There are two levels, at least, on which Eamon Ryan should stand accused of, and be summarily convicted for, monstrous hypocrisy for this photograph, visit, and tweet:
My trip this week to #Shanghai #HongKong & #Beijing showed me how dramatically the country has changed. Never in history have so many people risen from poverty. The scale of development is hard to believe but the people were still as welcoming. I loved it just the same. #China pic.twitter.com/6Ir2y1yp49
— Eamon Ryan (@EamonRyan) March 18, 2023
The first and more important level is human rights: Here’s Ryan docked out in a Hawaiian shirt, after a visit to Hong Kong, where democracy has recently been abolished, and China, were millions of Uigher Muslims languish in concentration camps, to say how much he loves the place. He’s not a million miles removed from a fella drinking beers in Dresden in 1938, remarking on how well Germany has been cleaned up in recent years.
One of the great paradoxes of recent years – on the face of it, anyway – is the silence in establishment Ireland about China’s human rights record, contrasted with the rending of garments and grinding of teeth over the United States when Donald Trump was President. Then, concerns about human rights in the Irish establishment were so great that a Taoiseach visiting Washington was almost required to rehearse the private comments he would make to Donald Trump before the Irish Press Corps before departure, just in case there was something he might miss: “Remember to mention the muslim ban, Taoiseach”, Miriam Lord might have said. There was a basic national coaching effort to make sure our man wouldn’t let Donald Trump’s victims – chief amongst them Hillary Clinton – down.
Indeed, poor old Leo got in bother in Washington last week – with the Irish press, not the Americans – for the perception that he might have caused embarrassment to the beloved Mrs. Clinton. It’s just very gauche, you see, to mention that her husband got caught interfering with the interns. It’s the kind of joke that, God help us, the wrong kind of American Congressman might find funny.
In truth, there’s no real paradox at all: The paradox only exists if you believe for a moment that the Irish media and Irish establishment ever had any concern over human rights in America when Trump was President: I would put it to you that they did not.
What they were concerned about, rather, was making sure that everybody knew where they stood on Trump and Trumpism – and as such human rights was a stick of convenience. Boy, we really did care about kids in cages on the Mexican border, or whatever the outrage du jour was. Those “kids in cages” are still on the Mexican border today, by the way, but we do not care because they are operated by the right sort of people. Mrs. Clinton’s people.
In China by contrast, there is no great reason for the Irish establishment to care about human rights, other than being sincere. And since they are not sincere, then there is no reason at all.
To say that they are not sincere might strike some readers as over the top. But the photo above is all the evidence you need that I am correct. One might argue that the Irish Government has no prospect of changing the human rights situation in China, and that therefore speaking out about it would simply cause needless diplomatic harm with no upside. That’s a reasonable, pragmatic position. But there is a difference between saying nothing, and showering praise on a regime that regularly abuses and tortures the people in its care – especially when you have no problem speaking in the most scathing terms about, say, the immigration policies of Brexit Britain. Or the security policies of Israel. Taken in the round, it gives the impression that it’s not human rights abuses that establishment Ireland cares about at all, but the political disposition of the abusers. Communist monsters are just our kind of people, in a way. Bibi Netanyahu or Boris Johnson? Not so much.
The second hypocrisy is not, like the first, common to the Irish establishment as a whole, so much as it is specific to Eamon Ryan.
All this progress he sees has been won, of course, on the back of unprecedented carbon emissions. China has fueled its growth and its prosperity with more coal fire power plants opened in the last twenty years than existed at any time in Europe. It has become the world’s largest and most relentless polluter of the oceans – more than 70% of the plastic in the world’s oceans originates in Chinese rivers. It is an inveterate persecutor of animals: For all of the talk in Europe about “trophy hunting” bans, the fact is that a huge majority of illegal poaching in Africa is for the booming Chinese quack medicine trade. It is China that is responsible for all those murdered elephants, and Rhinos, and the coming extinction of the pangolin. Even the Russians – no goodies themselves – have to patrol their border with China to try to stop innocent Siberian Tigers crossing the border and being turned into rugs, and a quack version of Viagra.
For a Green Minister, of all people, to deliver such glowing praise to China is so nauseatingly hypocritical that it makes it functionally impossible to take anything he says on almost any other matter seriously. As for his colleagues in Government, and his fellow travellers in the commentariat, it is simply a fact that their criticisms of western countries should never be taken seriously: If their concern was for human rights, they would shun China as much as they shun Donald Trump.
But it’s not human rights, and it is not the environment – it never was. We have a ruling class that more than anything else wants to be considered progressive by the kind of people who write for the New York Times and run diversity programmes in Google. Human rights has nothing at all to do with it, which is why China can be praised to the heights, even as it stands against everything Eamon Ryan purports to believe in.