Peter Casey is hapless but if you voted for him, you were RIGHT

Brenda Power’s searing column

PETER Casey is just about the easiest of messengers to shoot. If you’d prefer not to listen to the onethird of a million people who gave him their No.1, with some 28% of rural voters supporting him, then take your shot.

The target couldn’t be handier. He’s a seat-of-the-pants merchant who blurts out the first thing that comes into his head, and then chuckles at the fallout. He blundered into the minefield that is the Traveller issue, without a clue where he was treading, as a throwaway comment during a radio interview in the middle of the campaign. He didn’t even know where those six houses were, the €1.7million estate that the Travellers wouldn’t accept unless it came with grazing land for their herd of bloodstock.

He thought it was Cork and, when he was corrected, admitted he’d just heard the story second-hand that morning.

He didn’t know Travellers had separate ethnic identity status, never heard of it. He didn’t seem to know very much at all, in fact, about the constitutional parameters of the job for which he was applying, He was inarticulate, unprepared, flippant and facetious. He looked like he was treating the entire business as a huge practical joke.

Ludicrous

Nobody – not even Peter Casey, I suspect – thought Peter Casey would make a good President. He’d probably get on like a house on fire with Donald Trump, but you couldn’t picture him meeting the Queen, or making a State visit to China without the risk of a serious diplomatic incident. His inaugural speech would have been best watched from behind the couch, through your fingers.

The thought of him addressing the Houses of the Oireachtas on a matter of national importance is ludicrous.

I don’t believe that the 342,000 who gave him their first preferences last Friday truly wanted Casey for President. But more than one in five who bothered to vote, in the lowest Presidential turnout in the office’s history, still gave him their No.1. He topped the poll in Rathkeale and Abbeyfeale in Limerick, he got 20,000 votes to Michael D Higgins’s 24,000 in Tipperary, 13,000 to Higgins’s 15,000 in Donegal. I come from a rural part of Kilkenny, where 14,000 gave him their No.1, and I know some of those voters personally. Not one of them wanted, or expected, to see Casey in Áras an Uachtaráin.

They knew President Higgins would be comfortably re-elected out of a weak field, and they were content the land’s highest office would remain in safe hands. They weren’t voting for the messenger. They were voting for the message.

Over the past few days, the largely liberal, left-leaning Dublin-based media has been busily getting its retaliation in first. To the establishment, Casey’s vote was either a protest vote, against a Government and a Taoiseach otherwise enjoying relatively high popularity ratings, or it was pure, naked, knuckle-dragging, spittle-flecked racism in action.

This is profoundly offensive, patronising, disingenuous and inaccurate. Most people are relatively satisfied with the current Government, even if Leo Varadkar did renege on his promise to look after the people who get up early, which he did in the latest budget out of craven fear of the wrath of the Twitter mob.

Impetuous

There was certainly an element of Casey’s support that chimed with his championing of the people who pay for everything and qualify for nothing. But let’s say you’re one of the people who believes that an even bigger element was galvanised by those comments about Travellers, ill-considered and impetuous though they clearly were. In that case, either we have a massive, simmering problem with racism in this country – and Casey would have received the very same volume of support if he’d attacked asylum seekers or Muslims or Jews – or else the tireless virtue-signallers in the Dublin media and political classes are choosing to ignore the realities of rural communities’ relationship with Travellers, and to lay every problem therein at the door of what one columnist hilariously described as ‘settled privilege’.

As far as I can tell, the Casey vote reflects the frustrations of rural dwellers with the absolute prohibition on even the mildest public criticism of Traveller culture. As I discovered myself a few years ago, you daren’t question the Traveller lifestyle without being threatened with jail. Pavee Point and the truly pointless Irish Council for Civil Liberties sought to have me prosecuted and imprisoned for writing about the maiming of Traveller boxer and Olympic medallist John Joe Nevin, and even those brave champions who generally speak up for press freedom looked the other way when a member of the press was physically and professionally imperilled for holding an opinion that didn’t sit well with the Twitter mobs. After Casey’s outburst, the other candidates parroted the statistics regularly cited by the likes of Pavee Point – truly alarming figures on early mortality, suicide rates, joblessness, illiteracy in the Traveller community, without question or nuance. They could have added the high rates of domestic violence and alcoholism and of preventable diseases like diabetes and emphysema, the arranged marriages of children. But none of them had the courage to ask whether any of these problems might have their origins in the lifestyle of the Traveller community; in the peripatetic existence it perpetuates; in its treatment of women and children; in its attitude to education and integration; and were instead happy to lay the blame squarely with the rest of the population.

Bumbling

Casey was right to say that the Travellers’ leaders do them no service. Shutting down, punishing, threatening, abusing anyone who dares challenge you is no way to conduct a mission of advocacy.

Traveller women and children, in particular, often live lives that to us seem full of needless hardship. Margaret Cash, clearly an intelligent woman who posted a picture of her homeless children sleeping in a Garda station, was taken out of school at 12 and married at 15. In this prosperous country in the 21st century that is still a common fate for young Traveller girls, according to a recent Department of Education survey, and yet one that attracts zero concern from our supposed human rights activists.

In my view, it’s not racist to believe that young women should get an education, a career, a chance of an independent future that doesn’t rely on handouts and benefits. It’s not racist, I believe, to think that young boys should stay in school, go to college, perhaps try to learn a trade – like all other tradesmen – from someone other than their fathers. It’s not racist, as far as I can see, to say that choosing to live by the side of the road, keeping children in damp and draughty caravans rather than moving into fine new houses built by the taxpayer, is pretty questionable.

The profoundly intolerant virtue-signallers are now engaged in feverish damage limitation, cauterising any nascent debate with mutterings about Hitler and Trump-style politics. If you voted for Peter Casey, then, you’re a mad, racist Nazi, all 342,000 of you. I don’t believe that for a minute.

Bumbling and flaky as he was, Casey still pulled in almost half of President Higgins’s first-preference vote. If he’d been a bit more strategic, a bit better advised, a bit more articulate, a bit more measured, he could well be Presidentelect this morning. Nobody, not even many of those who voted for him, wanted that. But does any politician or commentator have the backbone to ask what it was they really wanted? Or is it just so much easier to take a pot shot at the most hapless of messengers?