One of the things about writing for a living is that it brings home to you the extent to which we live in an era of very low trust. In the case of the writer, this manifests itself as occasionally extreme reactions from otherwise loyal readers on the occasions where writer and reader find themselves in disagreement. The week before last, for example, I received a lengthy email from an annoyed reader accusing me of having “a barely disguised socialist heart” – something that will come as news to my apparent comrade in arms, Deputy Paul Murphy.
In response, a line I like to use with readers is this: If you agree with what you read on these pages 70-80% of the time, you should be subscribing and supporting our work financially. If you agree with us 100% of the time, you should be checking in with a psychiatrist. Disagreement, in both politics and journalism, is healthy. 100% conformity is not.
However, politics is fundamentally different from journalism: The journalist is not elected, and does not represent his or her readers. Nobody here or at the Irish Times or the Journal has a responsibility to reflect the views of their readers all, or even necessarily most of the time. A politician, by contrast, is elected to do just that.
All of this is perhaps a long introduction to a piece about Independent Ireland’s decision to align, in the European Parliament, with the RENEW group of MEPs which includes, amongst others, the MEPs of Fianna Fáil and those of arch-EU federalist Guy Verhofstadt.
The specific party that Independent Ireland has joined – the European Democrats – are an interesting bunch. Their manifesto, for example, contains lots of lines that many Ciaran Mullooly voters might have been interested to hear before the election. Did you know, for example, that they want to “remove all obstacles to an inclusive society, embracing transgender, transgenerational and transnational diversity.”? Or that they want a Europe of “car free streets”? Or that they want to abolish Ireland’s veto over all areas of EU policymaking? Or that they want an “emergency clause” to “authorize the European Union to act with emergency powers in a major crisis”? Or that they want to expand EU sovereignty over health, education, and energy? Or that it wants to turn the EU into a “Defence Union” by “abolishing the right of national veto” over EU defence policies?
I’ve scanned as many Independent Ireland leaflets as I can in the writing of this piece, and I cannot find where the party’s voters were informed that these would be the policies it would sign up to support in the EU parliament.
Which brings me back to trust.
For a large party like Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, trust is largely offset by tribalism. That is to say, we all know that regardless of what those parties do in office, something like 40% of the electorate will vote for them anyway, out of habit or tribal loyalty or because their families always voted that way. For a small party, or a new one, like Independent Ireland, no such tribal allegiance exists. You need the trust of the voters, or you will not have any voters.
It is, I think, reasonably obvious that across the country, Independent Ireland sought the trust of voters who were largely (perhaps not universally, but largely) entirely opposed to the agenda of the political grouping that Independent Ireland has just signed up to sit with in the EU Parliament. That is, without question, a betrayal of trust.
Such betrayals of trust are obviously damaging to the party that engages in them, but it’s much worse than that: they also foster a deep cynicism about politics in general amongst an electorate that already views politicians with – in some cases at least – a barely veiled contempt. By turning around within weeks of an election to align yourself with the very causes your voters oppose, you make it harder for future politicians and future candidates to build the trust necessary to form a real alternative to the political establishment.
Independent Ireland are positioning themselves, publicly and privately, as a party that can take advantage of voter discontent at the general election in order to come back with around a dozen seats in the Dáil in order to bring some “common sense” back to Irish politics. There is now an open question about whether they can be trusted: If an Independent Ireland candidate says on the hustings that he or she believes there are only two genders, then we will be forced to remind readers here that the party has just signed up at European level to help build an EU of “gender diversity”. If it says it opposes the EU migration pact, we will be forced to remind readers that it has signed up to support an EU group that not only voted for that pact, but wants to expand EU sovereignty yet further into many more areas. If its candidates talk about neutrality, that can hardly be separated from their support for abolishing neutrality at EU level. There are many more examples.
At a stroke, and for no good reason, the party has just made itself untrustworthy to many of those who voted for it. It is a calamitous error of political judgement.