It was interesting to watch the body language and the whispered, hurried confab of Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy of People Before Profit when Ben Scallan was asking them a question this week about the possibility of a referendum on the Triple Lock.
Murphy had been here before, in a rather mortifying exchange when the ever-surly Ruth Coppinger snarled that she wasn’t taking a question from Gript and was criticised by other journalists for that bit of theatre, which as Ben pointed out, garnered millions of views precisely because she created a wholly negative viral moment for herself by being unreasonable.
This time, PBP clearly had a plan, as instead of answering the question up steps a man with a lanyard to speak for the TDs and solemnly swear that these particular latchikos on the far-left wouldn’t be taking questions from Gript ever, so help me Karl Mark, or whoever the appropriate deity is.
The man with the lanyard is Des Hennelly who operates as ‘Leftist Dad’ on X and retweets accounts like “Antifa Ultras” and other frankly headbangery stuff. He declares that he’s a “Marxist – like Sally Rooney”, which is a new strand of socialism to me, I must confess. He also says that “we can have capitalism or we can have a future – we can’t have both.”. Right. How about the capitalism of the small business owner? They are the unacceptable petite bourgeoisie who presumably are also a threat to the Great Vision.
Anyway, RBB and Paul Murphy stand back and allow Des to have the floor to recite the party policy which is that Gript is a “threat” to stuff and so Ben Scallan won’t be getting an answer.
The whole refusal to engage feels a bit juvenile, to be honest: something pointed out by many of the hundreds of responses online.
“Two clowns” as Cllr Gavin Pepper said, who does a better job of representing the ordinary people of Dublin then the private-school educated, performatives lefties in PBP who rail on about the class struggle and the “woorking class” while expending most of their energy on some non-binary woke nonsense instead of sorting out real issues like the gross injustice of zero-contract hours.
From: X/Informative01
And while PBP might believe they are making a grand statement, an ultimate stand – a lame attempt at ¡No pasarán! against, eh, media questions – they mostly look churlish, and childish, and intolerant. And that brings me to why I’m bothering to write about them at all.
The real reason why Gript is a threat is because Ben Scallan and the rest of the crew are very good at doing what a media outlet is actually meant to do: ask the hard questions, push back against the establishment line, challenge the consensus. And that journalistic challenge is aimed at both government and opposition alike.
PBP is a tiny party: polling generally has it on between 2 and 3% support, yet it commands plenty of airtime and media coverage and is rarely interrogated in a serious way on its nonsensical policies. This is partly because Irish journalists are largely left-leaning, middle-class, and sadly lacking in minority representation, according to a recent study – and partly because the Irish media have long lost their bite and mostly seem to be serving-in-waiting for a major pay hike when they land a role as a government press advisor .
Gript is a threat to the PBP in exactly the same way that we are to the Minsters we held to account the past month in successive viral video reports questioning them on issues from the Triple Lock, to ‘disinformation’ and media funding, to explicit books recommended for kids, to the 3-day wait.
Gript’s detailed investigations are a threat to a system that has allowed the sort of people left-wing parties used to rail against make several small fortunes from asylum provision while the PBP and Sinn Féin looked the other way and called ordinary people racist.
Gript is a threat to brazen developers who think they can override the concerns of local people and simply build without planning permission. We are a threat to state-funded campaigns who make false claims about issues during referendums.
Our reporting is a threat to the recklessness of government migration policy which allowed tens of thousands of people to enter this country without a passport and then claim asylum – because we revealed that the supposed vetting which senior establishment figures said was taking place was not, in fact, happening.
The truth is that almost the entire political establishment has moved so far to the liberal left that they are practically singing from the same hymn sheet as PBP on a rake of issues including climate targets, spending, transgender nonsense and much more. A new media platform to challenge that cosy consensus – and therefore be a “threat” to an establishment which has persistently placed the needs of international obligation and global business over its own people and the nation was very badly needed in this country.
The bad news for People Before Profit, and every other political party which fears a challenge, is that Gript is here to stay. If you’d like us to keep reporting and keep asking the uncomfortable questions, then please take out a subscription today. https://gript.ie/membership/
