Synon Article

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Monday February 23, 2004 14:53 by Dave McCarthy - Traveller Visibility Group tvg at indigo dot ie 11 Comeragh Park, The Glen, Cork. 021 4503786

Where do you find old newspaper articles?

While working on material concerning racism in the media, I found that nowhere on the internet could I get a copy of Mary Ellen Synon's infamous article she wrote in 1996 concerning Travellers. This article achieved a new low in standards of journalism in Ireland. Four years later, the same writer managed to offend all but Kevin Myers when she wrote about the athletes in the Special Olympics. I have scanned the 1996 article into our own web site for reference. Below is the text.

Time to get tough on tinker terror ‘culture’

Gardaí believe travellers (sic) are behind 90pc of attacks on the rural elderly. For too long intellectuals have “cherished” the squalid Traveller lifestyle. Instead, we must make these criminals pay, writes Mary Ellen Synon.
Sunday Independent, 28th January 1996.

We now know - some of us have always known – the source of the terror that has overtaken the lives of old people living alone in the country. It is lying on the roadside, living in the fields, sustained, encouraged, indulged by the money of the welfare state and the sanction of the intellectuals. I mean of course the travellers and their "culture".
We know it. But we are not supposed to say it. And yet there it was last week, simple, clear, and on the front page of the Irish Independent - how it got there I do not know: “Garda intelligence gathered over the past couple of months indicates that more than 90pc of the attacks on elderly people in rural areas are being carried out by travellers based mainly in three centres.”
And the week before, this from Kevin Myers, the last thinking journalist on The Irish Times: “A hugely disproportionate amount of the rural crime is by a handful or travellers . . . their deeds are inexplicable and horribly effective - they have generated an atmosphere of terror in rural areas unlike anything 1reland has experienced since the 1920s.”
It could not be otherwise. Little else could come from "cherishing" the caravan slum-life of tinkers.
Though or course it is not country people who “cherish” the tinkers. It is the intellectuals and the politicians. In their pursuit of levelling, these ideologues have manufactured the lie that each man is as good as the next. They point to the sewer that is a travellers' camp and lay: “That is a culture which must be honoured like any other.”
But honour, like stigma, is earned. And a tinker camp earns no honour.
Look at what it is, and what the intellectuals and the politicians say one should honour. It is a life of appetite ungoverned by intellect. It is a life which marauds over private property and disregards public laws. It is a life of money without production, land without cost, damage without compensation, assault without arrest, theft without prosecution, and murder without remorse. It is a life worse than the life of beasts, for beasts at least are guided by wholesome instinct. Traveller life is without the ennobling intellect of man or the steadying instinct of animals.
This tinker ‘culture’ is without achievement, discipline, reason or intellectual ambition. It is a morass. And one of the surprising things about it is that not every individual bred in this swamp turns out bad. Some individuals among the tinkers find the will not to become evil.
For the poverty and brutal life of the Travellers’ camps does not force anyone to become a criminal: it simply presents a life in which virtue has no reward and lawlessness is acceptable. Every man in every tinker camp who becomes a criminal - like every man anywhere who becomes a criminal - becomes evil by choice. Crime is volitional.
So consider what ought to be done with these breeding grounds of crime. Simple: stop petting tinkers and start treating them like all other citizens.
When they fail to insure or tax their cars, prosecute them. When they neglect or abuse their children, prose cute them. When they steal, prosecute them. When they murder, prosecute them. If then they are convicted of murder, imprison them for life. For life.
At which point, the intellectual and the politicians who have encouraged this tinker “culture” will say - as they are saying already – “We must not get hysterical about these murders. We do not know what causes these crimes. We must not seek simplistic" (admire for a moment the arrogance with which they used the word, 'simplistic') – “solutions.”
It is now time for citizens to refuse to be intimidated by such bilge from intellectuals. First, citizens are not “hysterical.” They are concerned, and they are right to be. Second, we do know what causes these crimes. Each assault, each murder, is caused by some individual - not “society” not a “peer group” - choosing to go out and seize a victim and rob and murder him for money or pleasure. Third, there is a solution to these crimes, and it is straightforward.
Murder is rarely a first crime. When each of the murderers of recent weeks is caught - and I pray to Nemesis that each will be caught - the Gardaí will find that each has a record of crime. A murderer starts with middling crime and move on to worse. So, politicians must give the Gardaí the means to pursue and prosecute and convict all crimes by all thugs. A man who commits armed robbery must go - with certainty, without exception - to prison for years. On release he must be told that, if he commits another serious crime, he will not be given just the same sentence again; he will be put in prison for life.
Though of course an intellectual will say, "prison does not work." He is lying. Prison does work. We need prisons, better, stronger prisons, lots of them. And we need police and courts with the power (and the will) to put thugs inside forever.
And should the prisons rehabilitate the inmates? Sure, they can try. Training and education ought to be available to those who plan to live straight after their release. But the first lesson in training and education must be this: if you do not obey the law once you are out of prison, you will certainly be back, and for the rest of your life.
For prison is not there to rehabilitate. It is there to retaliate.