THE bizarre case of the extended family of Roma gypsies who set up camp on a roundabout in the middle of the M50 beltway around Dublin for a month or two had an even more bizarre ending. As you may know, the government eventually intervened about three weeks ago and flew them all back to Romania. At that stage they had been on the motorway for at least six weeks and had turned the roundabout into a scene from the Third World.

The case had attracted such huge interest here that RTE sent a reporter and camera crew back with them to Romania, and some newspapers also sent reporters to check out the Roma claims that even living in the middle of a motorway was better than where they had come from.

And living on the motorway here had been appalling. Hidden behind the bushes around the big circular motorway junction, the Roma camp in the middle of the roundabout was a mess of makeshift tents, rubbish, human excrement, discarded food and clothes.

Dozens of them were living there in the middle of the roundabout, including young children who would emerge from the bushes during the morning and evening rush hours to beg from drivers lining up on the slipways to get on and off the motorway.

It was this sight that startled and disgusted people here. The begging kids were dressed in rags and covered in dirt. They were clearly in danger from the cars and trucks thundering along the motorway during the day.

The Roma women who were begging on the roundabout were using the smaller kids as props, holding them up and rapping aggressively on the windows of cars, making feeding gestures at the mouths of their children.

This went on for several weeks and the camp grew larger before the newspapers here sent reporters to the motorway to investigate. What they found was shocking and disgusting.

Yet sitting proudly in the middle of the garbage and the squalor, the well-fed patriarch of the extended family said they had been living on a dump in Romania, foraging for food. Living in the middle of the motorway in Dublin was better because Irish people were kind to them, he insisted.

It was a different story, however, when they were deported a couple of weeks later and the camera crew and reporters followed the M50 Roma, by then around 100 people, back to where they had come from.

It turned out that they were from a mainly Roma village near a small town in the north west of Romania. They all had small houses and many of them even had land and horses.

Looking around the sunny, picturesque village it was clear that although it was poor, the people were not destitute. The houses had no electricity, but they seemed comfortable.

The mayor of the nearby town, embarrassed by the attention, showed the names in his land registry book to prove that the Roma from Dublin's motorway all had property in the area. He also revealed that several of them had petty criminal records and did not have passports. How did they get into Ireland, he asked.

The reporters then talked to the head of a British-based charity which runs help and training centers for Roma gypsies in Romania and has a center in the area. He said that while the Roma face discrimination and marginalization in Romania, conditions were not nearly as bad as the M50 Roma had been suggesting.

No one was living on a dump. No one was starving. He said that they had gone to Ireland because they had heard stories about how easy it was to get big welfare payments and charity handouts there.

And it got even more interesting when the reporters went to an Italian shoe factory within half an hour's bus ride of the village. The factory manager told them he already had a large Roma workforce and that he was looking for more workers every day. He provided on the job training and the pay was *200 a month after tax, three times the level of monthly welfare payments in Romania.

By now, all this was beginning to have a familiar ring to it for Irish viewers. The similarity with the behavior of our own travelers (who used to be called tinkers when I was a kid) was striking.

A separate culture in which begging, petty crime, temporary work in construction or laying dodgy driveways, horse trading, a semi-nomadic existence, a total disregard for the environment and the rights of the settled community, an astute ability to extract the maximum in welfare handouts and a posture as a repressed minority facing endless discrimination, are all common to both.

Of course not all Roma fit this description, no more than all British gypsies or Irish travelers do. But the hat does fit a significant number of them.

One of the seedier aspects of this way of life is the total male domination, teenage marriage, the subjugation of women by the men. The senior men in these extended families don't work, involving themselves in trickery and trading to pass the time, and regard it as their work to send out their women, girls and children to beg.

In fact it subsequently emerged that the patriarch of the clan camped on the M50 had been seen on a security camera in a Dublin bank wiring money back to Romania during their stay here. And it also emerged that a van was being used to ferry some of the M50 Roma into the center of Dublin during the day to beg on the streets.

Probably the most upsetting aspect of all this - and it applies to our travelers as well as to the Roma - is what it does to the kids.

It's not just the miserable existence they have and the way they are forced to beg instead of being sent to school. It's what it does to their heads, constructing a parallel world for them divorced from the rest of society.

In this parallel world, it's okay to beg and steal and spread garbage all over the place because you're moving on anyway and you're not part of society. You don't pay tax or abide by the law.

Ripping off mainstream society becomes a way of life. Tricking people, whether it's a welfare officer or an elderly couple for whom you do a "repair" job on the roof, is the clever thing to do.

One of the interesting aspects to the M50 Roma camp, especially in their first weeks on the motorway, was the reaction of a number of organizations here, who immediately demanded that the Irish government supply the Roma with housing, services for the kids and welfare support.

Chief among these was the organization for Irish travelers, Pavee Point, which talked about the discrimination the Roma faced at home and the moral duty we had to care for those who had arrived here. Another organization called Residents Against Racism also demanded intervention, housing, support funds and so on. Even the professional child welfare workers association called for action.

And, of course, the Catholic Church got in on the act as well, with the social welfare agency of the Archdiocese of Dublin, a body called Crosscare, urging the state to put pressure on the Romanian government about the lack of human rights for the Roma there.

The lawyers were also getting warmed up, with free legal aid for the Roma caught begging with children in the city center (which is now against the law here) and some of the Roma preparing to take a court challenge against their repatriation.

All of this is what I call the "immigration industry" here, a now large number of NGOs, lawyers, human rights activists and pressure groups which come out whenever a difficult situation like that posed by the Roma on the M50 emerges.

We - and the government -are lectured on racism, discrimination and the human rights of those who are part of a separate culture but the motives of those involved, like this group of Roma, are never seriously questioned.

The irony is, of course, that almost all these groups are funded by the state as part of our determination to be fair to immigrants. There are now dozens of lawyers here who make a living out of immigration.

But this irony has not been lost on at least one lawyer, our new Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan, who has now warned groups funded by the state that they must not encourage people who are illegal immigrants or those who disregard our laws in relation to immigration. The role played by these groups in the Roma case is now being reviewed by the government, he said.

That will be some comfort to the vast majority of people who are completely sick of the sermonizing of the "support" organizations which work in the immigration industry here. There are lessons to be learned from this Roma case for them and for us all.

For a start, they need to get real in dealing with such cases. They need to start asking some real questions, like how so many people who allegedly had been living on a dump had been able to buy air tickets to Ireland in the first place? Or how a few of them with no passports had managed to get in here?

The Roma have also learned lessons. The patriarch of the clan who came here went into hiding when the RTE cameras arrived in his home village in Romania, too embarrassed to speak.

He had led the group to Ireland because of stories about the free food, clothes, welfare money and accommodation that immigrants here get, his friends said. Now all the Roma in the village knew that Ireland was not such an easy place.