OpinionA good case-study of our democracy's incapacity to properly ventilate contentious issues is provided by what is known as "one-off housing", writes John Waters.
The term "one-off housing" is already itself a problem, being an example of how language can sometimes transmogrify from mere description to the encapsulation of prejudice, without the words undergoing any change.
This happened previously to words used to describe what we now call the travelling community. Once, "tinker" was the name of a respectable trade, but metamorphosed into an insult. "Itinerant", another intrinsically harmless word, was tried for a while, but the same thing happened. Now, even the word "Traveller" is becoming heavy with a malign irony, and may soon have to be abandoned.
The term "one-off housing" has been attacked by the forces of ideological prejudice and has become an argument against itself. The very idea of a self-standing house in the countryside is now associated with backwardness, sleveenism and lack of good taste.
Once a prejudice becomes so enshrined in language, discussion is circumscribed. Those who have created the prejudice and painted it onto the words are no longer required to have a good argument. They simply repeat the contaminated words with a smirk or a sneer, and sit back in their chairs.
The prejudice now widespread in our culture about what is called "one-off housing" is no worthier than sneering remarks about Travellers or racist jokes about Pakistanis, but, having been created by educated people, it is protected by a patina of respectability. That it attacks the right of a significant minority of the population - indeed the majority outside greater Dublin - to live in accordance with their own needs and culture, is a matter of - at best - indifference to people who will pontificate about the rights of more fashionable minorities until the milkman comes.
In this there is a worrying bypassing of democracy. In certain matters, far better than putting yourself up for election to parliament or putting your case in an open way on a public forum, is to cultivate the support and approval of those with power to create prejudice and alter the meaning of language. Anyone who seeks to promote an effective political agenda in this society would, rather than seeking electoral support, be well advised to acquire a house in south Dublin and hold regular dinner parties to which they would invite senior editors and correspondents in the national media.
This is what has occurred in respect of "one-off housing". A tiny elite of interested individuals, with agendas ranging from snobbery to social engineering, have, by pooling their ambitions and influence, created an unaccountable and largely invisible nucleus of thought and discussion, from which their objectives now leach, in the form of prejudice, into the groundwater of public opinion and the conduits of public policy. Not only are these people not accountable to electorate, court or higher authority, but we mostly don't know their names. They do not state their agendas in public, nor seek to argue with those whose way of life they have set themselves against.
Instead, using well-appointed media supporters, they have infected the planning process with their uncontested aesthetics, ideologies and prejudices, and smeared those thereby disenfranchised with a brush dipped in bile. There is the most urgent need to ventilate this issue, to open up to public scrutiny the raft of circumstantial evidence of these undemocratic activities.
The system of prejudice is hermetically sealed, and, as it rejects dismissively all that it finds disagreeable to its agendas, it ignores all dissent as the predictable carping of those whom the prejudice has marginalised.
Last Thursday in Dublin, on behalf of the Irish Rural Dwellers' Association (IRDA), I had the pleasure of launching a book entitled Positive Planning For Rural Houses. It is an impressive production, full of facts and statistics and arguments, but also alive with inspiration of the many, many people who have been disenfranchised by our planning system and the elitist ideologies which infect it. The book advances positive proposals for the reform of planning policy and examines many of the side-issues like rural traffic and waste disposal which are disingenuously used as a cover for elitism and prejudice.
Although the launch took place less than a half mile from the offices of the major Dublin newspapers and several radio stations, all of whom were informed in advance, only two journalists showed up: one from the Farmer's Journal, the other from RTÉ's Nuacht. Newspapers which for years have been running articles and commentaries about "Bungalow Blight" and which have made little or no attempt to ventilate a contrary view, elected once again to utilise their power to maintain by omission the partisan position which for years they have pursued to the point of crusade.
Is this democracy? No. Is it journalism? No. It is the operation of the bogus discourse created by pseudo-liberalism in the sham-democracy of modern Ireland, in which the truth is whatever "right-thinking people" decide and all else is error.