So, what’s the opposite of woke? Get ready to find out

So that’s it then? The big problem in Irish public life is that everything has gone too “woke”? That after Leo and the referendums debacle it’s time for all sensible people to do… eh... whatever is the opposite of “woke”? And that “woke” here means whatever Danny Healy-Rae or Peadar Tóibín or Ronan Mullen or Michael McDowell says it means?

I don’t think so — despite the political and media stampede in that general direction. I don’t think that this would be a good idea at all. In fact it would be a bad idea.

To understand the twisted forces at work here, perhaps the best place to start would be with “fake news”. Most of us have entirely forgotten that for a few moments in cultural history, the term “fake news” had a real meaning — it was used to describe the propaganda machines of the American right, the likes of Fox News.

What happened next was breathtakingly simple, and has become an essential part of the playbook of reactionary trolls the world over: Donald Trump just stole the label “Fake News!”, added that exclamation mark, and flung it at actual news — the regular forms of journalism which had some relationship with reality and thus could only be bad for him.

He turned the truth upside down, just like that. And it worked for him.

Likewise the incessant propaganda of the right has turned “woke” into an internationally recognised term of abuse — they have upended it in Trumpist style, arguing it reveals liberals to be the true authoritarians, with their “de-platforming” of those whose methods they deem to be unsound, their efforts to ban “hate speech”, and their control freakery in general.

I suppose you could debate that point, but probably the simplest way to establish who are the actual authoritarians here, would be to draw up a random list of some of the bestknown supporters and opponents of the old “wokery” — the opponents would include Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban, the extremist justices of the US Supreme Court who overturned Roe v Wade, and that weird-looking fascist guy who won the election in Holland.

I could go on, but suffice to say that when you put these lads next to our woke Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman and his ilk, you realise that poor Roderic has some distance to go before he can claim his place in the authoritarian firmament.

None of this is settled science, but in most areas it’s useful to see who is on one side of the ledger, and who is on the other side. George Clooney is woke, Laurence Fox is anti-woke. Bruce Springsteen is woke, Ted Nugent is anti-woke. Jurgen Klopp is woke, Joey Barton is anti-woke. There’s a pattern here, is there not? I mean, there’s a part of all of us that wants to excoriate O’Gorman for the virtue-signalling tyranny he represents, for extinguishing the liberty that is our birthright — but then we remember that some Brexiteering hack in the Telegraph has been writing that kind of twaddle for the last 10 years, and we think: you know what? Maybe that global authoritarian movement stretching all the way from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago is the one we should be looking at… maybe, just maybe, that’s the one.

As to why your Roderic O’Gormans would even appear in any part of that conversation, again it’s a bit like Trump straight-up stealing the “fake news” line — what the refulgent right has done here is seize the narrative.

They work very hard at this, many of them really have nothing else to be doing. Indeed they saw a big chance with the recent referendums to make a bit of fake news of their own, essentially because many of us couldn’t be arsed. In fact they are so used to being unchallenged by a demoralised media, you can hear Catholic activists denouncing the Government for using our Constitution to smuggle in this ideological agenda — the same Constitution that was effectively written and directed by the undisputed heavyweight champion of cancel culture in Ireland for much of the 20th century, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.

These lads don’t waste their time on ironies, they just want to win more territory in the war against their many enemies, even against enemies that exist only in their imagination — as they write and speak in public about not being allowed to write and speak in public, they identify “hate speech” legislation as the ultimate outrage, the point at which the woke mob has finally gone too far.

Again, they mostly get a free run at this, at a time when Trump is using language lifted directly from the Nazis, and his owner and trainer

Putin is actually invading countries just like the Nazis — and there’s a multitude of their followers, including those in Ireland, who have decided that the real threat to our civilisation lies in proposals which include an amendment to the law relating to the prohibition of incitement to violence.

Yes, for them it’s the woke mob who are tearing it all down. And yes, they can say that with a straight face.

Fake News!

Willie O’Dea is off again, stirring primitive juices

While Willie O’Dea may have stirred the primitive juices with his own little war on the “woke gallery”, he’s around long enough to know that this is just new skin for the old ceremony.

It used be called “political correctness gone mad”, and it had a fair innings — at the start you might hear an intellectual powerhouse such as Michael McDowell throwing his great weight against it, until eventually it dribbled down to the lower orders of Irish politics. Indeed, I remember seeing some obscure TD on Questions and Answers having a run at the “political correctness gone mad” line, and I figured at that stage it was probably reaching the end of its natural life.

Yet it always comes back in some other form — in earlier times it was all about “the loony left” — until eventually it just fades away and dies of embarrassment.

It is sad, though, that a substantial minority of supposedly “independent” Irish politicians are going there again. They talk about restoring “common sense”, when a look across the water tells them the Tory government now actually has a minister for common sense, seen as the final act of eejitry of a degenerate regime.

If we can’t take a hint from that crowd, there’s the excruciating embarrassment of US Republican congressmen staging their sham impeachment of Joe Biden, using disinformation coming directly from the Kremlin.

What is fascinating about this is that they are being mercilessly exposed by a number of brilliant Democrats who have turned this around, to the extent that instead of impeaching Biden, the Republicans are showing why Trump should probably be impeached for a third time.

If I had anything to do with politics, I would want to be on whatever side those Democrats are on, taking down the GOP blackguards and their unbelievable bullshit. Indeed, last week Elon Musk lost further ground in his war against the woke mind virus, by making a pillock out of himself during an interview with Don Lemon.

These lads really can’t stand up to much scrutiny — and yet some of our lads are increasingly inclined to follow them down the reactionary road.

Turn back lads, turn back now, while there’s still time.

Arklow awry as Wicklow gets its own taoiseach

While the fate of Ireland and the world hangs in the balance, only one thing is for sure — Arklow, which has not had a TD since the foundation of the State, still won’t have one.

Wicklow finally gets a taoiseach, just when they’ve moved Arklow out of his constituency. If the grand old tradition is upheld, the new three-seat Wicklow-Wexford constituency which now contains Arklow, will certainly have TDs from Gorey — no doubt about that.

But for the town which has its name in a Van Morrison song — Streets of Arklow — it’s too late to start now.