Why did Dublin City Council erect a concrete barrier at Dunsink? Was it to stop the Canadian Navy from dumping four somewhat-used submarines there? That would have been a good reason. Another reason is that probably their equivalent in scrap is dumped there every year and the council has a right to stop it. Well, what about the Travellers who are resident there? What about them? Most of them are there illegally. No one makes them stay there. If the blocks make life inconvenient for them, they should move on.
Of course, they logically should have done that years ago, because Dunsink Lane has been an "uninhabitable" cesspit for at least a decade. Had the people squatting there not been called "Travellers", and had not their preference for living amid such squalor not been dignified with the word "culture", then their children would have been put into care, and they would have been served with eviction notices, to be followed in short order by the bailiffs.
Dunsink has less to do with concrete blocks than the existence of a system of apartheid which creates a category of people called Travellers who are immune to some of the laws which apply to the rest of the Irish people. Dunsink for years has been a centre of organised theft and diesel-laundering. Many Traveller vehicles are either UK-registered, uninsured or untaxed. Moreover, the State has created laws which impose duties upon local councils towards Travellers which have no equivalent for the larger community. Travellers have been indulged with the creation of a legal status and legal protection, but without a legally binding definition of what a Traveller is - the true hallmark of the fuzzy thinking and unprincipled cowardice with which we have not been facing up to the Traveller issue.
We have created a dependent community within the Irish State which has now become pathologically dysfunctional. Nearly three-quarters of Traveller men are officially unemployed, yet Dublin has imported 30,000 Chinese people in the past five years - not one of whom, I bet, is on the dole.
Bishop Willie Walsh in Killaloe a couple of years ago allowed Travellers to park their caravans on his palace-land - temporarily, or so he thought. Once there, they refused to go, despite his increasingly desperate requests that the lack of toilets had disagreeable consequences for everyone. Finally, he persuaded the families to move - but they went directly into the car-park of the newly opened headquarters of Clare County Council. After a while, they were evicted, and where did they go? Why, back to the poor bishop's lawns.
Some time later, Co Clare opened up a small show estate for travellers, with halting-sites and €300,000 houses. Two families on the bishop's land were offered the new homes and left, but then decided they didn't like their new Traveller-neighbours. Bishop Walsh sought to bring peace between the feuding families, but unavailingly. The newly housed family then abandoned the house they had just been allocated and departed in their caravan. Where to? Back once again to Willie Walsh's gardens, of course.
The crowning moment of Clare's Traveller policy came last year as the county council was preparing to host a reception in Ennis to welcome the Russian competitors in the Special Olympics for mentally handicapped athletes. No sooner had the council gates opened than a convoy of traveller caravans occupied the car-park, and the welcoming reception for these wretchedly unfortunate Russians had to be cancelled.
Travellers' perception of the world has been shaped by a State which does not insist upon their having any concept of duties, and which tolerates every social deviancy which in any other community would be a cause of opprobrium. Traveller life is caste-based, unhealthy, highly alcoholic, illiterate, often violently misogynistic and low-achieving - two-thirds of Traveller children have abandoned all education by the age of 15. Most of all, Travellers are cursed with a life expectancy at least 10 years shorter than that of the rest of the population.
The Irish media have invariably treated stories of Traveller excess - the savage faction fights, the drunkenness, the endless trespasses - with a querulous, hand-wringing timidity. Traveller expectations are thus always about the conduct of others, not of themselves - and these expectations have been ruinously fuelled by the workings of the Equality Agency, which has created the expectation that there is only Traveller victimhood, never traveller liability.
The State has taken upon itself the duty of protecting the Traveller way of life, when it sees no duty to protect any other way of life. Every local council in the land has a legal duty to house homeless citizens, and as citizens, homeless Travellers can avail themselves of that system. But thousands of Travellers prefer to remain on illegal halting sites, or wait their turn for their special Traveller privileges from a State towards which so few of them make any contribution whatsoever.
Travellers remain in squalor because they actually choose to. The escape routes exist: they merely have to avail of them. Economically and socially, the basis of the travelling tradition is over, just as the basis of Irish shipyard and jute traditions are over, just as forty-shilling freeholders are over, just as the feudal system is over.
Only political weak-mindedness and fear of being labelled "racist" causes the State to continue to prop up an obsolete, economically parasitical and personally destructive tradition with grants, special laws or even no laws at all. And what we have got in return for such misdirected and utterly destructive kindness? Why, petrol bombs and gardaí in riot gear at Dunsink.