So Verona Murphy, then, is Ceann Comhairle. Good for her: She’ll pocket a cool €255,000 per year, be awarded prime diplomatic status on overseas trips, and so long as this Dáil and the next one run for full terms, she’s extended her term as a TD from five to ten years since she will not have to seek re-election. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the very best job that is on offer in Irish politics, so long as you ignore the part where she must spend five years listening to the speeches of 173 of her colleagues.
Her election would not normally be particularly notable, but it’s notable because it says more about Simon Harris than it says about the victorious candidate. Here is what Simon Harris said about Verona Murphy four years ago, in 2020:
“I think that anybody who engages in stoking what I believe to be unfounded racist fears has no place in the Fine Gael party. I thought the comments made this morning which I don’t wish to repeat or add fuel to, I thought they gave an insight into why it was best that she was deselected. The decision to deselect her is looking better by the moment”.
What were those comments? The new Ceann Comhairle had suggested that some of the people coming into the country from Syria might have links to the then-at-the-height-of-its-powers Islamic State, and that the state might not be doing enough to promote its own security in that context.
Of course, the rights and wrongs of what she said then are irrelevant. What’s relevant is that having said that she is somebody who stokes unfounded racist fears, Simon Harris then turned to his parliamentary party in advance of yesterday’s vote and urged them to make her the Speaker of the National Parliament. Verona Murphy: Too racist for Fine Gael, but absolutely perfect for one of the most senior jobs in Irish politics. That’s the Simon Harris view.
Of course, concern about u-turns of this nature is broadly confined, in Ireland, to cranks like me and cranks, dear reader, like you. That Simon Harris would promote the elevation of somebody he himself once accused of overt racism is a matter of entirely no consequence to any of the “grown ups” inside Leinster House, where pragmatism about power and jobs is not only the highest of moral values, but also the only one.
This comes back to what I wrote about yesterday, in the context of Ireland’s ongoing row with Israel: The rank unseriousness of it all.
The truth is – and most voters in Ireland are expected to be sophisticated enough to know this – that Simon Harris didn’t think Verona Murphy was a racist in 2020, and he also didn’t think she was particularly qualified to be Ceann Comhairle yesterday. On both occasions, this was just business: If the political need of the moment means that the Taoiseach needs to fling accusations of racism against an erstwhile colleague, then he will paint on his most furrowed brow and do so, more in sorrow than in anger. And if the political needs of the moment require him to elevate an unqualified one-term TD to the office of Ceann Comhairle, then he will ignore anything he has said in the past, don the clothes of a feminist, and say “it’s time for a woman in that chair”.
All of it, almost everything the man does, is an act. One might think that a growing realisation of this fact – brutally exposed during the general election when he ran into an ordinary voter and the Eoin McLove act failed him – was one of the reasons that the Irish electorate fell sharply out of love with the Taoiseach during the recent general election.
Again, I come back to this point: Perhaps people like you and I, dear reader, really are cranks, because we expect unreasonable things like politicians saying what they mean. Richard Boyd Barrett, for all his flaws, says what he means. So too does Mattie McGrath. Neither man has ever made it further than the back benches in this democracy of ours, or is likely to. It is the insincere and the devious and the shameless who rise to the very top.
You might think that this is true in every democracy, and that this is not unique to Ireland – but I’m not so sure. Having lived for almost all of my forty years in this country, and having spent some time abroad, I’ve long since come to the conclusion that in Ireland we are genetically cursed with an affinity for doublethink that is rare in most other cultures. We even have our own name for it: Cute Hoorism.
The politicians are, of course, not entirely to blame. The voters tolerate it. They take seriously and engage with this pantomime passing for discourse in which a woman can be a racist one moment and a paragon of parliamentary virtue the next, depending entirely on the demands of political expediency experienced by the babyfaced actor in the big chair. Perhaps it is because it is how so many of us want to live our own lives: Free to issue moral condemnations and judge others, but reserving the right when it suits us to embrace those people again as friends. It comes back to why the Irish Government is so shell-shocked by the Israeli decision to shutter its embassy: If they knew us, they’d know that all the condemnations are just business, like the condemnations of Verona Murphy four years ago. Our leaders would happily have turned on a sixpence and embraced them again, at some point in the future.
There’s an ugly two-facedness deeply embedded in our national culture. You see it expressed most blatantly at moments like yesterday, and at the highest levels of our politics. But it does not start there, does it? It starts much lower down than that.