Colm O’Gorman
He is the conscience of the nation in the same way the Church once thought it was, writes Donal Lynch
If you’re liberal but you loathe The Mob
— the majority who allow for no whisper of dissent — you might find yourself in something of a bind in modern Ireland. While ye olde Irish Mob brandished a crozier and a catechism, these days it wields victimhood and human rights as cudgels with which everyone is beaten into ideological submission.
And nobody wields these weapons with quite the vigour and savvy of Colm O’Gorman. A former clerical-abuse victim, who set up the charity One In Four, O’Gorman went on to try his hand at a political career. He was appointed to the Senate by Bertie Ahern, and subsequently became a candidate for the Progressive Democrats in the 2007 general election, but was soundly rejected by his own people, polling just 3pc of the vote in Wexford.
After serving just one term in the Senate, he became executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, and since then he’s been the conscience of the nation, in much the same way that priests once thought they were. Over the years, he’s come as close as you can get to being a national treasure without actually winning an Oscar or a Booker Prize. He’s been recognised in various People of the Year award ceremonies, and, because of his articulacy and his compelling personal story, he’s been a fixture on TV and radio.
Mostly though, he’s online. After the Arab Spring a few years ago, it emerged that one of the mistakes many Western observers made was thinking that human rights would be ushered in on social media, rather than through the traditional bomb and ballot box. But nobody told our Colm any of this. He seems to be fully convinced that female genital mutilation, or whatever, is just a few more well-crafted zingers away from abolition. The numbers are staggering. At time of writing, he has tweeted 108,000 times. That’s roughly 30 tweets per day for every day he’s been on Twitter. It’s nearly triple the amount of tweets that Donald Trump has fired off.
If O’Gorman were a teenager, we might be talking about the extent of his tweeting as a problem, or at the very least a strangely large component of a presumably busy man’s life, but because it’s all in a good cause, we just have to be grateful.