“I hope your wife is raped. I hope your mother is raped. I hope your sister is raped and gets pregnant”.
That particular message has been imprinted on my brain since I received it in early May of 2018 in a letter that came in the post to my home address.
At the time, I was a very prominent member of the campaign to save the 8th amendment to the constitution. I had taken part in multiple TV and radio debates. I had received many kind messages of support and praise, and had received many aggressive messages of disdain and upset. Abortion is not a topic people generally bring up at dinner parties, for good reason. It is personal to people, and strong disagreement can feel very personal.
I particularly recall a difficult conversation with a friend who seemed to take my public disagreement with him very personally. We have never really spoken since. Strong political beliefs, when they are in conflict, can destroy friendships and relationships. They can also bring out the worst in people.
I had received, at the time, many messages similar to the one above. Most of them, you write off: Somebody venting on social media, or somebody saying something in the heat of the moment that they didn’t really mean.
But: When you get a letter in the post, that’s intended to send a message. The person has gone to the trouble for a reason. They want you to know that they know where you live. It was some relief to me that the sender was clearly unaware that while I have two brothers, I have no sisters.
I mention all of this because I have some understanding of what Simon Harris meant, yesterday, when he declared that he had to “dig deep” to attend the Fine Gael think-in in the aftermath of threats that have been made, he says, against his family. I have a very thick skin, and criticism does not normally bother me in the slightest. But the vitriol, anger, and threats levelled against me in that referendum left their mark at the time.
Yesterday I wrote that Harris has to take some personal responsibility for the situation in which he now finds himself, whereby he is a hate figure for a section of the population. I do not resile from that view: He has built a career on moralising on divisive topics. It has never been his style simply to disagree in good faith, when the option was there to present his own argument as the intrinsically more moral one and his opponents as fundamentally deficient in moral character. Every debate he has ever partaken in he has used the same approach either openly or by implication: Me good and decent, you cruel and mean.
Over the course of a career, even one as short as his own, that’s a lot of debates. And it is therefore a lot of people in this society who have at one time or other been the target of Harris’s moral superiority over them.
Take abortion: There are many people in Irish society who will say and firmly believe that the national war over abortion in 2018 was necessary and right and that the result was overdue. I do not agree with that view, but I understand it. But there was a cruelty and a viciousness to that campaign and its aftermath that was unseemly: Simon Harris was not the one to say “I hope you are hurting” in a debate about – of all things – foetal pain relief. That was one of his colleagues. But I wonder does he ever reflect on the tone of the campaign that he so proudly led, and the number of people he profoundly alienated without much need to do so.
Nor frankly do I think all this victimhood on his behalf is seemly. No, he and his family should not have to go through what they are apparently going through. If any single person who reads this column ever feels like directing bile at him and his family, then I urge you: Do not do it.
But what he and his family are going through is naught compared to what the parents of Harvey Sherratt are going through – a little boy who died in pain because the Government Mr Harris co-leads was unable to deliver on a promise Mr. Harris solemnly made.
Harris understands moral outrage. He practices it: Witness the accusations he has levelled against the Israeli Government. Witness the shaking anger that spews forth from him when he talks of dead Palestinian children. Witness the undiplomatic language he uses. When it comes to dying Palestinians, Harris cannot contain his own rage at the Israelis.
I’m not even going to condemn him for that. It is human.
But it is also human, I think, that when Irish children die in pain on his watch, some people are going to get angry with him and condemn him and use undiplomatic language and do inherently stupid and self-destructive things.
And here’s where I have little sympathy for Harris: I remember, quite vividly, the vitriol and hatred unleashed against me and my own family for disagreeing with him. That bile, including threats like the one I referenced at the top of this article, did not seem to particularly concern him or the political class once the people on the receiving end of it were their opponents.
Evidently, what is happening to him is deeply wrong. His family are innocent. His children did not choose their father’s job. But this toxic atmosphere in which we now do politics in Ireland is one that he himself, perhaps more than many others, has helped to foster. Amidst his justified self-pity, perhaps he might find a moment for self-reflection as well.