Political divide in Fine Gael is anything but ‘airy-fairy’
THE one thing you must remember about Michael Healy-Rae is that he’s not thick. He’s the direct opposite of thick. In fact, he’s a class of a genius. So, when he denies he was being homophobic by telling Tánaiste Leo Varadkar that he should go off ‘with his airy-fairies’ during a bitter and personal clash in the Dáil, I feel I have no choice but to accept his word. But, I have to admit, it’s a struggle.
People of a certain age will recall how the ‘airy-fairy’ dismissal was meant to describe those regarded as bookish, absent-minded or generally were seen to be going around with their heads stuck in the clouds.
It was not a reference to sexuality or anything of the like. That said, I haven’t heard ‘airy-fairy’ used at all in that way for at least 30 or 40 years.
Since then the word ‘fairy’ has become a loaded term of abuse for a gay man, a description intended to undermine the target, an outrageous and mean-minded othering. How Michael Healy-Rae didn’t know that and wasn’t, therefore, sensitive about using the word ‘fairy’ in the context in which he used it against Leo Varadkar is utterly surprising, to say the least.
However, Healy-Rae’s gauche and hamfisted choice of words against the Tánaiste may come as music to the ears of many of Varadkar’s detractors in Fine Gael. They believe the Tánaiste is marching the Blueshirts, eyes wide open, into a devastating ambush and defeat in the next general election.
And these internal critics will deploy anything in their arsenal to undermine their leader, including suggestions that Varadkar has favoured people who don’t really represent what they regard as true Fine Gael. As if promoting your own tribe in politics is anything new.
WHISPERS from the shadows also claim that Varadkar has promoted others, in areas where the Government has a say, who, when polling booths open will not attract a single extra vote for the party. There is little doubt but that some of the faceless mutterings against Varadkar are motivated by outand-out homophobia – which is utterly unacceptable considering all we know about the appalling discrimination gay people have suffered through the ages.
But some of the criticism arises out of a genuine concern that traditional Fine Gael supporters have become alienated and simply don’t recognise the party they previously backed without question.
Trouble is, we simply don’t know the exact reasons because any issue which now touches on gender, sexuality or race is almost impossible to ventilate robustly in public. It’s a minefield.
So issues of this nature are suppressed because of the cancel culture doctrine of our great new faith, and as a result are allowed to lurk menacingly and unresolved in the shadows.
Truthfully discussing the political health of Fine Gael, a pillar party of Irish democracy, is now entirely verboten and Michael Healy-Rae’s cack-handed intervention will be universally denounced, with one newspaper even slapping him down while declining, at the same time, to tell us what exactly he’d said. How preposterous is that?
Joe Duffy was much more direct on Liveline, with a series of questions that would have thrilled the new fundamentalist priesthood, but made no impression at all on those outside the cushy, cosmopolitan, liberal elites who regard this ‘airyfairy’ controversy as, well, airyfairy in the old-fashioned sense.
In Ballinasloe, Carrickmacross, Tullamore and Kilgarvan, the greater number still see this as nothing more than the latest spat in a clash of cultures, as just another example of big city softies feigning insult at the expense of the great unwashed in culchie-land.
On one side of this divide are increasingly alienated traditionalists who, though accepting the social policy gains of recent decades, still see politics in terms of bread and butter issues, plus health, housing and education.
ON THE other side are progressives with their super-duper liberal ideals, like new Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik, who foolishly believe that politically noncontentious issues such as violence against women provides a pathway to Government Buildings.
This airy-fairy fuss will simply entrench both sides still further, with Varadkar and Healy-Rae cheered on from those already in their camps. But, overall, the row will go nowhere, because almost all public debate in Ireland now is being emptied of substance, the result of a pincer squeeze on free speech – the new PC religion advancing from the left, the old defamation law still holding solid on the right.
THE Government’s reaction to the Ukraine refugee disaster disproves that old mathematical chestnut that ‘two into one won’t go’.
For years we’ve been struggling with a housing and homeless crisis which by the end of this January forced more than 9,100 people into emergency accommodation.
Now we’re facing the prospect of at least 40,000 Ukrainian refugees arriving here by the end of April – well over 10,000 of them have already been welcomed in.
Meanwhile, the Government seems completely non-plussed, with Tánaiste Leo Varadkar throwing out the nugget in the Dáil that the influx will increase the population by 1%, almost overnight. Where, suddenly, is all the accommodation coming from?