The Gist: The Petty Bourgeoisie

What is a Government policy?

Must it be written down somewhere, like a Programme for Government? Or is it what the Government says in formal and official statements like Leaders' Questions in the Dáil or Ministerial Press releases?

Or should we derive the policy of the Government from what it does? After all, if a government publishes a policy that says it is committed to one thing, makes speeches committing itself to that goal and then everything it does delivers the opposite of that thing, which is the real policy of the government?

Is it, for example, now Government policy that children can be hugged without their consent, so long as it is by a family member? Should the wishes of grandparents to hug stand ahead of the rights of children to choose whether they want a hug or not? What are we even doing here?

Minister, misleading

This week Jim O'Callaghan, the Minister for Justice, had a rollercoaster ride through the media landscape, provided that rollercoaster was Oblivion, the vertical drop into darkness.

He opened the week with a wheeze of his own creation. Before going before the Oireachtas Justice Committee to discuss the ongoing withdrawal of solicitors from the criminal legal aid scheme he released a prepared statement claiming;

"that the only cases deliberately affected by the withdrawal of services in the Central Criminal Court [on Monday] were those involving allegations of rape"

And then, at the meeting, he went further, claiming that he'd cited only the cases in the Central Criminal Court (which only deals with the most serious crimes such as rape and murder) because that's

“where the campaign [withdrawal of services] was yesterday”.

You can read theJournal.ie's meticulous fact-checking of this statement, resulting in them demonstrating that his statement was misleading: "There is also clear evidence that the dispute has affected cases involving many other offences, including proceedings in the Circuit Criminal Court on the same day."

The solicitors involved, of course, did not need to wait for the official debunking to know it was nothing more than a smear. It combined two elements familiar from the Minister's past behaviour- the inability to make a persuasive policy argument in his favour and his preference for falling back on ad-hominem personal attacks as his rhetorical weakness is exposed.

Wilde Choice, Jim

The success of Jim's efforts to associate solicitors who have withdrawn their labour with the word rape depends on whether you believe Oscar Wilde correct when he said "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

The Minister, clearly a Wildean scholar, got multiple cycles of newsprint ink and broadcast attention from his rape-adjacent claim. He had, by that standard of success, won an Oscar-worth of being talked about.

But if we take more of a qualitative, rather than quantitive approach to publicity it has to be acknowledged that the Minister was denounced by TDs, including members of his own government parties, forced the Taoiseach to issue a statement as lukewarm as an English pint to defend him, and by the end of the evening the CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was interviewed and said that it would be very upsetting if either side of the legal aid dispute were to be "weaponising of rape and sexual assault cases... to advance their position".

By the end of the day, buffeted by the storm of attention caused by his own words, the Minister announced that he was going to meet with the Law Society, something he had avoided until then. So, you know, perhaps not the best bit of industrial relations strategy ever.

The Backlash Bots

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, as it advocates for the rights of victims and in particular for the rights of woman, is a perennial target of vilification by the far-right. In particular, due to its support of LGBTQI+ victims of sexual assault or rape, that far-right ire is frequently amplified by anti-trans voices. In the weeks since their campaign videos were released to promote and illustrate the concept of consent to different audiences, they had been attacked online, largely in the UK, by such luminaries as convicted racism grifter Tommy Robinson.

One of the tactics of fringe extremists is to attempt to gin up manufactured outrage around culture-war topics to intimidate institutions from taking public positions reflecting basic decency and inclusion.

In Ireland, we've seen this happen repeatedly with, for example, the popping of a balloon of online noise about Dublin Zoo's mother's day promotions involving a comedy drag act (Leading to Peadar Tobín of Aontú's eye-catching concept that Dublin Zoo were "deleting the visibility of mothers") when the social-media plan for a mass protest of real people in the real world lacked sufficient real people to exist.

We also saw a conference by the Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland move online in September for safety reasons after threats following reports of a speaker who, in other texts, had addressed breastfeeding in trans people.

You can go back and find similar fringe and far-right uses of this playbook for years now, from barging into libraries during children's storytime to plaguing elected officials at all levels about the imagined threat to the nation posed by melanin.

What you don't usually get is one of the most senior Ministers of the Government using unelected officials to pressure a Rape Crisis charity to do what that far-right fringe is demanding- and then posting that he has done that on X, the CSAM and Racism supporter's app.

A moral void

Now, we cannot look into the mind of Jim O'Callaghan to see if his motivation in pointing Earth's most unsavoury social network at the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was prompted by a wish to retaliate against its CEO for statements against the weaponisation of rape victims two days before.

Lacking telepathy, each voter will have to decide whether that sort of unconscionable motivation was at odds, or of a piece, with the rest of the Minister's behaviour.

All we can say is that, if it were the case that he decided to give credence and support to a far-right fringe issue in order to cause trouble to a charity he felt had not supported him, it would represent petty-minded narcissism of a Trumpian order.

And it didn't stop with the Minister for Justice. Here's the Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll McNeill in the Oireachtas responding to Aontú (of the invisible mothers earlier).

"The advertisement was inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents. It has been removed by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, following the Minister for justice's engagement with officials. It goes without saying that having loving grandparents in somebody's life is an incredibly positive thing and is not something to be campaigned against. It does not represent the views of Government in any sense."

How can an ad promoting only touching children if they want to be touched not represent the views of Government in any sense? Later statements from the Government tried to explain that non-consensual touching was OK, as long as the intent wasn't sexual. Which, and I implore you not to test this in public, would mean that, as long as it was meant strictly non-sexually, Jim O'Callaghan could slide his fingers up my nostrils. I don't want that for me. I don't want that for anyone.

It wasn't just the Government who misfired so badly in response to this manufactured nonsense. Sinn Féin's Matt Carthy responded by saying the Minister was right to have forced down the video promoting touching children only with their consent but demanding more action along the same lines.

"There must be a full review of how advertising campaigns that are fully or partly funded by taxpayers are authorised, to ensure that this type of debacle never happens again", he idioted.

Of opposition TDs, only Gary Gannon of the Social Democrats released a statement supporting the rights of children not to be touched against their wishes. To his credit, Green party councillor for Sandyford, Oisín O'Connor also came out and just said

"100% normal to ask anyone, esp. a child "dye want a hug?" before hugging them. No matter what age the adult is or their relationship to the child."

What's up with these weirdos?

I have found this story particularly galling. While the misleading claims at the start of the week were bad behaviour, they were also aimed at a group of people, solicitors, who are pretty able to take some heat.

But the idea of TDs abandoning the most basic tenets of consent to pander to an army of bots and weirdos seems to me to indicate a level of boiled brains widespread in the political class beyond what I already suspected.

I decided that I would call the constituency offices of my local FF, FG and SF TDs and ask them if they agreed with Jim O'Callaghan, Jennifer Carroll McNeill and Matt Carthy that it was wrong to say children should only be hugged if they want to be.

They don't have to answer me. But they will know that a real voter, who will look at their name on a ballot paper in the future, doesn't think campaigns promoting consent should be even a matter for debate, let alone described as a debacle.

And if they heard from enough voters saying the same thing, it might occur to them that paying attention to the hysterical ersatz mob they see in their phone apps might not be the same as knowing what actual people think.