Manufactured outrage has no place, Jennifer
IT WAS so predictable, you could have written the script. No sooner had Sinn Féin’s Pádraig Mac Lochlainn said he was sure Pearse Doherty was looking forward to putting ‘manners’ on Jennifer Carroll MacNeill than the Junior Finance Minister, and Fine Gael’s much vaunted potential new leader, rushed in to claim the moral high ground.
‘Excuse me, what? What does this mean? What does this mean?’ she repeated, a querulous edge to her voice. You’d almost swear she had just landed on Earth direct from a great matriarchy on the moon rather than debating the chief whip of the Dáil’s most ruthless and macho party in a pre-Budget programme on live TV.
Mr Mac Lochlainn explained his petulance, saying he was fed up with Fine Gael’s ‘arrogance’ in claiming it stood up for ‘people on lower incomes’, a cohort which he doubtlessly regards as his party’s rightful fiefdom.
Perhaps seeing Fine Gael muscling in on his territory will give Mr Mac Lochlainn some sympathy for the agony that mainstream parties must experience at being shoved off the middle ground by Sinn Féin parvenus, and having their responsible policies robbed in broad daylight.
BUT neither Jennifer nor Fine Gael was waiting to find out. Desperate to capitalise on Mr Mac Lochlainn’s faux pas, Fine Gael described his language as ‘menacing and misogynistic’. ‘Is this how the Sinn Féin leadership is happy to treat women politicians…. It was highly visible and every woman watching would have seen that’, a Fine Gael spokesman blasted.
Ms Carroll MacNeill wrote to Mary Lou McDonald asking her to ‘address’ the issue of the ‘misplaced and misogynistic’ comments made about her. ‘Women have enough to contend with as public representatives without having to deal with this sort of commentary’, she wrote.
Okay, there are no excuses for how Pádraig Mac Lochlainn tried to put down a member of the Government.
The last thing we need is an
injection of Trumpian broadsides and personalised attacks into our politics. But neither do we want politics to descend into manufactured outrage and righteous indignation with the potential to distract from important issues like the Budget.
THE threat to put ‘manners’ on Jennifer Carroll MacNeill smacks of the paternalism and authoritarianism that is Sinn Féin’s calling card, but opinion polls show that voters are quite happy with that.
If signalling the party’s roots in paramilitary violence or misogyny or miscreant behav
iour was a deal-breaker then the party’s support would be on the floor. Last week, Micheál Martin accused Sinn Féin of ‘infecting’ young people with its view of the Troubles and, ‘trying to triumphalise the horrible deeds of the Provisional IRA’.
It may have been a valiant attempt to remind voters of Sinn Féin’s bloodsoaked history but opinion polls prove that Coalition leaders are preaching only to the converted.
Ms Carroll MacNeill is an accomplished politician. As a prominent women in a toxic environment, where the internet has spawned an increasingly dangerous culture of misogyny, she must know that success in politics calls for a tough skin.
But mostly it means having the savvy to rise above petty insults and provocations and to address the issues that really make a difference to people’s lives.