ColumnSurrealing in the Years
You’re very tough, Jim.
THE FUNNY THING about Jim O’Callaghan is that the more that seems to go wrong during his tenure as minister for justice, the more inevitable it seems that he’ll be the next leader of his party.
He was caught flat-footed by the fuel protests at Easter and exacerbated matters by threatening to send in the army. He’s also been at war with solicitors for months now in a tug-of-war that is damaging trust in the Irish justice system.
But at the end of the day, what’s more Fianna Fáil than limping from one preventable crisis to the next without ever once thinking “Do you know what? Maybe somebody else could do a better job of this.”
This week — in addition to getting on Twitter to brag about deporting a few dozen Romanians — O’Callaghan reminded us yet again what a big tough guy he is when he intervened to instruct the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) to remove a controversial ad that gently tried to open a difficult conversation around consent when it comes to children being hugged or touched by older relatives.
Having read about the ad before I watched it, I assumed it was some kind of horror show, designed to drum up paranoia that anyone’s kindly old grandparents might actually be child molesters deep down. When, upon watching, I discovered that it was a 26-second clip in which a child looks mildly uncomfortable and confused about what to say as her grandparents approach her for a hug, I thought — “Yeah, I bet there are a lot of kids who feel that way, and those kids and their parents, and indeed their grandparents, should have the space to discuss such an uncomfortable eventuality”.
O’Callaghan took it differently, writing on X: “It goes without saying that having loving grandparents in a child’s life is an incredibly positive thing to be cherished and not something to be campaigned against.” What should actually go without saying is that the ad does absolutely no such thing.
The ad acknowledges explicitly that these issues are ‘awkward’ but ‘important’. Of course, they become a lot more awkward when they’re wilfully misconstrued by a government minister in a bid to inflame the passions of people who, understandably, might feel concerned about a narrative that we all should all be scared of all grandparents — a point that the ad does not even come close to actually making.
There is, of course, an argument to be made that the ad could have been better. Few ads that address such serious topics are perfect. Isn’t the same true of ads about the dangers of smoking, drink-drinking, or the Ronnie Drew chicken* who sings about carbon monoxide?
Ultimately, there are innumerable important and instructive reasons why a child might not want to be touched by a relative.
Maybe they would like to be hugged but are suffering from a sensory processing condition that’s confusing and overwhelming them. That’s something you might want to ask your kid about.
Maybe they have been touched in an uncomfortable way by another adult, and they are struggling to trust other adults. That’s something you might want to ask your kid about.
Maybe, in some cases, that relative has acted inappropriately towards them. Let’s do this, actually — let’s look at all the child sex abuse cases from Ireland in the last 20 years and see how many involved say, a trans person, or an immigrant, and then let’s see how many have involved a close relative.
Not wanting to acknowledge how sexual abuse happens, where it happens, where it comes from, who perpetrates it, is exactly how Ireland worked in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s. And what is the counterargument here, by the way?
I mean what, according to Jim O’Callaghan, is supposed to happen when a child expresses discomfort about hugging an older relative? Their parents should make them do it anyway?
What is so strange about O’Callaghan’s persistent tough guy schtick is that it’s not helping Fianna Fáil politically. The latest polls had Fianna Fáil in around where the polls always have Fianna Fáil. They’re at 18%, which is pretty much within the margin of error of every other polling position they’ve had for the last five years. It’s always somewhere between 16% and 22%, it’s always within a few points of Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. Jim O’Callaghan could grow himself a foot taller overnight and hulk out like those little aliens from Space Jam, and it still won’t do anything for Fianna Fáil’s standing among the weird, ravenous, conservative, tough-on-crime, anti-NGO, save-the-nuclear-family in his Twitter comments whom he is trying so vainly to impress.
But given all the pressure from beneath to act like a tough guy, it should come as no surprise that Taoiseach Micheál Martin ended up overextending himself in Dáil Éireann this week too.
A matter of minutes into a Dáil debate on neutrality, Martin accused Sinn Féin of past support for Nazism during World War II. This is quite a can of worms to open, given Mr Fianna Fáil Eamon De Valera’s infamous signing of the book of condolence for Hitler, to say nothing of the fact that the party with whom he shares a government can also trace its roots back to an organisation with a fascist ethos. Not one of the three major parties can exactly pat themselves on the back on that particular issue. Still, with Big Jim making it clear how tough he is, what choice does Martin have?
O’Callaghan has made it quite clear that he’d like to be the next leader of Fianna Fáil, and at times it has seemed as though he was gearing up to challenge Martin’s leadership. He’s not quite tough enough for that it seems, but if Martin’s position should ever weaken sufficiently, one suspects he’ll be in there.
And yet, perhaps there’s another way forward for Fianna Fáil.
Ryan Tubridy of all people popped back up this week to let us all know he’s still looking for something to do since leaving RTÉ, and that he’s considering politics. Fianna Fáil politics, specifically.
“This bloody politics is coursing through my veins,” he told said during a panel discussion in Galway this week, referring to his family’s long history of holding elected office in Ireland. Tubridy would offer a less cantankerous face to the party. Maybe he can bring his only closely held causes to the fore and turn Fianna Fáil into the party of child literacy.
It would be a far cry from where they are now: the party of throwing its weight around, calling people Nazis, and suggesting children hug adults they don’t particularly want to hug.
*I know it’s a canary. I call it a chicken because I don’t like it, and belittling it takes away its power.