She’s taking an awful lot of flack from her usual fans for this (since deleted) tweet. And very unfairly so, in my opinion.
https://twitter.com/SenatorKeogan/status/1554883712554344449
It’s worth reading the tweet carefully, I think, to note what Keogan is saying: She is not saying – as is self evident – that she agrees with every policy of Mr. Martin’s Government. She is, after all, in opposition, and has fiercely opposed some of Mr. Martin’s most cherished ideas. She opposed him on lockdowns, she opposes the Government on crime, she has been a sceptic of much of the climate agenda, she has spoken out on matters of immigration and integration, and she has been a ferocious critic of the Government’s approach to, and treatment of, children with gender identity issues. If she’s been a secret Fianna Fáiler for all these recent years, she’s done an extraordinarily good job of hiding it.
What she is saying, simply, is that Mr. Martin has conducted himself well, and with dignity, in office. And that, I think, is true: For all the reasons one might have to oppose the Taoiseach, his personal conduct has never been amongst them. In a thirty-year career, he has been unstained by even the hint of corruption. He presents as a decent fellow, and a person with a sincere desire to lead a “compassionate” country. He might be wrong about almost everything, in my view, but he’s not a bad chap, and he doesn’t embarrass the country when he speaks for it on the world stage. I’m almost completely certain that this is what Keogan, too, was saying.
But one of the problems with politics in general at the moment is that people do not want a middle ground – or at least, the loudest activists on both sides of the culture wars do not want a middle ground. Therefore it is not simply enough, for some, to oppose Mr. Martin and hope that he is not re-elected: You must prove your “true patriot” credentials by calling for him to be locked up for treason. It’s an impulse we should recognise, because it’s been around, and just as unhinged, on the left for years: You can’t just oppose lockdowns, in their view; you must also be de-facto a Nazi. Rage is the currency that fuels the culture war, which is why, as a publication, we make a concerted effort to keep these pages as rage-free as possible.
The other point here is this: Only a very few of you can vote for Senator Keogan. And by a “very few”, I mean only those of you who are elected county councillors. That’s how the Seanad works, and that’s how we kept it, when there was a vote a few years ago to abolish it. If you’re somebody who thinks having a person of Senator Keogan’s views in the Seanad is a good thing, then you should be willing to recognise the basic reality that to keep that seat at the next Seanad elections, she will have to win the votes of elected county councillors. Many of whom, of course, think Micheál Martin is a decent fellow. Without wishing to expose the tricks of her trade here, it strikes me that Keogan is behaving like a good and sensible politician, and throwing a bone to a part of her electorate. If you want Keogan to behave more like a fire-breathing anti-Government partisan, then the single best thing you can do for her is to stand as, and get elected, an independent county councillor at the next elections. Then she’ll have to answer to you, and not to some FF councillor from Roscommon.
Anyway, the bigger lesson here is that everyone should just calm down. Mr. Martin is not the problem, in Ireland: His policies are. When he goes – and he will – the policies will remain. And those policies will continue to be advocated by his successors until such time as those policies become unpopular enough to threaten their re-election. Sending tweets saying that Mr. Martin should be in jail, and is a traitor, or whatever, doesn’t do anything to address the underlying problem. It just makes it easier for people to write you off as a crank. Sharon Keogan, at least, understands that. Her critics should try to understand it, too.