What follows is simply beyond belief, but it's true, may God strike me dead; and I don't know whether to laugh, slap my thigh and get on with life, or cut loose with a Thompson sub-machinegun equipped with a 100-round drum magazine. The latter, probably, with Willie O'Dea as target number one, writes Kevin Myers
He's target number one because he should have been the first line of defence. Instead, he turns out to have been a gender-quisling, which is what most men are these days, especially politicians. We'll return to the reasons for his imminent demise in a minute; but it should be made plain now that the delay doesn't mean he won't die screaming. For he will.
Brace yourself, readers. Seat-belts on, and a leather thong between your teeth, so you don't bite your tongue off in disbelief. Dublin last week was host to the strangest press conference the capital has seen since Patrick Pearse called one outside the GPO in 1916 and announced he was setting up a united Irish Republic. All we can hope is that the Gender Equality Unit is unsuccessful as Commandant Pearse was.
The GEU has carried out a pilot study in State-funded organisations on gender mainstreaming - yes, here we go again, yet more mumbo-jumbo from the feminist language-factory in the bowels of the Department of Applied Linguistics, MIT. No, and I didn't know what gender mainstreaming was until I read about it, which I now ask you, with your nostrils firmly between finger and thumb, to similarly do. Painful, I know, but being a reader of this column has its price.
Gender mainstreaming involves the investigation of the impact of state expenditure on gender equality. And look, my tongue is not in my cheek when I report that gender mainstreaming studies in the UK have shown that road safety campaigns benefit men more than women, as more men die in traffic crashes. Therefore road safety campaigns discriminate against women. Equally, men benefit more from money spent on sports facilities, because they use them more. Katherine Rake, the splendidly named representative of the UK Women's Budget Group, was quoted thus: "One policy we looked at was investment on transport because we found women were more likely to use local bus services and make repeated trips on such services, while men were more likely to take the train or car. If you have a huge subsidy on roads, then that favours men's use of transport over women's." Oh. And what do buses run on - ploughed fields?
But even to argue like that is to enter this mad apartheid world, in which the sexes live measurably separable lives, ones in which budgets must then be equally allocated. Road safety campaigns save too many men? So cut down on road safety, and a couple of years later explain the splendours of gender-mainstreaming to the extra widows and fatherless daughters.
No, I'm not pulling your leg. This is all serious stuff. There's more to come. Katherine Rake thought that our National Development Plan provided Ireland with a "huge opportunity" to advance the equality agenda. Moreover, she thought that the techniques involved in gender mainstreaming could be used in studying the impact of decisions on other "disadvantaged groups", such as low-income households or ethnic minorities.
This year-zero ideological nonsense isn't happening after a revolutionary take-over by a gender Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as the Sex Pots, but within a democratic society which apparently slumbers while the Sex Pots investigate, interrogate and politicise the entire civil service.
But the world doesn't work on such simplistic gender lines, any more than it worked on the Marxist, class simplicities of the old Iron Curtain countries. Of course, that doesn't mean the Sex Pot loonies in the academic world - the equivalent of all those campus communists who for decades backed the old Soviet Union - will cease their current ideological gibberings. We should expect no better. The least we should do, in all decency, is simply to ignore them.
But ignoring them is not what we're doing. We're actually taking these Sex Pot loonies seriously. This is where Willie O'Dea comes into the picture. Instead of telling Katherine Rake to put her plans where they would inevitably meet her breakfast heading south, he took her at her word, announcing last week that the Government already widely applied gender mainstreaming, and a Gender Equality Unit had been set up to "provide training, support and advice" (i.e., ideological brainwashing) for officials implementing the National Development Plan.
This kind of sub-Marxist doggerel is only talked, and acted on, in organisations which are not serious about productivity or profit, i.e., academic and state officialdom. Grown-ups in the real world, the one in which we live on the Micawber principles of needing to earn more than we spend, have no time for such imbecilic Sex Pottery. But don't be surprised if UCD opens up a Department of Gender Mainstreaming in Belfield, where the Sex Pots will assess the gender-impact of the study of Latin subjunctives and the sale of postage stamps, thereby revealing lots and learning absolutely nothing.
This is a mere fad, a hula hoop of voguish nonsense which will soon pass, and in five years' time we will no more understand how we allowed these Sex Pot clowns to influence government or academic policy than we can understand 1970s flares. But in the meantime, we can at least identify one collaborator in our midst. Up against the wall for a bit of gender mainstreaming, Willie, courtesy of Colonel Thompson. And stop blubbering: it'll do you no good.