered extensive damage to her spine, her stomach, her bowels and her genitals, from which she might never fully recover.
The Heapes family were determined to seek justice for their mutilated little girl. The outcome? They have now been intimidated out of their home by the very man allegedly responsible for impaling Elizabeth against a fence with his car; and the DPP says that this creature will not face charges.
The cumulative effect of these cases is confirmation that we live in a divided society wherein one group of people are not seen to be legally answerable for their actions. And worse, in a way, is the likely outcome from the liberal travellologists, who invariably live in salubrious middle-class areas where there's no possibility whatever of a halting site opening up nextdoor: they will probably huff and puff about the emergence of the "new right" in Irish life and its "anti-Traveller racism", and of the pressing need for Ireland to develop a "tolerance of cultural diversity".
We'll probably see more of that cultural diversity this summer when the billhooks and meat-cleavers come out for the annual faction fights at Tuam, or when more isolated publicans in the west are terrorised in their own homes, or when new illegal occupations of vacant land occur. And, to tell you the truth, I don't blame Travellers one bit.
They're only human.
Traveller miscreants have now learnt that there's a bleating lobby that will always take their side, no matter what; and, worst of all, they've learnt that the State which provides them with the dole and their children's allowances is simply too infirm of purpose to compel them to obey the laws which the rest of us have to live by. So they simply ignore them: as indeed, in their circumstances, would I.