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“Nomen est omen”, as the Romans used to say: “a name is a sign”. Like many things, it’s as true today as it was then.
Across the world, “Karen” has come to capture a very particular type of woman: middle-class, officious, and always demanding to see the manager. Similarly, for the past few years, people in my circles have been using the term “Derek”, not for a universal type of man to be found as easily in Philadelphia as in Manchester or Munich, but for a very particular type of Irish man.
Derek is a middle- or upper-class boomer. Being Irish, he is “new money”, mainly because in Ireland there is virtually no “old money” to come from. Derek embraces the new Ireland. He eulogises the great national salvation brought by our “data-driven economy”, which liberates us from the evil clutches of “Dev’s Dark Catholic Ireland”. He paid for the premium tickets for the Oasis reunion gig, and he loves to watch the ruggers with “a noice stick of Heinomite”. He is not just a reader of the Fintan O’Toole column, he is a Fintan O’Toole column incarnate.
He is concerned about the “roise of the fawr roight”, Brexit, and “that awwwful idiot Donald Trump!”
I don’t have to describe him in visual detail, because you pictured him, didn’t you? We’re a small country, and we all know a Derek or two personally.
And while I give him a D4 accent, he is not bound to Dublin either; you’ll find him in Galway, Belfast, Cork, and Donegal.
But besides Derek, there is another type of Irish person I would like to baptise: “Sorcha”.
Sorcha is best described as your archetypal Sally Rooney reader. She is to be found haunting the smoking areas of Trinity, UCD, and beyond, where she’s studying literature, social sciences, or psychology (for a while — when the theory and statistical studies come in, she will get bored and transfer to literature or social science). She’s wearing vintage clothes from Depop and Doc Martens. Sorcha has an alt on Irish Left-Twitter called “@yerlandordscrustyprazkycans”, and her profile picture is either a fake-candid selfie or a cursed Simpsons screenshot.
Courtesy of Kneecap, Lankum, and Fontaines DC, Sorcha is a bit more in touch with her Irishness than Derek, but unfortunately she only views it as valid insofar as it gives her membership of the great global oppressed and allows her to claim she is “resisting colonialism”. In some cases, Sorcha is very much culturally Americanised but “aesthetically Irish”.
In politics, Sorcha considers wearing Palestine pins and rattling off a mélange of slogans such as “No human being is illegal” or “Trans rights are human rights”, along with a decent sprinkling of therapy-talk, to constitute a political ideology.
Sorcha is the daughter of Derek, both metaphorically and very often literally. Derek’s semi-mythologised bedtime stories of “Dev’s Ireland” drive Sorcha’s crusade against any vestigial remnants of Catholic Ireland she can find.
Their political disagreements really only hinge on economics and maybe the IRA. Both have only a vague understanding of either issue. Derek doesn’t want his tax bill too high, thinks free trade is the way to go, and sometimes considers the Provos to have been a virtually fascistic nationalist organisation. Sorcha wants to “Eat the Rich” and thinks the IRA were mainly about socialism and “sticking it to the Brits”.
What they have in common is that they are both insecure. Derek is insecure about being Irish; he believes the poverty and backwardness of the past are sins to be scrubbed clean by the socially liberal neoliberal globalism of Obama and Tony Blair. Sorcha is insecure about her bank account, and often about her own femininity (and the latter is a whole book in itself).
So why is any of this important?
Because once you see it, you realise all Irish politics is Derek and Sorcha.
Sorcha is angry at her dad Derek not because he is an authoritarian father, far from it, but because of his lax, hands-off approach. Derek, for his part, has no real disagreements with anything Sorcha wants, only procedural concerns: “Ah sure, it’s not the time for that yet”, or “You may be right, but that’s not the way to go about things.”
This reflects the false dichotomy between Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael and the Left in Ireland. The Left would like to act as if they are a threat to the established powers, but they are no more in revolt against Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael than a rebellious daughter is really in conflict with her well-meaning but somewhat absentee father.
Derek is in the Dáil, and Sorcha is in the NGOs.
The NGOs continually demand a more radical version of what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael already want (or, more often, what they simply do not really have any opinion on) and Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not oppose these demands so much as prevaricate on practical grounds, before eventually giving in to most of what the Left and NGOs want anyway. When the Sorchas screech for the abolition of any controls on “the poor migrants” or for any Current Thing™, the Dereks throw up their hands and say: “Ah well, anything for my princess!”
Derek and Sorcha are a uniquely Irish dynamic. They pretend that intense shouting matches over what are, in reality, fairly trivial differences constitute a serious political divide, all the while ignoring the real cracks in the floor and ceiling.
Tadhg Pidgeon
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