Riffing on ‘the right’ and ‘the woke’ of Ireland

NEWSTALK BREAKFAST

Newstalk, weekdays, 7am

THE OLIVER CALLAN SHOW

RTÉ1, weekdays, 9am

LIVELINE

RTÉ1, weekdays, 1.45pm

On Newstalk Breakfast, Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman were riffing about a drift to the right in Irish politics. I like this riffing, it brings an energy to proceedings, and I’m aghast at those who say a presenter expressing an opinion is not proper journalism. On the contrary, knowing where somebody stands on the great issues can bring more clarity to proceedings than the “objective” style, which has inbuilt and unacknowledged biases of its own.

It also makes Newstalk

Breakfast sound more like a creature of the modern world than its august rival on RTÉ, Morning Ireland – you could say RTÉ is doing a journalistic version of the Tridentine Mass there, up against the immediacy of the vernacular.

Moreover, when Kelly and Coleman were talking about a drift to the right, something occurred to me that I hadn’t fully realised before. As they pondered the fact politicians are now afraid of being regarded as right-wing, and almost all parties in the Dáil supported the recent referendums, I think they missed a trick.

I say this because I had missed it too. The trick is, to stop regarding the liberal or “woke” point of view in ideological terms, but to realise it’s now the position of many people in this country. And that politicians have been afraid to abandon it, because it would mean aligning themselves with the “right”.

Put it like this : the broad liberal position on, say, abortion, is that you mightn’t want it yourself, but that it should be available to those who do. Some on the “right” believes that because they don’t want it, nobody else should have it either – an extremist position which has no future in any half-normal country.

Newstalk Breakfast is correct though. The right is gaining ground in other areas, but no, we shouldn’t be concerned that there’s not enough of it in the Dáil.

There soon will be anyway, with TDs losing their minds in the blizzard of bile about the “woke agenda”.

So it was good to hear Kelly and Coleman riffing on these themes, as it developed my own thinking, and hopefully it will develop theirs too. Next time, with the Dáil deteriorating into a carnival of populist eejitry, I hope they’ll realise that, if anything, it was never woke enough.

By a happy coincidence, a couple of unrelated items on RTÉ1 reminded us of old Ireland, for which some on the “right” are still nostalgic. The great comedian, actor, and poet Jon Kenny was on The Oliver Callan Show, describing his difficulty with dyslexia – which always brings him back to his horrible experiences in primary school, when kids with reading or other learning difficulties were lined up and assaulted on a daily basis by deranged national teachers.

Anyone who lived through these horror-shows still can’t quite comprehend that such things were allowed to happen – but we know they’d have given anything back then for just a fleeting moment of wokeness.

More power to Liveline too, for featuring the journalist Antonia Cundy and her article in The Financial Times about the strange and terrible activities of Opus

Dei, that powerful group within the Catholic Church. In particular Cundy wrote about the women whose domestic servitude supported Opus Dei for decades, with girls around the world being codded into “hospitality schools”.

It wasn’t quite slavery – for all their cooking and cleaning the girls might get £3 a month.

Naturally, some of this happened in Ireland before the “woke” agenda came along and destroyed it all. Joe Duffy spoke to some of the victims, who corroborated Cundy’s stellar reporting on this international scandal.

But if anyone thought this was just some historical deep dive into Opus Dei, we should note the same Opus Dei has been a major force in turning the US Supreme Court into a battering ram for right-wing ideology, most notably in the overturning of Roe v Wade.

You could even say they learned some of their fancy footwork in old Ireland when they were trying to shoehorn “Catholic teaching” into our Constitution.

So we shouldn’t be worrying about the “right” being underrepresented in the Dáil – in the power game they’ll always be there or thereabouts.