AH SURE LOOKIT ... IT IS WHAT IT IS

Trump is always lying at some level, but the brilliant Canadian journalist Daniel Dale has found an infallible warning system which tells you that a lie is coming, for sure. It’s called simply “Sir”.

There’s a particular strand of lying in Trump’s repertoire which involves him being addressed as “Sir”, in suspiciously similar stories involving some rugged old-school guy like a retired fireman or a cop — though such men would usually spurn displays of emotion, when they greet the president he notes that they just can’t stop themselves breaking down in tears, they just can’t help it.

“Sir… thank you for giving me my country back,” they say to him. Or not as the case may be. After “Sir”, it’s always, always a lie.

But if Daniel Dale has identified this in relation to one person in America, in Ireland it seems we have a national system in place. A system far more sophisticated and nuanced than anything coming out of Trump, one which does not necessarily involve lying, more a determination not to get too entangled in the dark web of the truth.

It is a sprawling infrastructure of evasion and obfuscation that is triggered not by “Sir”, but by “Look”. Or the more folksy, “Lookit”.

The eminent gastroenterologist Dr Anthony O’Connor was watching a current affairs show on TV recently and tweeted: “When did everyone in this country start saying ‘lookit’ a hundred times a minute?”

Oddly enough, I first noted the phenomenon in relation to gaelic games rather than politics, during interviews with players who were clearly under orders not to say anything of interest to the accursed media, on pain of death — which, when allied to their own natural reticence in the matter, would give you a post-match reaction which, if the words “Look” or “Lookit” were removed from the transcript, would contain almost no words at all.

You could call it a “tell”, but in poker a “tell” is regarded as an unconscious signal, whereas in Ireland it can be conscious and unconscious or even both.

Now the techniques have been honed and embellished by so many in public life, they can find themselves saying “Look” and “Lookit” even when there is no intention to mislead. It can be just a verbal punctuation mark, but usually it serves its original purpose as some kind of diversion, a prelude perhaps to some conversation-killing cliche like, “it is what it is”.

Usually it involves the erection of some sort of barrier, however flimsy, to the approach of the truth. And indeed it is not Paddy alone who has taken it to his heart, it was a particular favourite of Tony Blair who was always saying “Look” with a slightly pained or amused expression, whenever he wanted to stray from the path of rigorous honesty.

So it is not exclusively ours, but we have worked at it ceaselessly, developing it to a kind of crazy perfection. And what does that say about us? Look… it is what it is.