With the recent presidential election in Ireland coming to a rather anti-climactic close with a resound and foreseeable outcome in the re-election of Michael D. Higgins, some questions raised provided foundations for interesting debates that many people consider controversial. Because of media dismissal of his comments as racist, many don’t provide any leverage to Peter Casey’s sentimentality about the travelling community.

The reaction of Peter Casey’s comments surrounding the travelling community circumvented the Presidential talking points. At the same time the Blasphemy law being repealed (largely seen as anachronistic but in my opinion was always a contradicting constitutional affirmation from its inception) mirrors a confusing polarisation of political ideology that is growing in the Western world today.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the growing nature of the anti-immigration rallies and concerns in European nations polarising with the leftist ideology prevalent in EU parliament and its leaders who support very open immigration. This is more evident now than before as Dave Rubin, an American political commentator who was in Dublin for a book tour with Jordan Peterson only a week before the election/referendum, highlighted a polarising sentiment in EU politics with one tweet which he simply stated “Europe is confusing”.

Dave Rubin’s Tweet surmising a polarisation of EU politics, on the left Ireland votes to remove blasphemy laws and on the right the EU Court of Human Rights says “Insulting Islam is not free speech”.

There is a growing disparity between classically liberal values that I would argue are very much prevalent within the Irish constitution, bar the exception of articles recently repealed, and that of the where the leftist political and social ideology is headed.

Two years ago, then Taoiseach Enda Kenny (Prime Minister of Ireland) announced that members of the traveling community in Ireland were to be identified lawfully as a different ethnic grouping to the rest of Ireland. Due to their limited and relatively small numbers (0.6% of the population or just under 30,000 people in numeric terms), travelers were declared and socially protected as an ethnic minority.

The traveling community have searched for this status for decades while many previous Taoiseach’s have not addressed the situation. The travelling community for those who are not familiar, are communities and groups of people who largely live in mobile homes, move quite often or even constantly, work blue collar jobs in trades and building, leaving school very young to do so as they often started families at younger ages than the rest of Ireland. These traditions have largely been reduced to a cultural affirmation by the community itself.

Enda Kenny, Taoiseach of Ireland in 2017 who declared Travelers an ethnic minority.

As Ireland grew more wealthy and affluent first, the building and trade work became largely unionized and industrialised within urban settlements and the rural work was often hired out to friends and relatives within rural communities.

As a result, the traveling communities found themselves largely destitute in an expanding and technologically sophisticated job market. Women are not encouraged to work largely within these communities so single income families which were very large, over time became no income families.

Without going in to any detail of travelling communities cultural traditions, many people believe this to be a simple scapegoat for the community to avoid working and neglect the social responsibility many Irish people take on. Western middle class work, send their children to school, pay taxes, and foster social responsibility which actively encourages economic placement in the middle class job market with higher education providing a basis to move upward from this class.

Ireland has become highly educated as the affluent middle class jobs previous generations undertook during times of economic boom, paid for education of their children. In polarisation, the absence of the travelling community from the workplace because of the growing educational requirements, their children lack the educational standard to enter the workforce. Coupled with the traditional traveler sentimentality to pull their kids from education while they are young teenagers of 14 -15 years of age, the downward spiraling educational and employment trends many travelers face will not be stemmed anytime soon because of their ideology regarding education and modern society.

Currently the traveling community has a second level completion rate of only 13%, in comparison to the standard national model of 92%, with 17.7% having no formal education whatsoever. Suicide rates are higher among traveler men while 86.6% of traveler men and 81.2% of female travelers are unemployed. The infant mortality rate in this community is 12/1000, four times that of the national average.

Make of those statistics what you will but they show a clear and harrowing disparity between the traveler community and the rest of Ireland. Many who support the claim that the traveler community are a separate ethnic group conflate these statistics with social prejudice and ethnic discrimination of the community and usher a greater need for empathy and resources to be provided through social welfare and provisions.

I should make it absolutely clear that I do not believe that to be the case. The travelling community have long been a source of disdain for many ordinary citizens who criticise the community for intimidating shops keepers, stealing personal property, and basic inoperable behaviour most within social expectations would consider appalling that emanates from a claim to “cultural differences”.

It has been a source of annoyance and regret from animal rights sympathisers that the position of “Sulky” racing from travelers is violent, dangerous, and deplorable. Sulky racing is a race between two horse-drawn carriages, often carrying multiple people, where horses frequently collapse of exhaustion from being over-whipped and not having horse shoes while galloping on public roads tearing their feet asunder. Once the horse is no longer physically capable of racing, it is often abandoned. €5 million was spent between 2011 and 2012 on the medical treatment, often resulting in euthanasia of abandoned horses.

Bare knuckle boxing is a cultural tradition in settling family feuds among travelers with many documentaries made about the subject, where kids are actively taught to settle difference through physical confrontation. Many people have stories of not being able to confront the travelling community for fear of assault and violence.

Public and civil servants find their jobs enormously difficult if confronted by travelling families. Social and child care personnel are threatened if they make complaints to the authorities if they suspect a child from the community is being abused. Veterinary inspectors unlucky enough to be given the task of inspecting the health of the horses many travelling communities keep for the aforementioned “Sulky” racing receive intimidating and violent threats if they attempt to have the horses removed for violation of animal cruelty laws. But criticism of such acts, due to their ethnic minority status, is deemed racist and therefore intolerable from some in society.

