A long time ago, we stopped believing normal politics too

Declan Lynch’s Diary

ISWITCHED on the radio around lunchtime, and there was Paschal Donohoe on RTE Radio One reading out his Budget. Given that the usual lunchtime fare coming out of the radio these days is like one of the more manic episodes in Orwell’s 1984, this felt like a return to something closer to 1954.

Time was when “The Minister” would stand up in the Dail and read out his Budget, the one that would be well-known anyway to anyone who cares about these things, a diminishing breed it must be said.

Still, in that ancient time before the arrival of the dictators bellowing things like “No collusion”, and “No obstruction” and “No quid pro quo”, we would listen for hours to these ministerial ramblings, because that was apparently how governments worked.

Journalists would actually get up early in the morning to stand outside Leinster House waiting for the minister to arrive to do his important work, whatever it was. They would even get excited about what he was going to say, and some of them would work long into the night in their offices producing page after page of unreadable Budget “analysis” for their newspapers — because that was apparently how journalists worked.

Sometimes they would all get a bit too excited, and you’d hear these tales of the Minister going out to RTE the following day to take questions from the general public, and his handlers demanding those questions in advance — because that was apparently how handlers worked.

Maybe that’s how they still work, it hardly matters any more. But the old ways still have some resonance, and they re-emerge from time to time to remind us of how different our lives used to be, but also to remind us that “normal” politics has something in common with the more dictatorial style — a long time ago, we stopped believing the “normal” ones too.

I give you Nick Clegg, perhaps the most perfect embodiment of the modern politician, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and the deputy prime minister of the UK, now with a “role” as head of global policy and communications at Facebook.

And in that “role” last week, as the Trump campaign spent a fortune putting out lies on Facebook about Joe Biden, Clegg confirmed that Facebook would not fact-check posts from political candidates, because “it’s not our role to intervene when politicians speak”.

His role is to say it’s not Facebook’s role — it would be the role of legislators, but then Nick Clegg was a legislator, and in that role he didn’t seem to think it was his role either, otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today — with this monstrosity of misinformation known as Facebook refusing to be held to standards of simple accuracy which have been established for centuries and which are observed by the lowliest publications as a basic necessity of civilised life in western democracies.

That’s gone now. The amoral potentates of Facebook are getting richer by the minute, enabling the rise of the dictators. But they weren’t up against much anyway, given that men such as Nick Clegg were the ones who were guarding the gates. Not that this is all about Nick — there are very few “normal” politicians who see their “role” as anything but the enabling of the higher power of moguls and their corporations. And in our case the legislators have become so inert, they have come to regard the mere building of houses as some kind of impossible logistical fantasy which ideally would just be done by somebody else. With Clegg as their spiritual leader, they give the impression they are just passing through. It was indeed the agitator and film-maker Michael Moore who predicted the success of Trump as an understandable response to the fact that for millions of people, “normal” politics had ruined their lives. And now they were going to throw a Molotov cocktail into that arena, in the form of a deranged dictator.

Under “normal” conditions, the handlers and the fixers and the wonks had turned politics into a game for insiders, whose main motivation on any given day was to keep the punters away from any true understanding — a game in which you’ve won if you manage to bully someone into giving you the questions in advance of a phone-in.

For themselves it has worked wonderfully well, and when the time comes, they just move on to a new role. But they leave behind a terribly fragile thing called “democracy” which can apparently be devoured by any nationalist hooligan who really fancies it.

And as we were reminded by our own Budget speeches last week, unlike the hooligans with their demented ravings, this thing is not just fragile, it is unbelievably boring.

Moreover if anyone thinks old Ireland is getting away with it, this is your regular reminder that we do have our own variety of nationalism, one of the most notorious strains of it — but for now we’ve got Paschal Donohoe talking for hours on the radio about the price of a packet of fags, like something from a forgotten world.

And that’s all we’ve got.

‘The handlers and fixers and wonks had turned politics into a game for insiders’