Kate O'Connell TD
Photo: David Conachy On Sunday, I had the rare privilege of being denounced in the opinion pages of no less an organ of official Irish conventional wisdom than the Sunday Times. “Politics,” announced Justine McCarthy, “needs more Kate O’Connell’s to defend us from the John McGuirk’s”.
Last week, by happy coincidence, I celebrated my 36th birthday. That is, it turns out, how long it took me to become an official threat to Ireland, which must be defended from me, in the eyes of the Sunday Times.
The reason for my identification as a threat to the established order of things was that a few days before, I had composed an article on Gript.ie reflecting on Fine Gael’s decision not to select its avowedly liberal, pro-choice former TD, the aforementioned Ms O’Connell, to the ranks of its class of prospective members of the Seanad.
Without going over all the details again, the general thrust of it was that Ms O’Connell’s personal conduct and political agenda was increasingly extreme and out of step with even Leo Varadkar’s very liberal Fine Gael. She was losing them votes, and therefore, they got rid of her. Not one word of the piece, or a single fact within it, was disputed by the Sunday Times.
Unofficial list
The crime, you see, was writing it in the first place.
Ireland has an unofficial list of people and things that can be criticised, and another list of people and things that may never, under any circumstances, be criticised. The lists aren’t published anywhere openly, but they’re in plain sight, all around you.
For example, the Church can be criticised in the most extreme terms without any fear of sanction whatever. Some months ago, you might recall, the Minister for Health launched a blistering attack on a parish in Tullamore because it made the unforgivable error of explaining Catholic teaching on IVF treatment to a crowd of Catholics on a parish Facebook page. “I thought and certainly hoped,” said Mr Harris, “that we had moved to a point as a country that this sort of inappropriate interference in decisions that individuals and couples make about their own lives would be left to them”.
“Inappropriate interference”? If the parish had been blockading an IVF treatment facility and preventing anybody from going in, Mr Harris may have had a point. As it was, the parish was effectively slandered by our own Government because the Minister for Health needed anything at all to distract from the latest disaster on his watch, and not one journalist of note raised an objection, because he was attacking an approved target.
You’re also perfectly allowed, according to the unpublished but universally obeyed rules of official Ireland, to say almost anything you want to say about foreigners we don’t like. Boris Johnson, for example, has been repeatedly denounced by Fintan O’Toole as a racist, a misogynist and a homophobe, to the cheers of the massed ranks of journalists in Ireland whose ambition is to be the next Fintan O’Toole.
The very notion of an Irish journalist saying anything on that level about an Irish politician (except for Rónán Mullen) is so fanciful as to be unimaginable. Indeed, imagine the howls of outrage from official Ireland if a British newspaper wrote in such terms about a Taoiseach – it would cause Mr O’Toole himself to choke with outrage.
Because liberal Irish politicians, particularly those favoured by the establishment, are on that other list – the list of people and things who should never be too harshly criticised. One must never, ever, ever, for example, speak a critical word about President Higgins. The man has, it’s true, a long record of saying monstrously inappropriate things about brutal and repressive dictators, and an unfortunate habit of stepping well outside the bounds of his office to make political interventions, but those are, we are assured, the adorable foibles of the nation’s elected mascot, and to make a full-throated criticism of him is unpatriotic.
One must also never criticise certain groups – or even policies involving certain groups. To question the benefit to travellers and the rest of us of elements of contemporary traveller culture, for example, is to be denounced as a racist. To question immigration, even in the mildest terms, is to advertise yourself as a xenophobe. To wonder whether it is a good idea, as is now fashionable, to invite drag queens to teach children about sex and sexuality is to reveal yourself as a despicable homophobe. To simply state one’s belief that life is sacred and should be protected, as I have been known to do, is to proclaim oneself, as Justine McCarthy put it, as an “anti-choice” writer who, worse again, “has been known to write for The Irish Catholic”. Evidence, if ever her audience needed it, of high crimes and moral corrosion.
Ms O’Connell, of course, is on the second list, the list of people who should never be criticised. In three years in office, she had made enemy after enemy, accusing a party colleague of bullying, attacking her own colleagues as choirboys, snarling at pro-lifers that “you lost, get over it” and generally behaving as no good friend or colleague does. But to say these things, of course, is to attack a woman, and therefore must be motivated by that other crime: misogyny.
But pointing these things out, of course, was not just wrong, in the eyes of Justine McCarthy. It was worse than wrong – it’s something the country actually needs to be defended from. But what does she want us to be defended against? I am, as she says herself, merely a writer, and very occasionally in the past, a campaigner. People like me lack the power to threaten people like Justine McCarthy with anything but words – and it is the words themselves that are what she is declaring dangerous.
It is not the threat of removal, or policy reversal, that Ireland’s establishment must be defended from, you see. It’s criticism itself. Speaking out against these people, and challenging their stranglehold on our culture, our politics, and our society is, to their eyes, an act of unconscionable rebellion, a threat to the country that they are building. By accident, she revealed the whole plan: to keep you, who might agree with me, silent.
But Justine, if your ideas, and your idols, like Ms O’Connell, cannot withstand a little criticism, then surely there must be a risk that there are many greater threats on the horizon than anti-choice writers for The Irish Catholic, like me?