Silly Old Twit

It’s never a good idea to lecture others on morality but when those others use the national airways to abuse the less fortunate in our society then we really have no choice. A new brutality is seeping into the national  consciousness and for the most part it goes unchallenged. It’s become normal. It happens slowly bit by bit and many don’t even notice. It creeps up on us. It chips away at our very humanity. Men and women who should know better ……..Pride before a fall…wealth leading to arrogance. A liberal society becoming less liberal by the second. Brutality and intellectual vulgarity feeding off each other.

This afternoon( 22/4/09) on RTE Radio Paddy O’Gorman (speaking on the Mooney Show) declared that the homeless were to blame for being homeless. He said a lot of other things too…that the homeless were all drug addicts , alcoholic  and mentally ill….. It was unpleasant listening to say the least. He spoke quietly as a man of some authority might…..when challenged by Mooney he held his ground ….he was sure of his facts ……he might have been an intellectual with that detached air of his. But this reasonable man was wrong in his facts. A display of intellectual vulgarity ….sloppy thinking…enough to impress the new landlord class but not quite enough to stand up to the cold light of day.

O’Gorman is a sort of itinerant nosy-parker. He will walk up to people in a charity shop or dole office and speaking in a somewhat whining social worker tone of voice talk to them as if they were for the most part half wits. It’s entertainment , show business and he, I imagine gets well paid for his trouble. But he doesn’t speak to just anybody. I’ve seen the man in action many time , indeed I’ve stood shoulder to shoulder (literally) with him but he never shoved his microphone in my direction. He studies the crowd , looking in all directions  at the same time and then swoops  on anyone who seems in any way in awe of him or at least of his microphone. As I say it’s entertainment …..

On the particular programme in question O’Gorman visited some dinner house ( run by Capuchins I think)  and spoke to some people who described themselves as being addicted to drugs or alcohol. For some reason or other he jumped to the conclusion that all homeless people are addicts etc. I say he jumped to this conclusion because there is no evidence anywhere to back up this statement. I have been homeless myself in the past on more than one occasion as have some of my family and many of my friends and none of us are drug addicts or drunks. Being homeless is quite different from for example being unemployed. An unemployed person becomes visible to the state as soon as they claim benefit but this does not apply with regard to the homeless. O’Gorman seems to think that all homeless people present themselves at their local penny dinner hall but this is just not true. Why would the homeless want to do this in the first place ? The Government might tell you that they get their statistics from the records of the numbers who present themselves as homeless to Dublin City Council but yet again there is no reason to think that most homeless people actually do present themselves anywhere. When I was homeless I didn’t. Why would I?. O’Gorman repeatedly stated homelessness was not caused by a person not having money. Well , in my case it was purely about having no (or not enough) money. There are no shortage of drug addicted pop stars and the like but few if any ever end up homeless….and why ?……money…The reality is that it’s very easy to become homeless. A request for a  rent book from the landlord can be enough to get you pushed out on the street and once on the street it’s not so easy to get a flat even if you can afford it.
Thousands of landlords will just not let a flat or room to anyone they perceive as ‘working class’. I have lived in or near bedsitter land most of my life and have lost count of the number of people who I met who were homeless. I didn’t ask them if they were drug addicts or the like but I’ve no reason to believe that they were. And I don’t recall seeing any of them queing outside the dinner house which I would pass on an almost daily basis.

At one point in the programme a couple of homeless drug addicts praised both the charities and government for the service they were providing for the homeless  and  O’Gorman simply took what they said on face value. Now if these people had for instance been raised in Catholic Orphanages , if they had been victims of abuse and they implied , as many have , that someone like Stanislaus Kennedy had been implicit in the abuse would he have simply accepted that ? No he would not. He would do what so many have done and told them ” Oh you can’t say that” etc. etc. O’ Gorman is quite happy to slander the less fortune and even give them a voice but they are on a short leash and they know. So they do what people in their position always do , they tell the man what he wants to hear. And they are not stupid , they know the game and know it well…….they have learnt the hard way. If O’Gorman was a serious journalist he would understand all this …..If he had been a fellow homeless drug addict himself  he might have heard some very different opinions expressed. The poor have long since learned that charity comes at a cost and a high one at that. We all know that there is no such thing as a free dinner and there is nothing , NOTHING so vicious as a charity worker who is reminded of his prejudices or the fundamental ‘racism’ of his attitude to the poor. Tell any of these kind folk that you don’t like strangers being over familiar with you or that you don’t like being talked down to and you’ve got an enemy for life. O’Gorman would be far better employed if he were to ask some  our fine upstanding bishops a few pertinent questions instead of inflicting himself on the less fortunate.

No reasonable person would deny the fact that addiction and poor mental health can contribute to homelessness but to claim that all homeless people fall into this category is pure nonsense. O’Gorman generalises about the homeless and is happy to do so. But his mistake comes from a fundamentally ‘racist’ attitude to those on the bottom of the social ladder. The poor , the less privileged can be , and are , spoken of in a manner that would never be tolerated if they were black or Polish. Substitute the word Blacks or Jewish or Romanians for Poor , Working Class , Homeless etc and most of our journalists would be in jail long since. O’Gorman might claim that he was doing no more than stating a truth but Derek Mooney for one was clearly disturbed by what O’Gorman was saying. Mooney showed great restraint and professionalism not to mention humanity but he couldn’t quite disguise his distaste for what he was hearing. Be it O’Gorman generalising about the homeless or some landlord/home buyer declaring that he/she worked hard to buy their home and now don’t want council tenants within a country mile of it the message is clear. Beggars on horseback. A dirty penny coin looking down on a farthing.

O’Gorman views must not go unchallenged. I have in the past had occasion to criticise Mark O’Halloran for laughing at drug addicts on RTE Radio and just today on the Joe Duffey Show yet more of this kind of thing was to be heard. I was only half listening to Duffy’s programme but at some point they were discussing the problem of anti social behaviour on the Dart. A woman called in and described how she and her husband saw some young woman buying drugs from this fellow. They (the fellow and girl) were ready to get off the train at the station and for some reason or other as soon as the guy got off this woman’s husband prevented the girl from getting off with him. She (the wife) then described how funny it was to see this girl dash off the train at the next station and go running for her drugs. She said the whole thing was very distressing for ‘respectable’ people (like herself) but repeated that the bit about the girl running for her drugs was funny. Duffy himself was not hosting the show but the man standing in for him apparently found nothing wrong with any of this. And this kind of thing is becoming far too common. The O’Hallorans , O’Gormans of this world may not know any better and clearly they don’t but RTE really  should.

We see and hear the race card being used on a daily basis to stifle political debate. Anything that might ‘offend’ any group within society is VERBOTER ( regardless of it’s truth or relevance ). Anonymous bureaucrats inform us that we may not say this or that. The last time Europe visited all this on us a man called Hitler was running the show. But you can say what you like about those  at the bottom of the social ladder. They no longer matter………….But , in a world where dead bodies are put on display in the local cinema and the popular will of the people (referendum) can be  put aside I suppose anything is possible. I’ve said it before , the babarians are no longer at the gate. They’re all in the RTE canteen sipping tea.