The body-language expert for Love Island was chased down by Sky News to analyse Boris Johnson’s resignation speech. The verdict — “seething” and “shocked” — offered no subcutaneous surprises. That a body linguist from a crass reality TV show should be deemed truthsayer about the fallen political hero is the real surprise. A house of self-promoters prone to cabin fever — the parallels between politics and the nightly displays of human nature, red in tooth and claw, are unavoidable.
It wasn’t always thus. There was an age of innocence, but it peaked, pre-Covid, with marvellous Maura Higgins and the pure feminist poetry of her “fanny flutters” honesty. Although a stable, loving relationship (plus £50,000) is the supposed prize of Love Island, the aim of the show is the opposite — where would ratings be with stability? Consequently, when things threaten to get settled, sexual saboteurs are sent to the house (Casa Amor is a serious misnomer) to disturb happy relationships with seductions and sometimes downright lies.
Casa Amor is a wrecking ball, which trails emotional carnage and destruction every night. The awful inevitability transfixes viewers and, for the hapless contestants, “them’s the breaks”. Or in their own argot, it is what it is. But what exactly is it? Why is stability so anathema to the human psyche? And are we all potential Love Islanders hurtling towards instability and self-destruction?
Today Sinn Féin will bring a vote of no confidence in the Government — arguably the most stable government we have had since the financial crash. The pretext is the Government’s loss of its overall majority over the mica compensation Bill, whereby the government, meaning the taxpayer, picks up the bill for failings in the private sector.
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But the purpose is to destabilise. And if that seems apocalyptic, it’s only because we are sleepwalking into a scenario that has been well signalled by Sinn Féin itself — and for which it makes no apology. Sinn Féin does not merely want to change the government, it wants to change the system. It says so in its manifesto. And as though to illustrate its contempt for political decorum, party TD Pádraig Mac Lochlainn last week cocked a snook at the common decency of the Irish people: the welcome for Ukrainian refugees.
“The Government were complaining about having to spend billions to help their own people in utter distress whose lives have collapsed, buildings collapsing around them in Donegal and the west, and the same government were almost boasting to the world about spending billions and rightly. That’s our place in the world — we help out refugees — every country does that around the world. But they were complaining about doing the same for their own people, and I think that’s stayed in a lot of minds and hearts and it goes to the core of what’s wrong with the approach of this government,” he told his local radio station.
Why would anyone juxtapose mica payouts with Ukrainian refugees or place “our own people” in contraposition to “refugees?” It smacks of naked populism.
Mary Lou McDonald and Matt Carthy, separately, were given ample time on radio last Friday to apologise. Both sidestepped it: contrition is not the Sinn Féin way. And while it is true that some rural Independent TDs have talked about a “cap” on refugee numbers, Danny Healy-Rae is not going to be leading government in a couple of years, as Sinn Féin almost certainly will. Especially since Fianna Fáil seems to have had a fit of the fanny flutters towards them while Micheál Martin’s back was turned.
“Othering” was how Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon described Mac Lochlainn’s stance. The worry is this unwieldy word, which means marking another as “different”, will become commonplace as populism metastasises into something worse. It’s a short distance from wilfully coupling refugees with mica payments to a Truthers-style conspiracy theory.
The Ukrainian refugees are no threat to anyone’s rights or jobs. We haven’t a great record on refugees. More than 30 years ago, we almost left the Vietnamese boat people to bob on the high seas. And 20 shameful years of direct provision cannot be easily explained away. Anyone who is close to Ukrainian refugees knows that anxiety is their pathology. Anxiety and a labyrinth of fear; fear for those left to fend and fight; fear for their future. Some 33,000 women and children have little agency and rely on the kindness of strangers. Their gratitude is humbling. They hide their sickness for home.
Against these desperate people fleeing a tyrant, would Sinn Féin erect a mica wall? Displacement and misplacement are global facts of life. Refugees always assume they are running away from something bad to something better. But liberation is not necessarily freedom. With populism being stirred and Sinn Féin in power, how much better will they — or we — be?
Just as the over-35s in Britain were aware of what Boris Johnson was but eagerly voted him in, everybody over 35 in Ireland is aware of what Sinn Féin stands for but, according to polls, many are eager to vote for it. And if the under-35s protest that the past and the violence Sinn Féin refuses to apologise for is nothing to do with them, they cannot turn a blind eye to the present and Sinn Féin’s dangerous populism.
According to its last election manifesto, the party’s intention is to establish a democratic socialist republic — whatever that means nowadays. We do know, according to the finance director of Coiste Seasta (the eight member committee that runs things), that Sinn Féin does not consider itself a normal political party but an activist group that does not want to be controlled by its elected representatives. We can’t pretend to be shocked.