How elegant that two of the most contentious issues in Irish life should so coincide in a shoddy and windowless caravan set in a strip of mud on some desolate roadway outside Dublin. Those two issues - the position of travellers, and abortion - are repeatedly brought before us, and we have repeatedly shied away even from public discussion. As a garda coming across four drunken men flailing into each other with broken bottles promptly finds an excuse to tie his laces, we have preferred to examine our feet and call them paws rather than deal with reality.
Nothing more emphatically and more completely disposes of that beast of foreign myth and imported legend, Panthera Tigris Celta. We are not tigers: we are morally craven, politically indolent wombats - a species known to zoologists as Vombatus Hiberniensis Bluefunkus. And the one certain truth about Vombatus HB is that, like the wombat on the Queensland plain, the problems which it thinks will go away if it ignores them are certain to come back, with redoubled deadliness.
Certain as nightfall
Nothing could be plainer than that the X-case would return. It was as certain as nightfall - and not necessarily because of rape. In fact - though it is not easy to say with this without the lynch mob turning on you - the manner of the impregnation is hardly relevant. Virtually no under-age girl has sex because she wants to get pregnant. Her pregnancy is almost always undesired. Naturally, a child who has been raped and who is very probably deeply traumatised will have a greater aversion towards going to term to than one who had sex because she was curious or because she wanted to please her boyfriend or wanted to please herself (and it's not fashionable to say that either, but it's often true). But neither will want to have a baby. The essence of the justification - their childhood - remains the same; merely the intensity of the argument varies.
And we were given all the warning we wanted, without rape alone being a factor. Over 50 girls a year under the age of 15 give birth in this State every year. And in all, some 250 girls a year under the age of consent have babies. For neither agegroup do we or can we know the number of abortions carried out in England. Despite the inevitability of this case, we did nothing to prepare for it. And I understand the paralysis: in this regard, I am truly a Vombatus HB. The sheer scale of the abortion industry elsewhere, the moral equivocation which underpins it, and the denial of free speech through liberal censorship or liberal derision in pro-abortion societies genuinely appal me.
Frank discussion
But Having a dilemma before us should not paralyse us indefinitely, with the inevitable imminent. We should at least have prepared the way psychologically by frank discussion, and we didn't, because, being Vombatus HB, we were too scared. But there is another point. How did this tragic case become part of the public domain? How is it possible that the identity of a girl whose predicament should be the closest of all possible secrets is known to the dogs in the street? How can her home be photographed, and her family be meeting the press?
There is one reason for sure, and that is because they are travellers. The normal rules have been suspended out of a perverse brand of sympathy for the girl and her wretched family living in two wrecked caravans along a road outside Dublin beside a traveller halting site from which the family has been exluded by its fellow-travellers.
There is a pit here, and this family is lying at its bottom. That pit has in part been dug by the devastating effects of welfarism.
And when we learn that the man who raped this girl is believed to have been responsible for another rape and an assault on a couple in their fifties, and was involved in the appalling traveller riots in Tuam last year, and was apparently responsible for wrecking the family caravan of the raped girl, yet is being protected by members of his own family, we are getting glimpses of extended dysfunctionalism which is already achieving critical proportions.
We dare not acknowledge the real issues of travellers: of their expectations of State-supplied halting sites and State-supplied welfare; of their exclusion, in part voluntary, in part imposed, from the general Irish social matrix; of a rising populationgrowth almost out of control; and of economic aspirations which are utterly at variance with the Americanised ambitions possessed by the rest of us.
Appalling violence
And nobody dare face up to or discuss the culture of alcoholism and appalling violence which has emerged within the past generation or so of the traveller people. It is not correct to refer to such matters in public debate. Yet it is there, as Tuam last year showed, and Limerick has repeatedly shown.
But what really reveals the true extend of the cowardice of Vombatus HB is not our failure to deal with these complex issues, but our refusal even to discuss them. We are facing moral, legal and social crises here and, like the wombat, we turn our bottoms towards the problem and say nothing. It is time for the wombat to grow up and stop calling itself a tiger, to look in the mirror and own up to being Vombatus Hiberniensis Bluefunkus. It'll be a start.