Why should the US care what we think?
IT’S four years since the much-loved author Maeve Binchy died, but it was touching how, during The Ryan Tubridy Show on Wednesday, Gordon Snell kept slipping into the present tense when talking about his late wife.
In a lovely interview, Snell, who’s also a writer, recalled how the couple would read one another’s work at the end of each day, allowing 10 minutes’ “sulking time” after each item of criticism, before getting over it and moving on. This isn’t such a bad rule in life in general, not least at a time when, as Cutting Edge presenter Brendan O’Connor noted on Wednesday’s Right Hook on Newstalk, “we have conflated the idea of somebody saying things with which you don’t agree with somebody who is actually physically hurting you.”
That’s why most public figures prefer to parrot, rather than challenge, platitudes. “They all want to be loved, they’re all afraid of Twitter ... they might be feigning saying something that is unsayable, but they’re usually saying something that all the worthies can get on board with."
There was a touch of that in the response to last weekend's massacre at an Orlando gay club, which led to the inevitable debate on US gun control.
Faced again with such criticism from Ireland, Richard Feldman of the Independent Firearm Owners Association bluntly reminded Newstalk’s Breakfast on Monday that “it’s not really relevant what the rest of the world thinks about how we handle our own internal policy.”
He has a point. Access to round the clock global news might fool us into thinking this is our business, but is our repeated demand that American supporters of the constitutional right to bear arms explain themselves to us after each atrocity anything more than an opportunity to self-indulgently show off our own perceived moral superiority?
Having said that, it led to a compelling exchange, with Feldman making some remarkably provocative statements in response to Chris O’Donoghue’s perfectly reasonable questions about Orlando.
This included the well-rehearsed line that the reason why 49 innocent people died had “nothing to do with the gun ... the gun is merely a delivery device.” The Newstalk presenter remained admirably composed in the face of this crassness.
The possibility of a so-called Brexit from the EU was also prompting some manufactured rows, such as Tuesday’s encounter on Today with Sean o'Rourke between Trevor kavanagh of the Sun and former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, which was entertaining enough in a knockabout way, but added little light.
Much better was Tuesday's late Debate on RTE Radio One, where Ger Colleran of the Irish Star gave a heartfelt indictment of an EU which “put the boot on our throat” when Ireland was in trouble, “rifled through our pockets”, and stole more “in one fell swoop” than it ever gave. Still the smug Europhiles don’t seem to understand why this causes resentment.