Our public schoolboys go on regardless

‘It must be hard for these tremendously privileged people to give an inch on anything’

IN February of this year, Simon Coveney, the then Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government, did an interview with David McWilliams on TV3 in which it was clear that he had formulated a view of life in Ireland that was rooted in the issue of class.

His political vision was full of this apparent belief that so many things would get better if we could release ourselves from this culture of “knowingly allowing for disadvantage”, an attitude that is given powerful expression in the way that we organise our housing policy.

He spoke movingly of how certain people are placed in “social” housing and certain other people are placed in less “social” kinds of housing, and by this ancient system they are kept apart to the extent that they could go through life without ever connecting with each other on any meaningful level — a culture which is not helping any of us, and which the Minister for Housing and the rest of it was determined to change.

How striking it was, that a man who had gone to the most storied of all Ireland’s private schools, Clongowes Wood College, should have been saying these things which might have been mistaken for the musings of an old Cork Communist looking back on the iniquities he had seen. And how fortunate that a man who had formulated such an analysis of society, and given such special emphasis to the issue of housing, should have that portfolio.

A few months later he was the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and we could only hope that his vision would live on in the person of his successor Eoghan Murphy, himself the beneficiary of an excellent if expensive private education of St Michael’s, Ballsbridge.

Class, my friends, it’s the thing we don’t talk about, it’s the thing that Simon Coveney was trying to talk about before he himself was moved on, which reminded us that our famous private schools really do try to teach these young men to use their talents for the benefit of those less fortunate than themselves — but if they’ve got to go to the ambassador’s garden party, let’s face it, they’ve got to go.

Class, as Simon Coveney was telling us in such inspirational terms, is the issue that decides a lot of things in the end, and sometimes it is the only issue. How strange then, that a man with such a heightened awareness of this force which works so powerfully in our culture, should appear to be unaware of the extent to which he embodies it.

When political commentators saw Coveney on Claire Byrne Live, defending Frances Fitzgerald at such a late stage of the game, they saw a minister trying to save the career of another minister, defying the demands of their opponents. They saw a government hanging on, or a government falling.

And they were not entirely wrong to see that. I saw a bit of it myself.

But what I was seeing above all was a member of the patrician class, defending another member of the patrician class, who are part of a government led by, shall we say, someone who was formed in that same socio-economic environment.

I saw a Clongowes boy unwilling or unable to give in to the demands of his rivals, in particular those of the leading barrister Jim O’Callaghan of Fianna Fail, sitting there in the RTE studio, when perhaps his more natural habitat is the Law Library — again we’d be talking here about a man at ease with the entitlements of power.

Indeed, it is remarkable just how well the lines of breeding are working out, at the upper echelons of the Irish class structure. We have always marvelled at the British precision in these areas, and yet we have ended up with a government led by a King’s Hospital boy, who got there just ahead of the Clongowes boy, and which prominently features the aforementioned Eoghan Murphy, the St Michael’s boy with a responsibility for the poorest of our citizens.

But when I see Simon Coveney on Claire Byrne Live, I am seeing more than a scion of the Irish ruling class, I am also seeing some of the reasons why he and his leader were struggling in the negotiations which were taking place at the time — why they couldn’t bring themselves to do what seemed obvious to almost everyone else. Why they couldn’t abandon one of their own until it was too late.

It must indeed be hard for these tremendously privileged people to give an inch on anything, given that they never really had to give up much in their journey to this point.

And we see the same kind of weakness in the posh boys who have been running Britain over a cliff in recent times, who have had so much handed to them, just for being born, they are entitled to think that everything will work out for them in the end — they don’t have to be really good at anything, because the way that their world is arranged, people like them usually come out ahead.

Indeed, even if they ruin the lives of the many with their carelessness, it won’t be the lives of their own kind that they’ll be ruining. David Cameron held a crazy referendum to secure his own position, and even when he lost, he could walk off into a life of ease.

Even if Brexit turns the UK into another Zimbabwe, we may be sure that the Boris Johnsons of that world will remain blissfully unaffected. For them there will be no catastrophic consequences, they will not know hardship, which should make them the people least suited to the positions that they hold — instead these Tory twerps are given their pick of the great offices of State.

Now we have our own public schoolboys running things, and almost matching the Tory boys in their attitude of ploughing on regardless with a ludicrous course of action — Varadkar kept giving the impression that he could see things about this Frances Fitzgerald business that others couldn’t see, basically because he is that kind of guy.

In truth, he was almost the only one who couldn’t see what others were seeing, others who lead lives of quiet negotiation.

But it is Coveney who is becoming most alarming, with his talk of “a United Ireland in my lifetime, if possible in my political lifetime”. This puts him right there in the frame with the Old Etonians who brought us the miracle of Brexit, who threw the acid of nationalism into the atmosphere, like they were spraying champagne over one another at the Bullingdon Club.

Thus in a very short time they have transformed a perfectly fine country into an omnishambles, through their posh-boy carelessness and then their chronic inability to admit that they were wrong.

With Coveney’s “United Ireland” line there is the same potentially disastrous mixture of upper-class over-confidence and nationalist tomfoolery.

They seem to enjoy these big statements, the lads from the leafy avenues where seldom is heard a discouraging word.

We can only hope that Coveney’s nationalist vision lasts as long as his vision of a classless society.