A world where we ‘cancel’ people whose ideas challenge us amounts to a polarised and dystopian society

Thank you, Anne Keane, if you are reading this. You are the English tutor from my UCG days who in 1988 gave me a lowly 42 per cent for an essay I wrote. And you graciously told me why.

The composition, hopefully lost to posterity, was about Thomas Kinsella’s Nightwalker. I didn’t understand the poem very much and it didn’t rhyme and that was the poet’s fault.

So I penned a wordy and grammatically-accurate rant and thought I would get a good mark. The 42 per cent was a terrible blow to my amour-propre. My tutor gently pointed out that I had not backed up my assertions with any evidence for the validity of my claims. She had written it on the essay too. “Prove your case,” was the message in red biro on the returned script.

Those words have stayed with me through the different twists and turns of my working life. Before I speak in the Seanad or do a media interview, I try to ask myself, “Am I proving my case? What do I believe? Why do I believe it? What are the counterarguments and how do I answer those?”

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Asking these questions can be inconvenient. Much of today’s political and media discourse prizes half-truth and oversimplification. And while online media can provide an alternative forum for the free exchange of ideas, the cure can be worse than the disease.

People are talking a lot but the depth of knowledge can be shallow. I recently came across a series of TikTok videos featuring a guy trying to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in two or three one-minute videos. He was talking very fast, I admit. But in three minutes – really?

In his book The Filter Bubble, Eli Praiser reminds us that we now live in a world where information is personalised, tailored and marketed directly to us. Search engines and social media platforms confirm our biases.

So if you type the term “climate change” into Google, are you likely to get different results depending on whether you are a climate activist or an oil executive? If so, that’s a disaster.

The next generation of Irish people deserve a climate of respect for ideas and for the complexity of things. We need to challenge group think and encourage a culture of independent research and opinion forming.

‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ the Washington Post tells us. If democratic politics is the business of collective decision-making through agreed structures, then good democratic politics demands a relentless commitment to truth-seeking.

It doesn’t have to – in fact it mustn’t – become analysis-paralysis. But we need to accept that the truth is often not easily summarised. We need to stick around for the debate.

It was out of some of these reflections that the idea of the Oireachtas Essay Competition (Aiste an Oireachtais) was born. Plus the rather old-fashioned notion that reading and thinking are the necessary prelude to talking and deciding.

Our competition invites senior cycle students, our future leaders, to consider why democracy is important and, specifically, why parliamentary politics matters. We hope this will help young people find their own personal place in the political process.

Not everybody is called to be an elected representative. But we need reflective people across the board to be involved with political parties and independents. They’re needed in civil society too, in voluntary organisations, trade unions, charities and sporting bodies, wherever politics is practised.

This competition, sponsored by Eason, Folens and CJ Fallon, is for students across the island of Ireland.

The best essay, in English or Irish, on the topic “parliamentary politics matters’ or ‘tábhacht na polaitíochta parlaiminte” wins €1,000 – divided between the student and their school.

We also have regional and Irish language prizes, making up a total prize fund of €4,000. An awards ceremony will take place in spring 2023, when we will welcome the winners, their teachers and parents to Leinster House.

So, if you’re in fifth or sixth year of the Leaving Cert, or doing the A-levels in 2023 or 2024, please visit our website (www.oireachtasessay.ie or www.aisteanoireachtais.ie) and register your interest by November 15th. We will email you a code number which you must use when uploading your article by the eventual deadline of December 8th.

Our team of teachers look forward to reading your essays. And if you’re wondering whether it’s worth the effort, remember what Winston Churchill said, more or less: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time!”

Rónán Mullen is an Independent senator for the National University of Ireland and convenor of Aiste an Oireachtais, the Oireachtas Essay Competition