Kevin Myers's words

On women

Women's Aid held a minute's silence outside the Dáil in November 2004 for the 107 women who had been murdered over the previous nine years:

"But what is worse than these desperately silly women with their bigoted, pathetic view of the world is the fact their ludicrous displays of sexist, man-hating prejudice are taken seriously, both by the media and the Government. What newspaper or television news would solemnly show a picture of men laying a wreath to commemorate men who had been killed in violence in the past 10 years, in a service which very specifically, excluded female victims."

On travellers

"This is what happens when you repeatedly indoctrinate any group about their rights but not their duties. The result is a socially-dysfunctional minority who believe that they should be allowed to do as they want, spending summers on the road, halting as they like and even claiming the dole wherever convenient. Irish farmers, helpless before the law, have taken to spreading pig slurry whenever travellers camp on their land... (Traveller life) is patriarchal, caste-based, dirty, diseased, alcoholic, illiterate, violent, misogynistic (often brutally so), low achieving – two thirds of traveller children have abandoned all education by the age of 15 – and, most of all, short..."

"Dunsink Lane has been an 'uninhabitable' cesspit for at least a decade. Had the people squatting there not been called 'Travellers', and had not their preference for living amid such squalor not been dignified with the word 'culture', then their children would have been put into care, and they would have been served with eviction notices, to be followed in short order by the bailiffs."

On Turkey joining the EU

"The apparent sticking point for Turkey's entering negotiations to join the EU was the demand that Ankara recognises the government of Cyprus. But, in reality, the real problem lay – and still lies – elsewhere: in the possible freedom of movement of 73 million Turks, many of whom are illiterate, pre-Enlightenment peasants. To allow millions of such people to pour into Europe would be cultural suicide."

On Africa

"Africa is not poor because of debt repayment to the West, or because it has been confined to an 'unnatural' poverty. Africa is poor because it remains close to nature, and because its leaders gorge themselves like thoroughly natural Serengeti predators at a kill."

On women in sport

"We don't want to watch women playing sports because, generally speaking, they're not very good. They're small and they're weak and they're slow, and watching an average woman throw an object is a deeply moving tragedy...

Which is why the official Irish Sports Council figures that show that 50 per cent fewer women than men play sport seem a little dubious: there is no female equivalent of the rugby clubs and their myriad of male teams down to the fourteenth XV, so where are all these women athletes performing, and what are they doing? Shopping doesn't count.

Nor does using the mobile phone while you're parking."

On domestic violence

"Domestic violence is radically different from public violence, as Erin Pizzey discovered over 30 years ago. She has often reiterated that only a small majority of domestic violence emanates from men. Roughly speaking, the responsibility for domestic violence is equally divided between the sexes."

On gender equality

"This year-zero ideological nonsense isn't happening after a revolutionary take-over by a gender Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as the Sex Pots, but within a democratic society which apparently slumbers while the Sex Pots investigate, interrogate and politicise the entire civil service... But the world doesn't work on such simplistic gender lines, any more than it worked on the Marxist, class simplicities of the old Iron Curtain countries.

Of course, that doesn't mean the Sex Pot loonies in the academic world – the equivalent of all those campus communists who for decades backed the old Soviet Union – will cease their current ideological gibberings. We should expect no better. The least we should do, in all decency, is simply to ignore them."