A Dublin man is to go to the European Court of Human Rights this week claiming that he is being discriminated against for being a racist.

Trevor O’Driscoll (42) from Ballyfermot says he has lost jobs, been refused others and been picked on by minority groups for his attitudes towards foreign people living in Ireland. He wants the court in Brussels to rule that he has been treated unfairly and to award him compensation.

Speaking exclusively to the Irish Sentinel Mr O’Driscoll explained his motives. “Look, I’m a racist. I don’t make any secret of that but I’m not an in-your-face kind of racist. I just want to go about my business like a normal person. I’m not a member of any racist groups, I don’t involve myself in sloganeering or chanting, I simply choose to deal exclusively with Irish people. Yet, I’m the one being punished. It’s madness”.

Complaints against Mr O’Driscoll were made to the National Equality Agency when a team of Polish workers arrived at his house to build a sun room. “Can you imagine?”, he told us. “I dealt with a nice Irish lad called Pat who assured me he could have the sun room built in two weeks. He never said anything about it being built by Polish people. The thought of having to sit in there knowing that their Polish hands had been all over it would have made me sick. I’d have had to burn it to the ground if I’d let them build it. So I told them to go home and insisted the contracter provide me with Irish builders instead.

He told me that Irish builders were now extinct and it was a take it or leave it situation. I left it and it took me months to get my deposit back”.

However, anti-racism groups are warning that if the court finds in favour of O’Driscoll then it would ‘open the floodgates’ for prejudice nationwide. Gervaise D’Arcy of the Racists Are Practising Evil group said “This man is a poison and should he win this case then others will be inspired by him. You can’t even imagine the mayhem this will cause. What happens when one of them goes into a Centra at lunchtime to get a sandwich and refuses to be served by a Chinese person? It’s all well and good saying you want a 100% Irish made sandwich but if there are no Irish in the shop what happens then? The queue would be out the door, people would be late back from lunch, productivity drops and the impact it will have on an already failing economy would be horrendous”.

But Trevor O’Driscoll isn’t for moving. “I’m as entitled to my beliefs as anyone else. There are some people out there who believe that an all-powerful being who lives in the sky created the world yet they’re allowed run the country for years without so much as a by your leave. I just don’t happen to like blacks or Asians or anyone from outside of Ireland, apart from Red Indians who are the Irish of America, and I don’t see why I should be punished for it”.

Legal experts say that if O’Driscoll is successful in his case then Ireland could become the most racist country on earth. At the moment title jointly held by England and Portugal who were inseperable in the Racism World Championships held in Athens in May of this year.

: We took to the streets to ask people “Are you racist?”.

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