The Independent Senator, Sharon Keogan, arrived into the stale, musty, echo chamber that is the Irish Seanad with the effect of an anarchist gaining entry into the House of the Romanovs.
These days, the Seanad is probably the most unrepresentative clique of assorted doses anywhere on the planet. A more privileged collection of Fogeys Who Haven’t an Original Thought in Their Heads you won’t find anywhere, though, like most of the elites whose connections land them a well-paid job or a platform to bore the rest of us to tears, they all imagine themselves not just to be the cream of Irish society but the most marvellous, tolerant, progressive people in the country.
They likely see themselves as radicals, even though they dutifully sing from the same hymn sheet about everything. It helps when they are lauded as stunning and brave by the media for having the same safe opinions on every subject, of course.
Keogan won her seat in the Seanad the hard way without party favour or faffing about in some university after a diversity hire. The Meath woman was elected by other county councillors and hasn’t held back since.
She’s had pretty much the effect of a bomb going off, delivering a badly-needed dose of reality and straight talking to the illiberal groupthink that passed for debate in the lower house. It didn’t take long for all the respectable Senators to start clutching their pearls and reaching for the smelling salts. But, of course, they didn’t stop there.
Their attack on Sharon Keogan this week had all the viciousness of a bar-room brawl. You could feel the bile and the rage from those posing as liberals in Ireland these days. Their intolerance is astounding.
They didn’t analyse Keogan’s argument or find fault with her logic, instead they heaped personal abuse on her for daring to have an opinion at all and then shouted her down and kept suspending the hearing until she was forced to leave. That this happened at an Oireachtas Committee hearing, to an elected representative, sets a very dangerous precedent, especially when the whole shameful incident was then brazenly mis-reported by the pathetic excuse for what passes as the media in this country.
What did Senator Keogan say about commercial surrogacy – that is surrogacy where women, usually poor women from developing countries are paid to carry a child – that led to Lynn Ruane to snarl that she was “bigoted” and “cold and cruel”? Watch it for yourself.
Sharon Keogan raises some reasonable points about the ethics and potential for exploitation involved in commercial surrogacy.
1/ pic.twitter.com/Ho1FsZRAAk— JRD (@JRD0000) April 21, 2022
Most reasonable people will agree that there is nothing bigoted or cruel in those comments. She said – in a calm and measured way – that she wholeheartedly objected to what she called the commercialisation of the human child and the regulation of women to the status of “simply incubators or wombs for hire”.
She added that she believed that surrogacy was harmful and exploitative and said she did not believe it was everyone’s right to have a child. She asked those attending the hearing why most European countries did not allow commercial surrogacy, and why the Spanish High Court described it as “commercial exploitation of the child and the biological mother.”
She also said that birth mothers should not be airbrushed out of the process. These are all reasonable questions, and she expressed concerns that many people would share. Yet she was verbally attacked, in the most personalised way possible, and forced to leave the hearing.
What followed amounted to performative outrage by politicians and campaigners who are so unaccustomed to being challenged that their reaction is to launch a personalised attack on anyone who dares to disagree. The aim was not just to vilify Ms Keogan, but to shut the debate down.
Elaine Cohalan, chairperson of the Assisted Human Reproduction Coalition, attempts to shut down even the possibility of open discussion on surrogacy by warning about the impact of words.
2/ pic.twitter.com/WOonHJNDvF— JRD (@JRD0000) April 21, 2022
Elaine Coholan of the Assisted Human Reproductive Coalition warned Sharon Keogan about her language, cautioning her to “think about your responsibility to lead the debate in a respectful, dignified way, around surrogacy”.
“Inflammatory language and using undefined terms do not benefit the debate,” she said. This amounts to a regulation of speech, nothing new for liberals really, who frequently chose to make it unacceptable to accurately describe any procedure in a way that would reveal its true nature, and who now struggle to define what a woman is.
I obviously missed the appointment of Ms Coholan as Chief of the Speech Police. Her attempts to dictate what words Senators might use was followed up by a pile on from Lynn Ruane and others.
Ruane, who obviously thinks her fellow Senators are a bit thick, gave a rambling explanation of what critical engagement should mean – before ignoring her own advice and launching a ferocious attack on Sharon Keogan.
Injecting a quiver of righteous indignation into your abusive words doesn’t make them true or fair. Ruane, as well as accusing Sharon Keogan of being bigoted, said she was “cold and cruel” and told her to “check your Christian values”.
Lynn Ruane attacking Sharon Keogan for having views on surrogacy not completely in line with the desired echo chamber, calling her "crude and cold". Perhaps, the irony of Lynn calling anyone crude here isn't lost on many. The meeting was subsequently suspended.
3/ pic.twitter.com/dlqJlzPbpX— JRD (@JRD0000) April 21, 2022
When Sharon Keogan objected, Ruane continued to shout abuse at her. When Keogan appealed to the useless acting chair, Kathleen Funchion of Sinn Féin, she in turn joined in the personalised criticism, as did Fine Gael senator Mary Seery Kearney.
What really upsets the intolerant liberals is that Sharon Keogan happens to be a woman who thinks for herself, and who can voice her own opinions. She is a Difficult Woman then, and she won’t be tolerated in shiny, new, progressive Ireland where everyone is obliged to think in lockstep even when that means turning a blind eye to the obvious abuses that are arising.
Of course, Difficult Women are now a vanishingly rare breed in this country. What happened in the Seanad yesterday when Keogan was, to use the vernacular, hopped on by a gang of hard chaws was a disgrace. It was more like being jumped on in a bar-room brawl than a free and fair debate.
None of those attacking Keogan have any real basis for thinking she’s a bigot of course, they just know that she has the audacity to think differently from the rest of them.
Never ones to miss the chance of giving a good kicking to a Difficult Woman, the media – with RTE and Joe.ie being just two examples – reported the controversy with breathtaking dishonesty, ignoring inconvenient facts and misrepresenting Keoghan’s contribution.
Joe.ie led with the accusatory headline: Keogan said to Gearóid Kenny Moore, representing Irish Gay Dads, that he was “lucky to be here”. In fact, what Sharon Keogan, who said she found Gearóid’s contribution to the debate very moving, wanted to explain was that at a private meeting of the Committee the day before, there had been objections to including some witnesses. She never got to explain that as she was continually shouted down. She could have also shared that with any journalist who bothered asking. Most didn’t.
Newstalk referred to Sharon Keoghan’s contributions as ‘the explosive comments that shut down” the Oireachtas meeting on surrogacy. That’s untrue. Her comments weren’t explosive, in fact, the Human Rights Council in Geneva reported that “there is no right to have a child under international law,” and that “children are not goods or services that the State can guarantee or provide.” And it wasn’t Keogan’s comments that shut the meeting down – the Chair did that.
Sharon Keogan has now written to the committee chair Jennifer Whitmore about how she was treated.
“I wish to object to this deeply personal attack on me during a public meeting and contend that the language used by the member was inflammatory, discriminatory and sought to characterise me and my contribution unfairly,” she said.
The irony in all of this, of course, is that the same chancers who cheered on bodily integrity and wearing handmaiden’s costumes to show that women weren’t simply ‘walking wombs’, are now shouting at a woman who raises entirely valid concerns about using poor and often desperate, women as surrogates.
Their hypocrisy is nearly as bad as their bullying. But I have the feeling that they won’t be shutting Sharon Keogan down any time soon.