Any article on the subject of Simon Harris’s attendance at the Oasis concert over the weekend should start with a few obvious and clarifying statements, so here goes.
First, politicians, even those ones that for whatever reason you really dislike, are entitled to a private life. They are entitled to leisure time like anyone else. They are allowed to enjoy music and concerts and meals in restaurants and a few hours on a Sunday to watch sports if that is their thing.
Second, politicians are entitled to privacy. Irish media outlets – this one included – have a general and commendable policy of not reporting irrelevant personal life gossip about who is sleeping with whom, or whose child has been sent to private school, or whatever. Sometimes I feel like this respect for privacy nearly goes too far, but the motivation for it is broadly noble. After all, you could do the same sort of stories about many journalists, or many members of the public. Gossip is not news.
Third, politicians who choose to make parts of their private lives public do so in the knowledge that to do so will invite comment and scrutiny. What they do choose to make public is generally curated because they believe it will enhance their public standing or just plain make them look cool. If they do make things public, they should not expect to have their cake and eat it when it comes to people commenting on them.
Those declarations out of the way, we can turn our attention to this:
Simon Harris chose to make that photo public. He chose to do so at the end of a week where he has been, entirely fairly, the subject of immense scrutiny – amongst the public if not exactly the full strength of the nation’s media corps – in relation to his handling of Scoliosis.
The message he wanted people to take from the photo, I think, is something like this: “Modern Ireland is an exciting place where people have a great life and I am happy to be amongst the people enjoying some of the many great things you can do in Ireland”.
Man of the people, looking after the people’s needs, in other words.
But that is not the message that I, and I think many others, take from it. That goes something more like this: “Here I am enjoying some of the many privileges of my enormously well-paid job from the public purse, while a huge percentage of the population is in arrears on the electricity bill and sick children can’t get the operations I promised them. Do you like my bucket hat?”
Harris’s defenders will very fairly point out that even if he was entirely committed to eschewing a social life or leisure activities in favour of work, there probably isn’t much he could be doing to advance the cause of the nation at 10pm on a Friday or a Saturday night. That is fair.
But it’s equally fair to note that politics is above all a communications and perceptions business, and that this guy sends a message with everything that he does. The message in this case will be received by many as “it’s great being me, and if it’s shit being you, I don’t care”.
The bigger problem for Harris by far, though, is the way his brand has been atrophied and corrupted to the extent that what was once a strength is fast becoming a fatal weakness. Once, the “cool man of the people” act was his strength, projecting normality and trendiness through the tiktok screen, where the public could choose to believe that behind the camera there was a diligent, competent, and compassionate public servant whose glimpses into his private life were a portrait of a rounded character.
Now, it seems increasingly apparent that behind the parts of his life that he chooses to share on social media, there’s…. not much there. That he is, in the old American styling, an empty suit. Or an empty bucket hat, in this case. A nice guy, perhaps. But no more competent or compassionate or decent than the rest of us.
In fact, it’s worse than that. The point of Harris’s communication style is something you might call “mirroring”. That is to say, you are supposed to look at him and see yourself: The young person trying to get on the property ladder. The music fan. The guy really angry and frowning about some social problem. The objective of the TikTok Taoiseach, Father Trendy act was to make voters believe that one of them was in charge.
What happens when voters think they have been duped? That he’s not “one of them” at all, but is instead just a kind of alien, mirroring what he thinks people wish to see?
What happens, I think, is that they start to hold him in that special kind of contempt that is reserved for frauds and conmen. Leo Varadkar, his predecessor, had many problems but never this particular one because his connection with the public was never forged through emotion. With Varadkar, the notional appeal was that he was intelligent and competent, not that he was great fun at parties. Public patience for the “Eoin McLove has a happy face” performance is wearing thin.
Harris has built his brand on being “just like you”. But how many people in Ireland would feel happy and excited at being at a concert, the week after the parents of a dead child have charged you – fairly or unfairly – with culpability in his demise?
The act, Simon, is wearing very thin.