How we would handle France’s burkini folly
THANK God – or Allah – that the French are beginning to see the light about their ill-conceived burkini ban. Its only purpose is to introduce a form of control over women, some of whom are already subjugated as it is by religion and male domination, and drive a wedge between ordinary people. Try as we might to see it, there was nothing remotely civilised, nothing that reflected Western values, in the images of three armed gendarmes circling a woman on a beach in Nice and subjecting her to a level of surveillance that would only be in order if she showed signs of wearing a suicide vest.
As bikini-clad sun worshippers glowered spitefully in the poor woman’s direction and the gendarmes took notes, she was obliged to take off her turquoise shirt to reveal nothing more suspicious than her black top and leggings.
Now the French may be celebrated for their je ne sais quoi but there is nothing uplifting about an unaccompanied middle-aged female being bullied off a beach, just to make a point about the cultural and political superiority of la Belle France.
We are routinely bombarded with the idea that the French can teach us plebs a thing or two about fashion, romance and the art of living well.
But excusez moi s’il vous plait – when it comes to introducing new laws in a civilised and decorous fashion it’s we Irish who have the upper hand. Our art of obeying the spirit rather than the letter of the law shows the French that there are other ways to skin a cat, or rather a burkini-clad Muslim woman than applying the brute force of militant secularism. Our national ingenuity for getting around the law meant that we could usher in a draconian smoking ban without creating a single scene of smokers being humiliated in public.
IF THE French had our knack of thinking outside the box, they’d have cleared their beaches of burkinis without a whisper of dissent. Social life continued as normal despite the smoking ban because publicans and hoteliers built partially enclosed smoking rooms on to their premises, allowing people to puff away contentedly.
For obvious reasons a burkini ban is hardly an issue in this rain-sodden country but still it is nothing our local authorities couldn’t handle with panache.
Taking a leaf from the publicans’ survival manual, they could clear sand from part of the beaches or cordon off areas from the public – there are many ways of tinkering with the meaning of ‘public areas’ on beaches to allow Muslim women take a modest dip.
Alternatively our councils could employ the same turn-a-blind-eye approach that they take to the regulations governing contaminated drinking water or beach pollution levels.
Basically the burkini ban would be quietly ignored and in the unlikely event of complaints about it being flouted, the unseasonably hot weather would be blamed.
We fly by the seat of our pants in this country when it comes to regulations. New laws that demand too much upheaval or departure from the old norms are more often honoured in the breach rather than the observance.
Despite the law we still natter on our phones while we drive – too many of us climb into our cars after the pub.
They say it’s a legacy of our colonial past, of a native distrust of authority.
It breeds a tolerance for lawlessness that makes us seem weak and absolves many of our so-called betters of staggering levels of corruption.
The upside, however, is that ordinary people are treated civilly and with respect for human foibles on the rare occasions they find themselves out of step with the law.
The most that would happen to a burkini-clad woman here is a woman garda having a word in her ear. We may not stand by our Republic as vigorously as the French – but we are all the more civilised for it.