Dear reader,
Yesterday, you may have happened across the news that 160,000 households in Ireland are in arrears on their electricity bills, with the average amount owed being a hefty €476. Or, you might have read an editorial in the Irish Times, headlined “the only way is up in house prices, for now”. Or perhaps you read a different opinion piece in that paper, by Kathy Sheridan, cheeringly titled “plenty of people will happily live in a smaller, darker unit, if the price is right”.
Earlier in the week, if you were a consumer of the Irish Independent, you’d have learned that the price of an average weekly shop for an Irish person is 22% higher in 2025 than it was just three years ago, and that you are paying a quarter more for your groceries than you were in the heady days of 2022.
Moving away from the cost of living, keen students of the news might have eyed another story, which revealed that despite a government order to the HSE last year mandating the purchasing of overseas surgery for children with Scoliosis, only two out of 68 children on that excruciating (in every sense) waiting list have actually been sent.
In the midst of the housing crisis, Tim Healy of the Irish Independent told his readers the wonderful tale of an estate in county Waterford, newly constructed to the highest of building standards. Twenty-eight homes in total. However, an enforcement order from Waterford County Council now requires that all twenty-eight homes be demolished because the homes “sit at an elevation three to four meters higher than permitted under the county development plan”.
Amidst all this, celebrity chef Oliver Dunne was also in the papers, talking about how his high-priced restaurant, Cleaver East in Temple Bar, will likely close after 12 years in business. “I used to be able to sell [out] the restaurant three times a night. I’d sell five o’clock, seven o’clock and nine would be my last sitting, Now there’d probably be two tables a week coming into my restaurant now after nine o’clock”, bemoaned Oliver.
In news that is possibly related to declining restaurant bookings, fully a third of parents told an Irish League of Credit Unions survey this week that they would have to borrow to fund the costs of “back to school” in a few week’s time.
This was all in one week.
The Irish Times opinion poll yesterday revealed that fourteen per cent of Irish voters believe that “the government is successfully tackling the country’s problems”. Eighty-six per cent of us declined to back that sentiment.
One of the most well-written and relevant to modern Ireland characters in all of fiction was breathed into life by the pen of Charles Dickens.
In his seminal satirical novel “Bleak House”, we are introduced to Mrs. Jellyby, wife to Mr Jellby and mother to their children Caddy and Peepy. Mrs. Jellyby is a philanthropist and an activist, obsessed with a project she has developed to build links to the coffee trade with a remote region in Africa. All of her energies go into her work for poor children overseas, but at the cost of her own family. Her house is described as “in chaos”, her children are left dirty, unwashed, and uneducated.
Dickens portrays Mrs. Jellyby, and this is important, as actually insane. She is seized of a kind of frantic madness, coming to life with passion and exuberance when issues of poverty overseas are raised; but goes into a kind of glazed-over trance when matters concerning her own family arise. She ignores her own daughter’s wedding, doesn’t listen to anybody else when they speak, described memorably as having “handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”
You might, perhaps, sense where I am going with this.
It was a busy week for An Taoiseach, Mr. Martin. On Wednesday, he met with Agnes Calamard of Amnesty International to discuss ongoing human rights issues in the Gaza strip and elsewhere. He also met with Fillipo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to discuss Ireland’s continuing commitment to the plight of persons displaced by wars, climate change, and other pestilences. On Tuesday, he ventured outside Government buildings to issue an important statement on the war in Gaza, declaring that it must stop and that the Irish government was working tirelessly to stop it. Presumably the Nobel Peace Prize is in the post.
The Tánaiste was equally busy. He opened his week with a meeting with the Brazilian Foreign Minister, in which he pledged fifteen million of your euros to the Amazon Fund, as part of an effort to “promote Brazil’s climate leadership”. (This, incidentally, is the “climate leadership” which has deforested the Amazon at the rate of about 10,000 acres every single day since 2021).
He then went off to Brussels, to push hard for sanctions at EU level on Israel. Ten different options for sanctions were presented to the EU council, all of them with the backing of the Irish Government. All ten were rejected. In brighter news, the Tánaiste did get to announce Ireland’s associate membership of CERN, signalling Ireland’s commitment to particle physics.
He is also, he says, “working tirelessly for a trade deal with the USA”, which is interesting because negotiating trade deals with the USA is something his Government long since outsourced to the European Union.
Alas, if you were looking for statements or announcements from our gallant co-monarchs about ESB arrears, borrowing for back to school, scoliosis operations, or the absurdity of demolishing new homes in a housing crisis, you live in the wrong country. This is Mrs. Jellyby’s Ireland.
