Dogmatic liberals are Ireland’s new version of the old Catholic Church

SURFING television channels on a typical Saturday night is a truly bleak pastime. The chances of finding anything worth cuddling up with are as remote as coming across a busy off-licence in downtown Riyadh.

But if you stumbled into RTÉ One by chance over the weekend you would have come across a very singular cultural oddity: The ‘Brendan Howlin Variety Show’. Or the Labour Party Conference, as the ‘RTÉ Guide’ would have it.

No podium, no sharing the platform with his comrades. Instead Brendan worked the stage like a stand-up comic, except without any funny bits. Not intentional funny bits anyway.

He spoke in the earnest manner over-spun politicians specialise in: that is say nothing in case you say anything at all.

Such telly, we’re told, is democracy in action. But perhaps a bit too much of it. After all, Labour received less than 4.5pc of the popular vote in the 2016 General Election.

How does that earn it prime-time? On that basis Peter Casey, who pulled in over 20pc of the vote a week and a half ago in the presidential contest, should have a television chatshow of his own.

Instead, his appearance on ‘The ‘Late, Late Show’ had indignant evangelists from the Church of Righteous Liberals clamouring for the moral high ground with no thought for their own safety.

He had no right, they twittered feverishly, to free speech.

He’s a racist. And a that-ist and thisist. Disgraceful. And so it went.

Not that I feel any need to defend Casey, an empty vessel making garbled noises which, when they occasionally reach coherency, are offensive.

But he’s as entitled to a soapbox as anyone else.

I just make sure I am somewhere else when he’s on it.

There’s a familiar pattern here, of course. Those who campaigned to retain the Eighth only a few months ago were vilified too. Free speech was a luxury that some Repealers didn’t feel they were due.

Shutting down debate in our universities is another pet project. Coming along nicely, actually.

The irony, of course, is that these militant ‘liberal’ outriders of this brave new age are mimicking the absolutists of Church and State who reigned during the first half century of independence.

Archbishop McQuaid, for instance, might abhor their values but he’d certainly high-five them when it came to their enthusiasm for censorship and silencing debate or dissent.

But the irony will be lost on them. It always is by those who need to appreciate it most.