Because I’m rarely in Dublin and more rarely again in the city centre, I was unaware until yesterday that the outbreak of tent encampments in the capital city had finally reached the sanctified doors of the Irish Times. The news that a man was stabbed there, living in his tent beneath the gleaming multi-storied windows of the Paper of Record, on Monday night, was the first that I, and presumably many others, learned of the existence of tents at that location. This is mildly surprising, since I am and have been for many years a loyal Irish Times subscriber. You’d think they’d have mentioned it.
In some ways, it’s a fitting summary of the state of Irish journalism: The great and the good, picking their way through a tent encampment on their doorsteps in order to do the vital work of informing the public of the dangers to social cohesion posed by angry protesters in Newtownmountkennedy or Aughrim, and reminding us all of the importance of ensuring that the country doesn’t tip into radical extremism in the forthcoming local and European elections.
In other ways, though, it’s a fitting summary of the state of the nation. The proverbial water has reached the national eyeballs, and nobody is quite sure whose fault it is, or what to do about it.
The aforementioned great and the good, this week, have, as I wrote yesterday, defaulted back to the oldest of national maxims: Ireland’s problems are England’s fault. While they are engaged in the theoretical doling out of blame, solutions remain short on the ground, and the tents pile ever higher. On Mount Street, where a fully blown shanty town has grown up around the international protection offices, businesses are tearing their hair out.
As this was occurring, yesterday morning, I was taken by a new initiative by cabinet minister and chief whip, Hildegard Naughton. “This is the real national conversation we need to be having”, says Deputy Naughton, referring to, of all things, menstruation and periods.
Let’s foster a culture where periods are no longer a whispered topic 🤐🩸 pic.twitter.com/8qjKSE5vnZ
— Hildegarde Naughton (@1Hildegarde) April 29, 2024
Since I count amongst the fifty per cent of the population for whom menstruation and periods are a theoretical rather than practical issue, it might be considered rude for me to sneer at the Minister when she says that this is the real national conversation we need to be having. Alas, I find myself compelled to sneer anyway.
It seems to me, for example, that removing any taboo around the fact that women have periods, and that these are often painful and traumatic, is on the merits a worthwhile thing to do. Yet it also strikes me that this is a job for Taylor Swift, and other female figures with immense cultural influence, rather than a job for legislators. I’m not an Irish woman, but I suspect if you asked them to rank their political priorities, housing, crime, taxation, and about a hundred other things would rank ahead of “talking more about periods”.
Yet such is the state of the Irish political class that menstruation and periods are now a more comfortable conversation topic for our leaders than any of the problems that they were elected to address. Menstruation, as I recall, did not feature much in the leaders debates in the 2020 election. Housing and healthcare did.
Without wishing to be overly pious about such things, there’s also a jarring contrast between a cabinet minister talking about periods and the stigmas around being female just days after a devastating report into the death of Aoife Johnston in Limerick Hospital last year. She died for want of an antibiotic, not for want of a soothing conversation about how menstruation is perfectly normal.
None of this is to say, or suggest, that politicians are somehow prohibited from talking about things other than the main national issues. But this sort of thing is, I think, emblematic of a wider issue that I’ve written about for some time now: That Irish politicians have almost given up any pretence of having the ability or competence to tackle those main national issues, and thus spend endless hours trying to find other things to talk about. The Tents have reached the Irish Times, you say? Time for another article about equal pay. Time for another press release about periods. Time for another statement on extremism.
A political system only survives for as long as those it serves retain faith in it to address their issues. The French, a rarely happy people, are proof of this, having variously adopted and discarded monarchy, empire, dictatorship, democracy, and republican government like sets of clothes over the past 230 years alone.
We are at an existential point in Irish democracy, with an existential question: Is our system actually capable of delivering the results for people that the people expect to receive in return for their taxes and submission? The increasing unrest suggests to me that the answer to that question – at least under the present Government – might well be “no”.
In part, this is because we have a system that was never really designed to tackle big problems to begin with. Irish voters have always preferred politicians who tackle small problems effectively to politicians who tackle large problems effectively. Call it “he fixhsed the road” syndrome. The learned behaviour of Irish TDs, over decades, is that there is a safer seat to be held by dispensing medical cards and council workers to fix potholes than there is in proposing significant reforms. It is often forgotten, for example, that the last truly reforming Justice Minister we had – Alan Shatter – effectively lost his job for trying to fix a “big” problem: The backlogs in our courts. None of his successors have touched that issue since.
Instead, Irish politicians have always gotten by on blaming someone else for the big issues, and seeking outside help to solve them: Inviting the IMF to run the country, in effect, after the bust, is a good example of this. Outsiders could come in and make the big decisions, and our lads could complain about those decisions to their heart’s content.
It’s part of the appeal, I think, of the EU migration pact. Handing over control over that issue to the European Union takes it out of their hands, and makes it someone else’s problem. Meanwhile, our lads can talk about periods and transgender rights and addressing climate change.
I remain skeptical, by the way, that Irish people have any great desire to change all of this. We remain by and large a country that things are done to, rather than a country that does things. We are at our most comfortable with the symbolic, rather than the practical: It extends to every facet of our life, including foreign policy. Thus, the somewhat hysterical demands that our leaders go to Washington and give the President of the United States a solid talking to about the carry-on in Gaza. There’s no pretence that it might accomplish anything, just pride in the fact that everyone knows where we stand. We’re a nation that doesn’t do things, so much as we like calling on other people to do things. Faced with a real problem, the default stance is to ignore it and call for more discussion on menstruation instead.
Looking at the tents in Dublin, one gets a sense of national helplessness. A sort of “somebody else has to fix this” attitude that permeates the Dublin establishment. Thus, our big row with the British. It accomplishes nothing, but it makes us all feel a little better. After all, somebody else has to fix it, while we focus on the real issues.
Like talking more about periods.