It is said of both US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers that when things start sliding for them at home, they turn to foreign policy for “legacy building” purposes. Examples here would include Bill Clinton’s eagerness to be the man who brought peace of a sort to this island. Or Tony Blair’s somewhat madcap mission with George W. Bush to spread democracy to societies where democratic majorities would appear to believe that murdering the infidel is a neat way to secure the lustful affection of whole armadas of virgins in the afterlife.
But UK Prime Ministers and US Presidents can be forgiven, I think. Both countries – the US because of its hard power and the UK because of what we will diplomatically call it’s “historic ties to much of the world” retain actual influence on the world stage. They can actually shape events.
But Micheál and Simon? Even if you support their efforts, just judge them on effectiveness.
On foreign initiative after foreign initiative, the best case scenario has been utter ineffectiveness and the worst-case scenario has been fiasco. This week we learned – after decades of Fine Gael assuring us that Ireland at the heart of Europe has influence – that Europe doesn’t listen to Fine Gael’s present leader on trade, Israel, or even agriculture. That is why the new EU budget proposal proposes to strip Irish farmers of 25% of their common agricultural policy supports, which would devastate the sector. The war in Gaza goes on. The US President seems relatively undeterred by Simon Harris’s objections one way or another to tariffs.
But forget effectiveness for a moment. What Harris and Martin are doing, dear reader, is actively immoral.
It is immoral – this is the lesson of Dickens and our own common sense both – to prioritise the rest of the world over your own people. It is immoral to spend months and months of your limited waking hours obsessing over children in Gaza whilst children in your own country go without necessary operations and their parents go into debt to fund basic needs. It is immoral to fork over millions to Brazil while Irish people languish in debts accrued from a basic need like keeping the lights on and their children’s bedrooms heated.
It is immoral, and disordered, to spend your days gladhanding Amnesty International while tens of thousands of young Irish people (and many older ones) cannot get homes. It is immoral to lecture the world on your own virtue while the people with whose welfare you are entrusted cannot afford food for their own children.
It is immoral, and frankly insane, to risk the jobs of unknown thousands of Irish people whose livelihoods depend on US investment just so Bert and Ernie in Government Buildings can have their moment of “moral leadership” on Gaza by enacting an occupied territories bill that will not save one Gazan life but may well imperil the jobs of their own constituents.
Do you know who won’t suffer from any of this, by the way? That’s right: Bert and Ernie themselves, whose gold-plated pensions and status as elder statesmen is secured regardless.
This is not “moral” leadership. It is the opposite.
We did not elect a Government of Gaza. We did not elect Brazilian Climate Cheerleaders. We did not elect UN High Commissioners for Refugees. We elected an Irish Government, to manage and administer Irish Affairs.
But what have we gotten instead? A deadbeat Government, led by a pair of moral vacuums posing as the guardians of galactic goodness. Irish people are not nearly angry enough. Not by a long shot.
I come back here to Dickens’ depiction of Mrs. Jellyby. The reader is not supposed to see the person obsessed with charity overseas while her own family suffers as merely quirky, or pitiable. You are supposed to see her for what she is: Afflicted with a form of madness, moral disorder, and insanity.
It strikes me that the ruling classes of this country suffer very badly from the same affliction. Our political parties languish in the polls, each sustaining their own mediocre share of votes from an electorate that is quietly tearing its hair out in frustration, while our leaders, so shorn of love and affection at home, seek adulation and recognition on the global stage. Consider Mr. Harris alone, this week committing €15m to “recognise Brazil’s climate leadership” while his party intones about how Irish people will have to suffer a hair-shirt budget this year because things are tight.
It is not that €15m is a large sum of money in the context of the budget, but what it represents is the story of Ireland’s political class in 2025. If my colleague and friend Laura Perrins was writing this article, she would put it in very blunt terms: They do not care about you. If they cared about you, they would spend time on your problems.
I, by contrast, have always leaned towards giving politicians the benefit of the doubt. They have good intentions, I would tell myself, it is just that their policies are ill-conceived.
I no longer think so. I no longer think we are dealing simply with people whose priorities are nudged slightly out of alignment. I think we are dealing with a political class that has gone, in large part, entirely mad.
And there is not a lot that voters can do about it.
On that depressing note, I bid you a good weekend. I shall spend at least some of it watching the Open Championship, and rooting for Mr. McIlroy. I figure I might as well watch some talent and skill on the television for a while, since the return of Manchester United to the football pitch is now, terrifyingly, but a few weeks away.
See you Monday.
John