If we don't get words right, it's unlikely we'll get things like laws and institutions right. Much of the thing called progress over the past decade or so has been based on an imprecision to do with words. Instead of meaning, we have yearned for piety, and found it in verbal sloppiness. We have been allowing a mush to accumulate around words like "parity" and "equality" which makes us feel good and virtuous; and no doubt that mush, like boiled peas, is pleasant enough for the time being - until the test of hard steel comes, which will cut through the mush like a laser through dark.
We have heard a great deal, about equality in recent years. We even have a minister for equality. I know what housing is, and I know what fisheries are, and I sometimes get an inkling of what finance is; but, for the life of me, I do not know what equality is. It is an abstract; and when you encounter a government ministry dedicated to an abstract, like or Goodness or Equality, the humbug-antennae on the end of your nose should start quivering.
Few things in life merit the demand for equality - between anybody. Aside from our (if we have any) immortal souls, parking meters and the ballot box, equality is a meaningless thing, even in courts. Who in their right mind would suggest that a well-educated young man from a good family who embarks upon a career of crime should receive the same sentence as an illiterate pauper from a broken family for the same offence? The well-educated young man should, of course, be thrown into clink, the pauper given the benefit of the Probation Act.
Parity Between Sexes
It's not equality; but what is? The greatest inequalities of all are nowadays done in order to maintain the fiction of equality, with quotas being established to ensure equality between the sexes on the boards of public bodies.
When I asked an RTE producer why a particular woman journalist was always on Questions and Answers, the explanation was that her frequent presence was needed to achieve numerical parity between the sexes. Hence, parity by inequality. In other words, everyone is born equal, only some are born more equal than others.
Why are George Orwell's words never quoted anymore? Is it because they speak such obvious sense that they make the equality industry nervous? That industry has been having a good time with fire brigades recently. Is anyone really reassured by the news that Dublin Fire Brigade has dropped the height requirement for firefighters because it was discriminatory against women? And is anyone - apart from the woman herself - truly heartened by the £5,000 damages granted to Gillian Maxwell on the grounds that she had been discriminated against when her application to join Belfast Fire Brigade was turned down because she was three inches shorter than the 5' 6" minimum? The award was for "injury to her feelings".
Ah. The poor thing. Now she says that she's not sure whether she wants to be a firewoman. Good. I hope she doesn't become one. Who would volunteer to have a small woman "rescue" them from a burning building? Who in the midst of an inferno would, with egalitarian gallantry, dismiss the burly attentions of a rescuing male in order to be rescued by a 5' 3" woman? And as the gallant unrescued and the tiny non-rescuer perish in the flames, or topple together down the ladder, how reassuring to know that it is in the name of equality.
No doubt the equality industry will be satisfied only when a race of dwarfish female firefighters fills the fire engines of Ireland, and overweight males are burnt alive in encouragingly large numbers.
Exploiting Divisions
Now for parity. This is what Sean Redmond, national officer of the IMPACT trade union, had to say on this particular subject at a recent Desmond Greaves memorial lecture. "The establishment in Northern Ireland of equality of treatment and `parity of esteem' ... point to the relevance today of a political struggle, analogous to the 1960s civil rights movement, which would exploit the divisions within unionism, move the more liberal element of Ulster unionism to an accommodation with nationalism, and win a majority in the North ink time for national reunification" (my italics).
I see. And this is parity of esteem? Lest we miss the full meaning of this parity, Sean Redmond recalls the achievement of Desmond Greaves thus - "(he) pioneered in the late 1950s and 1960s the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to undermine Ulster unionism ... Greaves contended that the way to a peaceful solution to the Irish problem was to discredit and divide Ulster unionism by exposing the discriminatory practices that prevailed under the old Stormont regime..."
So Sean Redmond merely confirms what Ian Paisley always said - that the civil rights movement wasn't about civil rights. And it certainly wasn't about what we describe in Nineties-speak as "equality of treatment" and "parity of esteem" (discredit . . . divide . . . undermine). What it was about was - apparently - the subversion of unionism.
Equality Commissions
Now I don't happen to believe this. But the fudge over words like equality and parity enables nationalists like Sean Redmond and professional egalitarians of equality commissions everywhere to use language in such a way that the meaning of words is inverted.
For such nationalists, parity and equality do not actually mean parity and equality - they are merely weapons to ensure there is disparity and inequality between the two traditions in the North, so that one is effectively destroyed. And, for the equality industry, equality means an insistence on unequal qualifications for women fighter-pilots, women soldiers, women firemen.
Which is fine; but I just hope I'm not going to be rescued from an embassy siege or a towering inferno by a squad-experiment in sexual and size egalitarianism. That's the wrong time to discover what we, already know - there is no such thing as equality, within or between the sexes.