Brian Hayes’ exit is a big loss — to politics and the body politic

BRIAN Hayes is a big loss, not just to politics, but to the body politic.

That’s because Hayes is one of the few Irish politicians who have consistently fought bad tribal politics and pursued good pluralist politics.

Let’s first look at the ancient principles behind bad and good politics before showing how they applied last week to Brexit, the US elections and the politics of wearing the poppy.

They go back to the argument between Plato, father of ideological politics, and Aristotle, father of pragmatic politics.

Plato, like his later fascist and socialist followers, believed man was perfectible by society.

Conversely, Aristotle believed man was fundamentally flawed so that all his political projects would be flawed, too.

Finally, Plato was an essentialist. Today his followers on the liberal left call Peter Casey or Donald Trump racists, as if racism was an endemic, essential part of their character.

Conversely, Aristotle and his followers believe you cannot judge people on their interior and thus invisible essences but only on their exterior actions.

I reject that lazy leftliberal habit of denigrating Trump as racist or fascist as if he was ‘essentially’ no different to Hitler.

Trump is clearly just an opportunist who takes up racist positions for temporary political gain and would reverse them if he felt it would do him good.

Platonic essentialists also find it hard to distinguish between minor issues of politics and major issues of moral principle.

In Europe, the main moral principles that cannot be bargained away include the human rights of minorities and immigrants.

In Ireland, the main moral principles include opposition to the IRA’s tribal, terrorist campaign to intimidate a million unionists into a united Ireland — and Sinn Fein’s political efforts to carry on that campaign.

Let’s now turn to three examples of bad and good politics last week.

Brexit is about more than a backstop. It is also, as Micheal Martin never forgets, a challenge to conduct civil political disagreement without bullying our Northern Protestant neighbours.

But Brexit is being used as an creeping artillery barrage behind which move the Sinn Fein commissars, spreading fear and hatred.

This is mostly the fault of Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney. Ask any moderate unionist and they will tell you the breakdown of civility began with Leo Varadkar’s loose talk about not ‘abandoning’ Northern nationalists.

This in turn gave Sinn Fein the confidence to continue with a hardline campaign for an Irish Language Act rather than return to the Assembly and take their seats in Westminster.

Last week Leo Varadkar showed a flash of good politics by briefly opening the door to a review — but he quickly slammed it again.

His real problem is that he hyped a dodgy deal last December. Dodgy because even a casual reading of the 2017 text shows it was never “iron clad” never mind “legally binding”.

The December text was simply a joint UK-EU report for the next meeting of the EU heads of government.

The last line made it clear that all the UK promises were conditional on “an overall agreement” on withdrawal. In short, the document was legally not worth the paper it was written on.

Leo Varadkar used this flimsy sheet to go into full Haughey 1980s mode, including Haughey’s moth-eaten “totality of relationships” line.

Let me now turn to the American elections, and the welcome evidence that some Democrats are learning how to deal with Trump.

I say some because The New York Times (like The Irish Times) still thinks that Trump is too awful for words (which he is); should be impeached (which he won’t be); and after that are just impotently appalled.

Luckily, Nancy Pelosi, once a Platonist, learned a hard lesson from the failure of Hillary Clinton, who fought a doomed campaign on Trump’s fitness for office rather than on jobs.

This time, Pelosi and the Democratic strategists did their homework. Last year they commissioned a report from Normington Petts, the Democrats’ polling firm, which told them two things.

First, the pollsters warned them that Trump was not the “most important villain”. Second, they found that the “strongest policies for a Democratic candidate were almost entirely economically focused”.

Pelosi, a late convert to Aristotelian pragmatism, decided that Democrats should go in hard on health.

Naturally the Platonists, or in my book, the Trotty leftliberals, wanted her to fight health on the liberal issue of (listen to this for lunacy) Planned Parenthood!

Pelosi banned that Trot nonsense. “Those things are in our DNA, but they are not in our talking points.”

Lyndon B Johnson, the master of principled pragmatism, would have been proud of the Pelosi Democrats, including their cold refusal to fall into the CNN trap of telling Middle America that migrant marchers were “victims”.

Finally, a comment on the corrosive controversy about the politics of wearing the poppy.

Let me start by saying I agree with Sinn Fein that the poppy is not a neutral symbol. Wearing it does send out many political messages, depending on who wears it, where and when.

In the Irish Republic, wearing a poppy is no longer simply a symbol of commemoration of the dead of World War I.

Wearing it is also a pluralist gesture of goodwill to the unionist and British traditions on our island. Furthermore, it is also not neutral to subscribe to the ‘cannon fodder’ polemics promoted by nationalist and socialist propagandists.

The ‘cannon fodder’ canard deprives all participants, especially Irish soldiers, of any voluntary agency on their own account, degrading them to being sheep-like victims.

Yes, unemployment was an important factor in joining up. But many Irish soldiers believed, rightly, they were fighting to free Catholic Belgium from the brutality of the Kaiser’s jackboot — as Francis Ledwidge did.

Belgian and French civilians still thank the Irish troops for their sacrifice — as we saw on the fine RTE News programmes presented by Donal Byrne.

But, in my opinion, Bryan Dobson’s superb report on the Battle of the Somme for Nationwide was spoiled by Theo Dorgan’s recycling of the ‘cannon fodder’ cliche.

Tom Burke, of the Dublin Fusiliers Association, gave us a moving tour of the Somme battlefield without giving us a sermon on what to think about their sacrifice.

Theo Dorgan began by promising us the same neutrality: “I resent it when people try to recruit either the Rising, the men and women of the Rising, or the men of World War I to contemporary politics.”

But he immediately broke that promise by recruiting the Irish soldiers to the nationalist, cannon fodder, victim version, pioneered by Sinn Fein.

“I’m perfectly happy to see Tom Kettle and the men who died on the Western Front remembered for their personal honour, but we shouldn’t confuse that with their political position.”

Theo Dorgan is a poet. He should have given us fresh words, not ‘green thoughts in a green shade’.

‘Many Irish soldiers rightly felt they were fighting to free Belgium from the Kaiser’s brutality’