In recent times, an unsettling tendency has developed whereby the voices of unrepresentative minorities have been able disproportionately to influence and sometimes usurp the democratic process.
As a result, ideas and philosophies never canvassed before the electorate have been adopted by such as State agencies because they have gained currency in discussions uncontaminated by democracy.
Elitist activists, acting in concert with elitist commentators, have imposed their agendas for social change not through winning hearts and minds, still less by virtue of the objective value of their ideas, but because they have privileged and instant access to the public conversation.
This tendency has stretched from matters of what was once deemed private morality to, for example, the issue of public aesthetics. A high-visibility example relates to one-off housing. In the past 20 years or so, thanks to the relentless efforts of a tiny, unrepresentative but vocal minority, public policy in this regard has become deeply inhospitable to the idea of people who live in the countryside building houses on their own land. Promoted by the chinless wonders of An Taisce, and relentlessly pushed by a small band of public commentators, an electorally-untested shift in public policy has resulted in the rapid erosion of the once-sacrosanct idea that a citizen had the right to nest where he pleased in a nest of his own designing. In some parts of the country, citizens have ceased to submit applications for reconstructions or new developments, because they know that a once straightforward matter of human need is now subject to an unspecified aesthetic and prohibitive bureaucratic regulation. Often, it has been impossible to avoid the idea that this change in Irish culture was being promoted by a cosmopolitan elite nurturing a profound antipathy towards rural Ireland and those who live there. To their shame, the Irish media have presented a one-sided "debate", monopolised by surreptitious interests and fanatics, and lacking a sense of moral or philosophical objectives.
This pseudo-discussion has been driven not by genuine public-interest concerns but by metropolitanism, snobbery, spurious aesthetics, dinner party politics and a fundamental lack of perspective on what life is about. Anyone seeking to challenge the assumptions emanating from the resulting edifice of prejudice have been shouted down and bullied into silence, often in a manner lacking proportion concerning the meaning of words. One lofty Dublin-based commentator, for example, some years ago dismissed criticism of An Taisce as follows: "In some parts of Ireland, admitting membership of An Taisce is to invite the pariah status of a paedophile." Such disproportion has spread like an antibiotic-resistant superbug, contaminating perspective and sense. To its discredit, this newspaper has boasted about inventing the term "bungalow blight", a grotesque slur on the efforts of decent people to house their families.
As I noted before, my dictionary defines a bungalow as "a one-storey house, sometimes with an attic". The word, denoting a particular house structure, is devoid of moral content, but its use in the discussion has been superciliously suggestive of morally-deficient lifestyle choices imposed on the landscape by people of inferior taste.
I therefore wish to express solidarity with Fintan O'Toole, with an address in Ballyvaughan, who has recently attracted the attentions of the busybodies at An Taisce because he seeks to extend his modest Co Clare property by some 462 per cent. In an objection lodged with Clare County Council, and displaying the same lack of proportion demonstrated in the aforementioned quote about "paedophiles", An Taisce described Mr O'Toole's proposal as "unacceptable and criminal". (The allegation of criminality has since been withdrawn.) Mr O'Toole's property is a cottage of some 39sq m, which he wishes to extend to create 180sq m of living and working space. An Taisce has submitted a syntactically challenged objection to the development on the grounds that it "lies along a protected coastline within the Burren complex, along a scenic route, would be visually obtrusive and the density is not in keeping with the original dwelling, nor is its design". There was a time when Mr O'Toole might simply have ambled along to his local Fianna Fáil councillor and, following a series of nods, winks and other latterly-unapproved gestures, conveyed the nature of his difficulty and obtained a cast iron guarantee that no bunch of sandal-wearing hysterics would be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
There are those who would sit in judgment on Mr O'Toole for adopting such a course, but who could sincerely blame him if he felt nostalgia for the old days? The councillor would have been elected, for a start. Progress could have continued unimpeded. And the Dublin 4 snobs seeking to impose their ideas on ordinary citizens, while believing themselves exempt from their own prescriptions, would have been roundly and democratically stuffed.