NEWTON'S OPTIC:THE DAMAGE done to the good name of Listowel in recent days highlights the growing problem of placism in Irish society.
Often referred to as “the hidden prejudice”, placism can affect anyone who lives in a place following an event. Although events occur in both time and space, placists ignore the temporal dimension and focus solely upon the three spatial dimensions, leaving people who spend all their time in a place feeling unfairly stigmatised.
We can gauge the terrible impact of placism from the comments of TDs, councillors and other Listowel residents who have expressed deep hurt and surprise that a place has been linked to an event.
Not all associations of places with events are negative, of course. Events such as third-rate literary festivals or bizarre monorail heritage excursions may be positively linked to a place, usually with the word “community”. But all other associations of places with events are discriminatory and probably a hate crime. Placism is perhaps the most pernicious of all forms of prejudice because every human being must occupy spatial dimensions which they cannot change, except by moving north, south, east or west – or, in extreme cases, up or down.
As a native of Portadown, I can fully empathise with the suffering of the people of Listowel.
Between 1995 and 2001, the events of the Drumcree dispute coincided with all three spatial dimensions of my home town. Statistically, it can be shown that this had nothing to do with anything that anyone local either did or did not do. Drumcree could have happened anywhere, although it would have been called something else if it had. The number of people from Portadown who were involved in Drumcree was insignificant compared to the number of people in the town overall, or more accurately to the number of people like them in every town. The rest came from other towns, especially Lurgan – not that there is anything wrong with being from Lurgan as such.
Yet, to this day, people from Portadown are still judged on the basis of events which occurred in a place where they just happened to be at the time. In the years since, valiant attempts have been made to tackle this prejudice through events which can be linked to places, usually with the word “community”. But it is an uphill struggle, partly because of stubbornly placist attitudes and partly because our railway heritage is of the conventional twin-track kind.
There does seem to be a particular issue with placism in Ireland. Whenever they hear of an event, the first thing Irish people want to know is precisely where it transpired. However, the inability of the media to refer to any event without giving it a placist label, such as “Portadown” or “Listowel”, is undoubtedly at the root of the problem. Just as it is no longer acceptable to stigmatise whole groups of people in terms of their physical appearance, so it should no longer be acceptable to stigmatise whole groups of people in terms of their physical location.
There is clearly a strong case for monitoring the media to stamp out this casual hate speech. As an interim measure, all proper nouns should be banned from all reporting.
The people of a town we have no need to name are clearly expecting no less.