Here’s a fact that you may be unaware of if you’ve – for some unknown reason – being paying attention to the drivel about Michael O’Leary that’s dominated the election campaign for the last two or three days:
Michael O’Leary did not insult teachers.
Here is what he said, with emphasis added:
““The Dáil is full of teachers. There is nothing wrong with teachers. I love teachers – I have four children – but I wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done.”
There are questionable parts to the statement, for sure. For example, the Dáil is not exactly full of teachers. But that’s not the bit that has every imbecile in politics in a tizzy, is it? No, the allegedly offensive bit is that last statement – “I wouldn’t generally employ a lot of teachers to go out and get things done”.
The problem is that this statement isn’t in the least bit offensive. If Elon Musk were to say for example that he wouldn’t generally employ a lot of opinion writers to work on Space X’s Mars project, that would also be inoffensive, since by definition most opinion writers are unqualified in the field of space engineering.
Government tends to require skills. I have written repeatedly, for example, that Simon Harris is objectively unqualified to run the country, and he is not a teacher. (In fact, he does not have a College degree of any kind).
The department of health alone has more employees and a larger budget than NASA. It’s operations in Ireland dwarf those of Facebook, Google, and Intel combined. It has more contact with the public than any of the major supermarket chains, and offers more services – from dentistry to vaccinations to free contraception – than any company in the land except perhaps Amazon.
And let’s be frank: A teacher is objectively unqualified to run it. Even the principal of a large school would be objectively unqualified to run it. Simon Harris was certainly unqualified to run it.
Saying so isn’t offensive – it’s common sense.
Michael O’Leary, for all his undoubted flaws, would be qualified to run an institution of that size because he is one of the few people in Ireland with relevant experience of running a large multi-billion-euro organisation and doing so capably. When he of all people talks about the skillset needed to run a government, we should be listening to him, not scorning him.
Now, at this point in the article I am going to engage in some speculation – I have no data, nor is there any in public that informs what follows. What I do have, however, is a sense from conversations in private and public in recent days that a very significant slice of the Irish population agree with Michael O’Leary. That is to say, they instinctively recognise the truth of what he is saying, which is that we need more people in politics with appropriate qualifications.
Those people, whether they are 20%, 30% or 70% of the population have, however, no representation in the hysteria that has flowed forth from our political parties, all of which have rushed to condemn O’Leary’s “anti-teacher” tirade.
There are reasons for this, and they are uniformly depressing.
The first is that in Ireland, outrage sells. Politicians always want to be on the side of an angry slice of the population, and the sight of some teachers up in arms tends to send the likes of Fianna Fáil Senator Timmy Dooley into full chest-puffed-out “this is an outrage” mode. Once one member of the herd decrees something an outrage, all must follow.
The second is our ridiculous electoral system, which makes preference voting the key to getting elected. It’s very dangerous to be the candidate who is unlike all the others, and very safe to be the candidate who’s very like all the others. Because voters “rank in order of preference” it makes logical sense to be somewhere in the middle of the pack ideologically because then preferences will flow to you from all directions. Thus if everybody is upset on behalf of teachers, the safe thing for any sensible candidate to be is also upset on behalf of teachers.
The third is a media focused entirely on process over substance. This story is catnip for the kind of journalism that focuses on “how Fine Gael is dealing with the fallout” rather than “Was Michael O’Leary right, and who agrees with him”.
Thus you could sense the excitement of the press pack yesterday when they got to write their “Fine Gael campaign off to faltering start amid O’Leary comments” stories.
All of this, of course, is why sensible people do not enter politics, and why we’re broadly left with the raving hysterics who do. Michael O’Leary did not insult teachers. But even if he did, that would be vastly less annoying than the people running the various election campaigns, who seem intent on insulting our intelligence by lying about what he said.
Really, the country deserves everything it gets, if this is to be the standard of debate around our governance for the next five years.