God be good to the Equality Commission and all who sail in her: it adds so much to the gaiety of nations, and we would all be the immeasurably poorer without it.
It issued its most recent findings the other day, and they were, as always, a fascinating minestrone of intellectual inconsistency, gobbledegook and droning sanctimonious dogma.
What must it be like to share one of those old-fashioned railway carriages with an Equality Commissar, say from Oslo to Vienna? I suspect you would have slaughtered and consumed his remains, licking the paintwork clean of the last traces of his gore, long before you had reached the German border.
Consider the case of Claire Maguire, whom the Equality Police found to have been discriminated against because of her disability by Bob's News & Deli, Darndale, Dublin when, in an isolated incident, the manager refused to assist her to shop. Yes, "assist". For many years staff in the shop had accommodated the complainant, who has "mobility difficulties", by doing her shopping while she waited outside the shop in her motorised four-wheeled scooter.
Is there a single Equality Commissar in the Equality Industry who is capable of grasping that her treatment before this single incident was inequality at it most humane and quintessential? For this was not a service they would have provided for any able-bodied person, and it is certainly not one that they are in law obliged to provide. They were decent people, doing an unfortunate woman a favour; and ultimately, they paid the Equality Industry's price for their decency.
For one day, through circumstances which remain unclear, the manager refused to do the complainant's shopping for her. And though this was an isolated incident - as even the Equality Police admitted - she sued the shop (on whose advice?, I wonder) and was awarded €500 damages.
Despite this fine, the Equality Officer found no evidence that the shop operated any form of discriminatory policy against people with disabilities. In addition, the shop was ordered to ensure that all staff were aware of their obligations under the Equal Status Act. Really? And just where does it say in the Equal Status Act that some people are so much more equal to others that shopkeepers or their assistants are obliged to do their shopping for them? The complainant ceased to shop at Bob's for 18 months, but is back shopping there now: I take it we are using the term "shopping" in the sense which is unique to this establishment, in which the staff obligingly collect her groceries while the woman who took their employer to court watches on. Must be a charming atmosphere.
Perhaps Niall Crowley, armed with his all-encompassing Equality Bible, could intervene in the little row which has broken out between Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Archdeacon Gordon Linney. I confess to having a taste for disputes between the churches: one grows tired of the ecumenical Riverdance, heels nimbly flashing in Christian accord, as tambourines rattle and everyone else feels each other's pain. Nothing quite like a pair of fingers in the Episcopal eye to remind one of the real gulf between the churches.
Sticking a pair of deaconly digits into Roman ocular orbits was what Gordon Linney effectively did when, while arguing for same-sex unions, he wondered how it was possible that people (i.e., the Papes) who were certain homosexuality was evil had been so indifferent and even devious when it came to facing the issue of child abuse. No wonder the poor old archbish reeled back, blinking - not, of course, that the remark was in any way personal.
The Church of Ireland archdeacon is now calling for the State to enact legislation to "to allow gay people to have registered stable relationships with all the benefits and rights that go with that status, such as the inheritance laws and so forth".
Over to Commissar Crowley, with this question. If two of the Archdeacon's flock, Myrtle Sidebottom, say, and Heather Haddock, have been living together in celibate spinsterhood for 30 years, are they not also entitled to share similar inheritance rights (and so forth)? Surely, Commissar, if cohabiting homosexual couples are allowed such rights, then cohabiting asexual couples should be allowed them also.
No? Or is the presence of joint sexual activity the decisive arbiter of any such relationship which may be recognised by both Church and State? If that is the case, are there to be regular sexual-activity tests? And perhaps for those who haven't yet started having sex with someone else, the Equality Police could have an Exploring Sexualities service, which provides equality counsellors to advise on how to lesbianise hitherto celibate relationships.
Perhaps there are pamphlets, with little diagrams, telling 82-year-old Heather to do this while 79-year-old Myrtle does that. What japes, girls! And what fresh idiocies await us, as the clouds of ideological egalitarian dogma infiltrate our laws and our churches? Why should sexualised relationships enjoy tax-breaks and inheritance laws that non-sexualised relationships do not have?
And then, if we remove that inequality, and admit "special relationships" to be formalised in law, who is to say adult brothers and sisters should not marry in any combination you like, on grounds of mutual and enduring affection? Perhaps we could have a new civil egalitarian ceremony for such unions, which would be solemnised by Secular Archbishop Crowley?
But maybe the Equality Agency doesn't even recognise bishops - it seems at times a rather Presbyterian, even Roundhead organisation, for which Commissioner Crowley is, anatomically at least, very well suited.