It’s Danny Healy-Rae’s critics who are away with the fairies
The Kerry TD’s real crime is not to give a hoot what superficially “smart”, “sophisticated” people think, writes Eilis O’Hanlon
SNIGGERING at Danny Healy-Rae has become every stupid Irish person’s short-cut method of trying to show off how clever they are. Now the Kerry TD, who believes in God but not in man-made climate change, has seemingly dared to blame the parlous state of the roads in his native county on the fairies.
Didn’t Danny get the memo? Ireland has cast off the shackles of tradition. It’s out with the old and in with the new. To be Irish now is to put one’s faith in frappuccinos and Google and hashtags.
In scoffing at him, the smart set simply demonstrates again its own bankruptcy of imagination.
Had he blamed the problem on greedy capitalists not respecting the earth’s natural, organic, spiritual balance, they’d have fallen over themselves to laud Danny as a sensitive, eco-friendly soul who was only trying to save man from the consequences of his own arrogance.
Instead he couched it in poetic terms which would have made perfect sense to practically every person who ever dwelt in that corner of the world for centuries past. For that, he was subjected to a week of sniping condescension from uppity urbanites.
One could argue about what causes the roads to dip in rural Ireland until the fairy cows come home. It would be a waste of breath.
Danny Healy-Rae still wants money spent on actually filling in pot holes, as he made plain repeatedly last week as smartypants broadcasters tried to trip him up into saying something foolish. (They failed. Miserably.)
It’s nobody’s business but their own if some people also happen to believe in fairies, or ghosts, or reincarnation, or Jesus and the heavenly host. Who’s presumptuous enough to say they’re wrong?
Only a minuscule fraction of the universe is made up of stuff that we can identify and measure. The rest is, literally, mysterious, unknown. You don’t have to believe in fairies to go along with the traditional wisdom that it’s best to leave some things alone.
It’s certainly hard to take lectures on scientific rationalism from people whose own irrationality may take what the modern world regards as more acceptable forms, but which has just as little scientific credibility.
Their heads are so stuffed with New Age, touchy-feely claptrap that they don’t even recognise many of their own most cherished beliefs as superstition. What infuriates them about Danny Healy-Rae is that, unlike them, he isn’t tormented by a paranoid need to prove his credentials.
The Healy-Raes say what they think, and they don’t care what Twitter or RTE or The
Irish Times make of it. They’re not seeking approval from the establishment. They’re comfortable and confident in their own skins.
That is a deeply radical act. It threatens those who seek validation through the endorsement of others. That easily turns to hostility.
In many ways, they perform the same function nationally that President Trump performs internationally, which is to act as a lightning rod for every liberal discontent. They’re deemed to be so stupid that it makes their critics feel intelligent by default.
This certainty that idiocy resides exclusively in Them and not in Us still pervades media conversations about President Trump. The discussion on the growing tensions between America and North Korea on the national airwaves last week was soured by that smug certainty, as if shuddering distaste was an adequate substitute for serious analysis. It became a game of cliche bingo.
It’s taken as read that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe he doesn’t. But are we really supposed to believe that journalists or academics necessarily know the right way to handle international crises either?
That proposition seems equally implausible. The media consensus that Donald Trump is a danger to the world is startlingly reminiscent of the groupthink in the 1980s which declared with equal certitude that Ronald Reagan (castigated as a B movie actor, in the same way that Trump is derided as a reality TV star) didn’t know what he was doing when he faced down the Soviet Union. He too was underestimated because his reference points, and his way of expressing them, was too homely for sophisticated urban tastes. They’re similarly embarrassed by the HealyRaes. Even when the scoffers do have anything good to say about them, it’s in a condescending manner, as if their role is to bring local colour to the political scene, adding to the gaiety of the nation.
They can be tolerated only if they accept their subordinate role as “characters”.
The one kind of intelligence which they’re permit- ted to embody is the canny, money-grubbing, cute hoor variety, which is invariably deemed to be subservient to the intellectual, book-learned sort, and is so far inferior to it than even acknowledging that it exists is a sneakier kind of insult.
It’s just another way of not taking them seriously, when in truth they are solid political figures, who understand their constituencies better than many career TDs, and make more worthwhile contributions to national debate in a month than many time-serving backbenchers have managed in a lifetime in the Dail.
No need to name names. They, and we, know exactly who they are. These people wouldn’t stick their necks out for anything. There are few principles on which they’d be prepared to stand or fall. Yet they’re the ones who get more conventional respect.
Sneering at the Healy-Raes is just a socially acceptable way to still tell Kerryman jokes, but it’s the world that they represent which is the real target of this antagonism.
Pseudo intellectuals may laugh at Danny Healy-Rae for apparently believing in fairies, but the real “little people” of whom they’re afraid and contemptuous in equal measure are the little people of Ireland.
‘Deriding them is just a socially acceptable way to still tell Kerryman jokes’