Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
“Joke of a country”, wrote Cianán Brennan, the political correspondent of the Irish Examiner, within an hour of Liz Truss’s election yesterday as the United Kingdom’s third female Prime Minister. He was speaking, presumably, of the United Kingdom, and not Ireland – a country where a woman recently received a €10,000 bill for electricity for running a small coffee shop and where, in a matter of weeks, we will swap the Taoiseach’s office around between two parties as if it is a computer game controller at a child’s birthday party, and everyone deserves to get a go.
Which is the bigger joke? A woman being elected Prime Minister, or a man being appointed Taoiseach again in a few weeks because it’s his turn to sit in the cool chair?
Truss had not been elected an hour when Fintan O’Toole published his column. The column itself was too predictable to bother quoting here, but suffice it to say that if you were wondering how long it would take into Liz Truss’s Prime Ministership for O’Toole to announce that she is worse even than the hated Boris Johnson, the answer was minus twenty-three hours. She had not yet even taken office yet, and Fintan had already pronounced her, in the manner of the Simpson’s Comic Book guy who he increasingly resembles in character, if not appearance, worst Prime Minister everrr. He is the most consistently embarrassing offender, but he is by no means the only offender. Hating Liz Truss and pronouncing her a disaster before she even takes office is already the new Irish media equivalent of saying the Rosary before bed.
Which is why, I’d argue, it might just be time to have a reckoning with the fact that the Irish media and political establishment is suffering from an exceptionally demented case of Anglophobia. They loathe Britain, and its leaders, and they make no secret of that fact. It is, at this stage, foundational to their identity.
They would deny that, of course. They would claim that they do not loathe Britain, but rather wish to see it thrive and succeed and be better governed. It is just bad Government that they hate, according to their scribblings. There’s truth to that: After all, all it will take for Britain to get back into their good books is to elect a Labour Government again, just as America is either a cesspit of evil or a shining city on a hill depending on whether a dastardly Republican or a kind and inspirational Democrat holds the White House.
But if it is bad Governance that they so oppose, then they have much of it to comment on here at home. But seek high up and low down, and you will never find a fraction of the vitriol directed at our own bunch of bumbling incompetents that you do at Britain’s Tories. The United Kingdom having a vain, shallow, dunce as Prime Minister is regarded as a crisis of democracy. Our own vain, shallow dunces are generally presented as decent fellows just trying to do their best. Because our own vain shallow dunces have much in common with those who write about them for a living, you see, unless they have eight houses for rent when the average journalist does not.
Imagine, just for a moment, what the reaction in the Irish media would be, for example, if Liz Truss were to announce next week that, due to the cost of living crisis, every member of the UK parliament would receive a pay increase to the tune of £6,500. I promise you, we would have newspaper columns and radio shows devoted to the cruelty and capriciousness and greed of Tory Britain. Yet, this past week, our own TDs, already better paid by some distance than their British counterparts, received exactly that from the Irish Government. The news did not inspire Fintan to take up his pen and write a column about how out of touch our government is. It never will.
The raging Anglophobia of the Irish establishment would actually serve some useful purpose if it was directed in a vaguely competitive manner. If this country was so determined, for example, to prove itself superior and better to Tory Britain, and all our energies and loathings were directed into building a country that was better for our people than Liz Truss’s is for hers.
But ask yourself: You wake in the middle of the night feeling unwell – would you rather go to an Irish A&E, or to a UK NHS hospital? You want your child to get the best education – are you sending them to NUI Galway, or to the University of York? You want to be environmentally friendly, and use public transport – are you taking the Luas, or the Tube? Every country has its problems, especially at the moment, but let us not pretend, please, that we live in Tolkien’s Shire and are gazing fitfully across the Irish sea into Mordor.
What is it in the realm of public policy that we do better here, after all, aside from licking our own arses about what a great little country we are?
It is, and should be, mortifying.
This will close in 10 seconds