What could be worse than being stuck on the top floor of a burning building with no way out? What’s worse than hacking up deadly black smoke, bleary-eyed, as you stagger around in desperation, mere minutes away from roasting to death?
Well, according to Sinn Féin’s Lynn Boylan it could definitely be worse. The firefighters that arrive to save you could be mostly male.
That’s what the senator said this week while speaking about the Irish fire service, after all.
Lynn Bolyan showing that, while Sinn Féin might not care about Irish sovereignty or the integrity of our borders, they do care about the truly important things, such as the gender balance among firefighters. pic.twitter.com/KtB1sQ1LjZ
— JRD (@JRD0000) November 30, 2022
“I would like to raise the issue of gender balance in the fire service,” Boylan said in the Seanad on Wednesday.
“Of those 965 firefighters, only 56 are women, which amounts to a gender balance of 94% male and 6% female. In 2022, I think we can all agree that this is outrageous and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
“A plan needs to be put in place to rectify that alongside a recruitment process. That process is not working at the moment and we need to ensure it addresses the gender balance.”
Bear in mind, now, that this isn’t just a casual pet peeve that Boylan has mentioned in passing. It’s not a minor irritation that slightly grinds her gears. She describes it as “outrageous” and says that it must be addressed “as a matter of urgency”. You can practically see the steam shooting out of her ears if you look closely enough. She’s so heated she might actually burst into flames herself.
Now it’s worth pointing out that at no point during her speech did the senator give an argument for why female firefighters would improve the brigade’s ability to save people from burning to death. She didn’t say “We need more female firefighters because statistics show that they’re more useful in certain situations.” All she said was “It’s 2022, there aren’t that many women, and that pisses me off.” That’s the totality of her argument. It has nothing to do with merit, and everything to do with forced equality for its own sake.
Call me crazy, but I don’t actually think that people who are on the verge of dying in agony being scorched to a crisp are particularly worried if the person saving them is male, female, or Klingon. Personally speaking, if I was in a burning building, I’d happily be saved by a guy dressed as the Monopoly Man with face tattoos, provided he knew what he was doing. Literally the only thing that matters is that the fire department is saving people from fires, which is their one job. Who actually gives a rat’s furry arse about gender of the people doing it?
Well, a woke ideologue with too much time on her hands – that’s who.
Based on her speech, we can only assume that if Lynn Boylan was on the verge of burning to death, and firefighters came to help, she’d want to ask what their gender ratio was before accepting any assistance. She’d also no doubt want to get their gender pronouns while she was at it, all while the flaming roof caved in.
It’s also not exactly clear what the solution to this so-called “problem” is in the first place. If there is a large discrepancy in the number of people doing a certain profession, maybe it’s because some people simply don’t want to do that job?
Around 80% to 90% of nurses and teachers are women in Ireland according to the CSO – does that mean there’s sexism within the education industry against men, and that males are discriminated against? Or does it simply mean that less males want to be teachers than women? Is that an “outrageous” situation that needs to be rectified too?
Of course there are exceptions to everything, and there are many brave and fearless women. But by and large, when you’re talking about a society of millions of people, men tend to be the ones who deal with dangerous or scary situations – i.e. getting rid of spiders in the bath, checking out suspicious burglar-ish noises at night, etcetera. On average, men are biologically stronger than women, and gravitate more to dangerous jobs that involve protecting people. That’s just an undeniable fact. It doesn’t apply to absolutely every individual – duh. But it is a broadly recognised pattern.
So based on this, has it occurred to us that maybe women are less eager than men, on average, to hurl themselves into flaming buildings? And if so, what is the solution to that? Do we force women to go into dangerous situations against their will?
Some will no doubt start foaming at the mouth that I dared to write such a thing. They’ll begin howling about how it’s sexist to acknowledge this reality. But we literally all know that this is true. No amount of feminist propaganda can talk us out of what we all see with our own eyes in our families and relationships.
I mean, if Lynn Boylan wanted to join the fire brigade tomorrow, she could. But presumably she’s chosen not to, because she prefers a different career path. Why are other women not allowed to make the same choice?
It might seem like a cheap shot, but at this point it is absolutely worth throwing in for the record that Boylan actually doesn’t know how many males and females are in the Irish fire department, because as someone who has bought into radical theories around gender, she actually can’t define what a woman is.
Of course that point has been made to death by many people now, and might seem tedious at this point. But the reason it keeps coming up is because they still don’t have an answer for it. How can you possibly have “gender quotas” when you can’t even tell me how many genders there are, or where one gender ends and another begins? If it seems repetitive, blame the people who refuse to give a coherent answer to the question.
There’s a great, very underused word in the English language, and that is the verb “to beclown” – meaning, to make a fool of someone or something. To turn them into a clown, essentially.
Well, in a country with about a hundred serious crises, from health, to housing, to antisocial behaviour and much more, any politician who would waste the Seanad’s time with such useless drivel has certainly beclowned themselves. And the fact that this tripe is the best that our biggest opposition party can muster is a very poor indictment of our politics indeed.