How is it that compassionate people can turn viperous towards the most defenceless?, asks Vincent Browne.
For the last seven weeks I have been presenting a day-time radio programme on RTÉ Radio 1 (in the slot usually reserved for Pat Kenny) and have been exposed to the reaction of public opinion in a way I have not experienced before.
The programme has a high listenership (or at least had at the start of my run with it) and it generates a huge response in the form of phone calls, e-mails and letters.
The first impression of this reaction is its warmth and often its humour. Another impression is its overall fairness (with the exceptions I come to below) and good judgment (again with the exceptions below). When I was unfair to an interviewee, invariably there would be a rush of calls to make that point (as in, for instance, an interview with Sister Helen of CORI about the deal struck between the religious orders and the Government on compensation for victims of sexual abuse in institutions run by members of religious orders).
Then there was obvious compassion (again with the exceptions below).
I read a letter from a woman in a mental institution, and the reaction was overwhelmingly in her favour, with outrage over the way she is being treated by the State and the psychiatric profession.
It is worthwhile digressing for a moment about her. She wrote a 4½-page letter on A4 paper, in clear legible handwriting and in a vivid, coherent style.
She wrote how, on two occasions in the past five years, gardaí had come to her house, handcuffed her and taken her away in a Garda car in front of her neighbours. She said this had been done at the instigation of her husband.
She wrote about appalling conditions in the hospital she was taken to (having seen this hospital myself I can confirm her account of those conditions - filth, absence of privacy, general degradation) and dismal conditions in the hospital she is now in (locked doors, no access to open spaces, tiny windows).
She went on to describe how doctors and nurses had forcibly injected her with drugs, despite her objections, how none of these medics talked to her, and the absence of any counselling or support.
The reaction to that letter was hugely sympathetic to the woman, with several people telling of their own traumas in psychiatric hospitals (in a few decades there will be a tribunal of inquiry into the treatment of psychiatric patients, and there will be all the usual guff then about a different climate, different perspectives and the rest).
Another item which had considerable impact was an interview with another woman, Kathleen O'Malley, who was raped by a neighbour in a Dublin tenement when she was eight and how, as a direct consequence, she and her sisters were taken away from their mother and locked up in an industrial school in Moate, where they were physically and psychologically abused until they were released at 16.
THERE was outrage over that as well, with a focus not so much on the nuns that ran the industrial school but on the administrative and judicial system that took the children away from a caring and loving mother because of something done to them by a neighbour.
But two issues evoked quite a different, indeed venomous, response.
Almost every sympathetic reference to Travellers gave rise to a splurge of calls, all of them anti- Traveller. Hardly a call expressed support for the most vulnerable and discriminated-against group in Irish society. The usual stuff came up: Travellers have pots of money and are merely scrounging off the rest of us; why should we respect Travellers when they don't respect us? the side of the road is not good enough for them, and so on.
That's just ignorant bigotry.
More worrying is the political response, represented on the programme by the new leader of Fine Gael, Enda Kenny. Apparently the authentic line of the party of "The Just Society" is that there has to be "balance" here, between the rights of the Travellers and the rights of the settled community.
An equivalence between "the quiet enjoyment of one's property" and the right of children, for instance, to be accommodated in elementary living conditions?
The response on refugees was almost unrelieved by any sympathy. They are, I was told, scroungers, flooding the country, afforded preferential treatment, and up to their necks in criminality.
How is it that people who are so obviously compassionate on several fronts turn viperous towards the most defenceless?
Is there no wonderment why people would leave their homes and their country and travel to a country that is entirely alien to them if it is not because of desperation?
Is there no folk memory of the desperation that drove millions of people from Ireland over the centuries and no suspicion that similar desperation has driven today's refugees here?
But it was the warmth that was the most salient feature of the public reaction to the radio programme. The memory of that will, I hope, obliterate the other memories.