Ireland is currently in the midst of a housing crisis and as the number of travelers who live in houses hits 84% despite having almost identical unemployment rates, the social housing offered to the community is frequently turned down. This polarises the working middle class who feel their taxed to pay for social housing is going to waste. There is an anger brewing when newly built houses with solar panels in Tipperary are turned down by the travelling community because there are no horse stables while those working pay extortionate rental prices rising across the country who signal disdain for the manner in which many of those livestock are treated regardless.

The site of a new development of social housing in Thurles, Co Tipperary that a traveler community rejected on the basis there was no stables for their horses.

Recent Presidential candidate Peter Casey raised some furore when he described the travelling community as “basically people camping on someone else’s land” and “not paying their fair share of taxes in society”, which many consider to be racist statements.

The reason I write all of this isn’t to disparage or cast aspersions at various socio-economic classes. The point is that the people on social media and mainstream media have clashed in the criticism of what Casey said. Mainstream media and national leaders attributed Casey’s comments as insensitive, racially or ethnically provocative, anachronistic, and not an accurate portrayal of what modern, liberal Ireland stands for.

Whereas exit polls and election results highlighted that the only candidate who saw any rise in votes over the past 2 weeks was Casey, who went from a paltry 1% at the bottom of the polls, to 23.3%, leap frogging 4 candidates to finish second behind the current and now re-elected president, Michael D Higgins.

The manner that Casey jumped this high from virtually nowhere could be almost entirely reduced to his comments mentioned above. It raised discussions that surprised many people in that more than most actually agreed with his comments, much to the dismay of the travelling community and the alarm of the mainstream media who abhorred these comments largely because they have to.

Peter Casey, a Presidential candidate in Ireland’s 2018 election whose comments about the travelling community caused a stir in the media.

My personal quarrel with the model of social protection is largely based in minority inclusion sentiments in Ireland and the European Court of Human Rights which recently stated, “Insulting Islam is not free speech” on the same day Ireland repealed its blasphemy law.

This contradiction arises when the EU and the leftist political ideology (which has always focused on equality of rights) puts faith in the social protection of minority groups and minority group ideology to achieve this equality rather than the protection of principles and liberal virtues which promote equality like free speech and free press.

I believe that the Irish state affirmation of social protection through minority status of the travelling community is a non-actionable model of what has become knows as virtue-signalling ( an effort to signal moral and virtuous superiority by the protection of minority groups). This protection comes in the recognition of the stats highlighted earlier and the desire to correct these stats by offering free social housing in an effort to gentrify the community. This does not work.

It is not my belief that these numbers show a social disparity emanating from systemic inequality targeting travelers but rather that the numbers show a cultural inability emanating from within the travelling community itself to share the same values as the working diaspora in Ireland. Appeasing this culture by offering social housing does the psychology of the community no favours as they do not require any responsibility to achieve what others work for.

The social responsibility of class mechanics does not lie in social welfare but in employment and education which travelers actively discourage in their own communities and then cry foul afterward.

Protecting the community from the need for education and work by offering free houses is giving protection to that inability while offering no reasonable solution to a more deep-rooted and fundamental problem that travellers face which is their own secessionist society.

Ireland’s constitution offers protection to freedom of thought, press, education, Religious beliefs, expression of personal beliefs regardless of religion, race, creed, sex, and ethnicity. Without this, many people would not be able to criticise the failings of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the control the institution exuded over the country. These criticisms were first viewed as offensive by many staunch Catholics but after multiple indefensible accounts of perpetration by the Church, criticism became hugely necessary. But this also offers us opportunities to criticise failings of any group ideology, including that of travelers.

The EU and a lot of the Western world have fallen into dismissals of the difficult conversations surrounding Islam as Islamaphobic, about the Transgender community as transphobic, about open border immigration as racist and xenophobic, about the travelling community here in Ireland as likewise.

The final point is that free speech and freedom of thought can often times be offensive. The offense often comes when someone highlights a discussion we don’t want to have or are not mature enough to debate. Offense and dismissals of speech as racist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnically insensitive, sectarian or blasphemous are often easy fast tracks out of the difficult conversations. Intentions of truly indecent comments are not that difficult to notice but the trend is that honourable intentions are persistently conflated with the indecent and this misleads necessary conversations away from some hard truth and sobering facts.

The resurgence of free thinking is happening online, in independent publications like this one. In YouTube videos and independent commentators like Dave Rubin. The resistance to free thinking online is largely perpetrated by highly recognisable social figures, politicians, mainstream media icons who have contractual obligations to offer platitudes to everyone for votes and broadcast ratings.

Leo Varadkar even recently stated he wanted Facebook to remove any comments made in an ethnically derogatory manner towards the travelling community to appease their group. Many people are starting to voice their opinion in opposition with these platitudes.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who strongly opposed the comments made by Peter Casey pictured supporting current President running for re-election, Michael D Higgins.

If ideas are not met with open discussion and instead conflated or denigrated as unacceptable, society never learns. We then enter realms of incremental restrictions based on the offense taken by various groups where the list of groups and the list of things one should not say about this group, increases every day.

Peter Casey was never going to win the election. However, the surge in votes he garnered that no other candidate could, amid one of the lowest election turnouts in decades, suggests that more of our largely exhausted middle class are encouraging a discussion on a subject matter that our politicians and mainstream media may not be willing to have. But history shows us that this means we probably need to have the conversation.