Yesterday the Sunday Independent reported on the arrest of a 40-year-old man in Galway, who is facing charges of issuing death threats to An Taoiseach via an apparently anonymous account on Instagram. The newspaper reported that the threatening comments were made in the comments section of Mr. Harris’s popular Instagram account, and included images of knives, references to Mr. Harris’s children, and language along the lines of “they’re coming for you”. Gardai, we are told, regarded the threats as credible, meaning that they assessed that there was at least a reasonable prospect that the person making them was sufficiently deranged to attempt to carry them out.
This is, of course, why we have Gardai: To protect people, including the Taoiseach, from criminal threats or criminal actions.
At the bottom of the article, however, we got this news:
“The Sunday Independent has also reported today that the Taoiseach is to host a major online safety summit and has written to key government departments setting out plans to clamp down on social media companies over their handling of online threats, bullying and the increasing spread of misinformation.
It’s understood the Mr Harris wrote to ministers this weekend insisting social media can no longer be a “hiding place for bullies” or people with “sinister motives” who threaten and incite violence.”
If you were to rank “bullying and bad behaviour on social media” alongside the various problems facing the country – for example the lack of housing, the overcrowding in health, the creaking traffic infrastructure of Galway City, the immigration crisis, the shortage of teachers in schools, the state of some many roads, the cost of electricity, or threats to national cybersecurity – where do you think the average person would rank it?
The answer, per most of the public opinion polling, is “nowhere near the top of the list”. Indeed, online safety has not featured, so far as I can tell, in a single public opinion poll of the public’s concerns over the lifetime of this Government. So why is the Taoiseach planning a “major online safety summit” instead of a major summit of Ministers to deal with any of the problems that feature in the public’s list of concerns?
The answer, I fear, is that the Government is unable to solve any of the other problems, and therefore needs to look as if it is doing something very important which justifies the inaction elsewhere.
This has long been central to Simon Harris’s style of politics. Readers might recall his tenure as Minister for Health, in which precious little of note was achieved in terms of improving the state of the health service. But what did we get instead?
We got free contraception for young women. We got free GP visits for small children. We got a one-man crusade in the abortion referendum. We got a short-lived 2016 campaign – now forgotten – in which Minister Harris launched a national crusade against obesity.
What we didn’t get, of course, was any meaningful increase in the number of hospital beds, doctors, or nurses. Or any meaningful decrease in waiting times.
What about his time in the Department of Further and Higher Education? Readers might recall that there was little progress made in the student accommodation issue which is probably the single greatest problem for students in Ireland.
What did Harris do, though? Now and again, he would find some issue to make a pronouncement on: In December 2022, he announced to the Irish Times that “the country is obsessed with CAO points”, indicating that he would like to change the leaving cert and the qualifications system to make it more accommodating to those for whom a bumper points haul was an unrealistic expectation. Did he follow up on that? No – the CAO system remains as it was. But Minister Harris was in the news, sounding progressive. When Harris appointed his own successor to the Department, Patrick O’Donovan, the Irish Times noted in its subtitle that “Simon Harris has left his successor Patrick O’Donovan with a series of complex challenges”.
Quite.
This is, after all, the Simon Harris style of politics: He will elevate a relatively minor problem to the status of national crisis, and then pose as the action-man figure “finally” doing something about it. All the while, the major problems can wait, while the Government finally does something about – in this case – anonymous accounts on social media.
It works, in part, because Harris has a tremendous skill for identifying issues that concern young journalists in particular: Free contraception for 20-something women. More opportunities for those who are sub-par, academically. Tackling the meanies on twitter who call them fake news.
It works also because Harris has a rhetorical gift for making the small problem seem like it has disproportionate impact on “who we are as a country”. We might not be able to fix the scoliosis treatment problem, he’ll tell you, but we can be a better people if we’re just kinder on social media. He poses less as the nation’s leader, and more as its therapist. This is one reason why Ministers – not just Harris – so enjoyed the Covid 19 pandemic. There wasn’t a whole lot of governing to be done – thanks NPHET – but there was a lot of therapy to be imparted to the country about coming together as a nation, and so on.
Needless to say, the Government has every political interest in maximising the threat of bad actors on social media, because it gives them a problem other than housing and migration to talk about. The media has every interest in it because social media is a threat to the media’s business model.
That is why an issue which doesn’t rank in a poll of public concerns is drawing a Ministerial summit and a plan of action. It’s the Simon Harris way.