Here’s a quick series of questions for those of you sitting at home – and answer them honestly now, please: Has the two-day row about Fine Gael candidate John McGahon changed your vote in the election? Have you been so impressed with Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil’s pressurising of the Taoiseach over the McGahon affair that you have swung your support behind their parties? Were you perhaps a staunch Fine Gaeler, but this has been the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent you fleeing to the Irish Freedom Party or the National Alliance?
Yeah. Thought not.
In movies and television, a “McGuffin” is a plot device which serves no other purpose other than being the source of conflict. As Hitchcock said, a McGuffin “is the thing that the audience doesn’t care about but the characters on screen really care about”.
A good example might be the necklace in Titanic. The whole movie – the whole long drawn out three heaving hours of that movie – takes place only because some nerds are hunting a necklace they believe to be at the bottom of the ocean. The whole steamy re-counting of Kate Winslet’s automobile tryst with Leonardo DiCaprio is notionally based on an old woman explaining what happened to a necklace. We the audience don’t care about the necklace (a point driven home to us when the old dear tosses it off the boat at the end and our reaction to the permanent loss of a supposedly priceless cultural artifact is awwww). We care instead about the story.
All movies, the American writer John Gardner once said, have one of only two plots: Stranger comes to town, or Man goes on a journey.
Titanic is the former, as Leonardo DiCaprio comes to town and upends Kate Winslet’s previously heavy-breathing-free life. Saving Private Ryan is the opposite, as a bunch of men go on a journey.
That movie is a good example of how McGuffins are not always objects. They can be people: Think of the eponymous Private Ryan. The only purpose that Private Ryan serves in the film is that he is the reason for the story – the thing that motivates the conflict.
Now, in the context of the Irish General Election, Senator John McGahon, dear reader, is a McGuffin.
God love our politicians, but they are finding it hard to find policy differences of significance between the three main parties. All three (and the Sinn Fein manifesto has yet to be released, so this may change) are committed to billions of new spending and giveaways on the economy. All three want a greater role for the state in housing. All three would like more Gardai and more nurses. All three would like to shuffle slightly to the right on immigration but not by enough to frighten the Irish Times and RTE unduly. To the extent that there are real policy divergences, they are around gimmickry: For example, Fine Gael’s “acorn” plan for €1,000 for every newborn is costed at only about €60million in its manifesto, which is next to nothing.
The battle, if it cannot come with any significance on policy, must be fought on trust and likeability instead. Thus, Meehawl took to RTE this morning to drizzle the McGahon story with some extra-virgin handwringing and head-shaking about how Fianna Fáil would not have nominated such a bounder to contest the election, notwithstanding his own happy service in cabinet with several bounders over the years. Sinn Fein twitter accounts have piled on to suggest that a man involved in historic violence of any kind has no place seeking election, which is assuredly a welcome sign of that party’s evolution.
The Blueshirts themselves have drawn up to their haughtiest and sniffiest heights on the moral plateau to complain about the importance of due process and respecting the courts, and so on. God help us all when Ivana Bacik gets to weigh in on it at tonight’s television debate. The hot air that is produced from that painful minute alone may be enough by itself to ensure Ireland misses its carbon emissions target in 2030.
We, the voters, are apparently expected to attach great significance to all of this. The mainstream press is certainly reveling in the process story of the election to date, with every utterance from a leader repeated as if this scandal had the weight of ceasefire talks in the middle east.
This is the second such McGuffin of the election. The first, of course, was the Michael O’Leary affair. This interested right-leaning activists less, because most of them agreed with him instinctively. The McGahon story appears to be a different matter: A young and apparently caddish Fine Gaeler involved in something as hair-rendingly awful as a scuffle on a public street? Well, we must all pretend to be utterly appalled.
But the stories are ultimately the same. Both of them are fake rows that carry with them no significance on policy or the long-term direction of the country. They are just things, designed to fill airtime to cover the fact that our three largest parties are in effect a uniparty, who agree on almost everything except the morality of John McGahon’s candidacy in Louth.
I confess, had I the opportunity, there are many questions I would like to ask Senator McGahon, such as, for example, whether his party has learned any lessons at all from the Charlie McCreevy era of big spending and tax cuts, and whether he will take responsibility for the next economic crash when it comes.
But unfortunately, that’s a question for all three big parties. They’re all set on the same economic course. Which is why the only thing they can fight about is a historic scuffle on the streets of Dundalk. Or Drogheda. Or wherever it was.
Who bloody cares.