POLITICAL DIARY
IN his speech at the Fine Gael ‘think-in’, Leo Varadkar said his predecessor Enda Kenny’s “only regret” as Taoiseach was that he did not get to see Mayo lift the Sam Maguire when he was in office.
I would doubt that is Kenny’s only regret, but it would almost certainly be in his top five or 10. His father Henry was on the Mayo team that won the All-Ireland in 1936. Enda wasn’t a county man himself, of course, but he was a reasonable club player.
A friend from the Wesht is convinced this will be Mayo’s year, as he was last year, the year before and the year before that… This year he believes Mayo’s intuitive football will overwhelm Dublin, driven as Mayo is to lay the bogey of nearly-men. For Mayo, losing is not an option today.
I see it as more political. The most audacious political move this year was not by Enda Kenny or Leo Varadkar or any politician, but by the Mayo manager, Stephen Rochford, when he sent out his talisman Aidan O’Shea to mark the Kerry talisman Kieran Donaghy in the first semi-final. This move has been parsed and analysed to bits, but I believe its real significance has been lost. It told of a team willing (or desperate enough) to do whatever it takes to win an All-Ireland.
The move was deemed to be unsuccessful the first day and, therefore, not repeated; but Donaghy received a straight red card in the replay following an incident with O’Shea. That is neither here nor there you may think, but in my view it tells us all we need to know.
Mayo, if you like, represent the resilience and fightback of rural Ireland in the face on the onward march of Dublin.
It is also the team that did not fully succumb to the suffocating brand of defensive anti-football that has emerged from the North, mastered by teams from the South — not least by the masters Kerry — even though that game goes against the fibre of their collective being. Rather, Mayo has refined its own game to the point of logic. But will they still come up short against the austere machine that has become Dublin, itself a beautiful thing? A team which has come to represent this new way of doing business in Ireland: ruthless. Alas, I think so, but all logic may go out the window at 5pm today. Mayo Abu.
LEO Varadkar will need something of that Mayo tribal spirit if he is to see the country through the future vision of Europe as outlined last week by Jean-Claude Juncker, and do so without the benefit of the defensive block that was the UK before Brexit.
While there was much to welcome in the President of the European Commission’s State of the Union speech, this was the critical line for Ireland: “I am strongly in favour of moving to qualified majority voting for decisions on the common consolidated corporate tax base, on fair taxes for the digital industry and on the financial transaction tax.”
So, will the EU need unanimous support to move to qualified majority voting? Therein will lie Leo’s battle.
THAT is not to say that corporate giants such as Google, Facebook and the like should be allowed continue to ride roughshod over sovereign states or even political and economic unions.
The scales are slowly falling from many eyes in this regard. Correct me if I am wrong, but was there a more measured reaction last week to the Apple iPhone X launch than was the case when Steve Jobs seemed to whip otherwise sensible people into a frenzy?
On these matters I tend to follow the analysis of Mark Ritson, a marketing guru and brand expert, who attended an International News Media Association conference in New York earlier this year to address how Google and Facebook were destroying news media brands and, in my view, democracy itself.
Eschewing the bland and cheery epithets usually associated with Jobs, he quoted the Apple founder’s reaction to claims that Google’s Android phone was “stealing” ideas from Apple: “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s €40bn in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this”.
In my view, such an attitude is what the international news media needs to counteract the influence of Google and Facebook, which spuriously claim their “mission” is to organise the world’s information, make it universally accessible and wonder how that could be perceived as a threat to anyone. Google could start by dismantling its own corporate strategy of internal secrecy, a form of anti-transparency which is, in my view, certain to eventually lead us to societal disaster. I kid you not.
TODAY we publish an edited extract from former BBC journalist Martin Dillon’s memoir Crossing the Line. Elsewhere in his memoir Dillon gives an account of how be brought former SDLP leader John Hume and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams into a radio studio to debate each other for the first time. As the clock ticked down to the end of the broadcast, Hume posed a question to the effect — “why should I talk to you when you are only the messenger boy for the IRA’s Army Council? Maybe I should just talk to the real men.”
The question, with its inbuilt sarcasm, had all the characteristics of a sucker punch. To the programme audience, however, it implied Hume wanted to meet the IRA, yet Dillon doubts that is what was intended. Adams fixed Hume with a stare: “Do you want to meet the real men?” he asked. Dillon is convinced to this day that Hume was flat-footed. Adams pressed him and Hume agreed as the clock ran out.
Dillon tells how Hume joined him for wine and sandwiches after the broadcast, wondering if he had done the right thing. It was not lost on him that he had just made one of the most controversial decisions of his political life. And so began Sinn Fein’s ‘suffocating brand’ of political football with the peace process.