The township of 12 people
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Today’s banner
Near Commonwealth House (HQ of the Games) – just in case anyone goes hungry
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Nomadic kids
and their
smuggled goods
Ronnie Smith
They are messengers, delivery boys, intelligence gatherers, the vital foot soldiers and very small part of a continent-wide network of organised crime dealing in the distribution and sale of smuggled goods and smuggled people.
Who knows what the boys’ task on this particular morning is. As they amble along the street they attempt to sell postcards to tourists coming the other way. They have no training in this and make the mistake of trying to sell to a very refined, fur-coated, Viennese woman of a ‘certain age’ who refuses even to look at them. However their movement is full of purpose and in a very particular direction. Clearly they are not just here to sell postcards. They are messengers, delivery boys, intelligence gatherers, the vital foot soldiers and a very small part of a continent-wide network of organised crime dealing in the distribution and sale of smuggled goods and smuggled people.
These kids are at the bottom of their particular career ladder, working their way up and they have colleagues all over Europe.
We watch largely from the sidelines as our new continental leaders (unelected) create their business-friendly paradise comprising the free movement of goods, labour and capital and struggle to manage stable single currency with fiscal and regulatory harmony. But we really do have to ask if they have given any deep thought to any accompanying social policy that might deal with issues like the parallel growth in imported organised crime and corruption, the culture and status of travelling people in the EU including those known generally as Roma, and the development of a strategy to look after ‘nomadic’ children who will certainly grow up to reshape the criminal culture of the EU itself.
In today’s EU the headlines all come from the top, filtered by our new elite. That really isn’t good but I’m sure that my three chums are quite happy to stay out of the news as they head off to their next meeting beyond the Staatsoper. They and their many colleagues in the growing and unmentioned ‘underclass’ are just as integral a part of the new Europe as fiscal treaties, appointed governments in member states and the all-powerful European institutions of the Commission and Central Bank.
