As Ireland’s political establishment slides into dotage, our politicians are getting younger

Consider the present spectacle of American electoral politics. The current president, at 81 the oldest person ever to serve in the role; his 78-year-old opponent (and predecessor) who, were he to win, would himself quickly become the oldest president in history. It is, in many respects, a depressing vista, one made even more so by the serving president’s apparent physical and cognitive decline. Whatever way it turns out, the role still sometimes referred to without irony as “leader of the free world” will be entrusted to a man unprecedentedly advanced in years.

If this were a fictional conceit, which sadly it is not, I would be forced as a literary critic to point out that it is an excessively on-the-nose one. Surely the author could have found some less lurid allegory for an empire entering its final senescence? And while we’re at it, I enjoy a reference to the King James Bible as much as the next guy, but giving the challenger the name Trump – ”We shall all be changed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trump” – is just cranking the old Apocalyptic Resonance dial up a little too high.

The mood of our moment is one of depressive futility. We face, in the form of climate change, a crisis of almost unimaginable scale and severity. Capitalism, which is constantly reinforced as the only show in town, seems incapable of doing anything but driving us ever deeper into crisis. The far right is gaining ground across Europe and America, successfully employing the same old carnival shell trick it has always used: converting inchoate anger about the material conditions of a society run largely in the interest of an actual elite into rage at immigrants and other outsiders. This sense of a declining civilisation, with its ageing populations and its diminishing expectations of a future for its young people, is intensified to a dispiriting degree by these maundering old incumbents at its imperial core, offering nothing but more of the same, with rapidly diminishing returns.

We in Ireland, however, seem to be going against the grain of this narrative of gerontocracy-as-decline. When Simon Harris was anointed Taoiseach a couple of months back, he was, at 37 years old, the youngest person to hold the office in the history of the State. His predecessor Leo Varadkar was the previous holder of that distinction, having been made taoiseach at 38. And earlier this week, the 33-year-old Jack Chambers became the youngest Minister for Finance since Michael Collins.

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This is good, isn’t it? We are going in the right direction here, aren’t we?

Well. Regular readers of this column – which, like Chambers, has only been around a few months and yet feels impossibly, uncannily old – will of course know that I am never happy, especially when the opposite of something I have just been complaining about happens.

Firstly, there is the personal aspect of all this. The fact of the Taoiseach being younger than me is mortally wounding to my sense of self. I’m not even sure what my sense of self is, exactly, other than that it is inextricably bound up with being younger than the Taoiseach, whoever that happens to be at a given time. I had a close shave with Varadkar, who is my senior only by a matter of months, but I still managed to convince myself that his comparative youth was a statistical deviation, and that I had at least another governmental term before I would have to finally contend with the Taoiseach being younger than me. Harris’s ascent to the top job was, in this sense, a personal fiasco.

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To make matters worse, I learned just yesterday that Roderic O’Gorman, who is a leading candidate to be the next leader of the Green Party, is also younger than me. I don’t know much about his main rival Pippa Hackett, other than that I’m backing her bid for the job because a) we as a country need more women in political leadership, and b) I personally need fewer political leaders born after 1980. If O’Gorman were to get the job, and if Chambers, who last week was announced as Fianna Fáil’s deputy leader, were to succeed Micheál Martin as head of the party before the next election, all three Coalition leaders would not only be men, but would also be younger than me, thereby making it something like an existential imperative that the electorate does not return this Government to power.

I’m willing to admit that the parties of Government in this country are probably not putting ostentatiously young people in positions of extraordinary power deliberately in order to remind me of my own advancing years – of the incumbency, as it were, of death. Something else, presumably, is going on here. My sense of it is that this does have to do with death, in a way: with the need to stave off a sense that the political establishment is sliding into its irrelevant dotage. What better way to signal the vitality and vigour of a government, after all, than to make a 33-year-old the Minister for Finance? Chambers may have been hand-reared at an Ógra Fianna Fáil hatchery, but it’s also true that he was in nappies when Bertie Ahern was taking dig-outs from his pals.

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Ireland’s political charade of youthfulness is considerably less depressing than America’s allegorical spectacle of imperial decrepitude, but what it reveals is an establishment desperate to signal vitality and relevance. Despite his conspicuous youth, our new Minister for Finance is an avatar not of change or renewal, but of stasis, and even of regression. In 2018, as a 27-year-old TD, he campaigned publicly for a No vote in the Repeal referendum. He represents not the future, in other words, but a politics that has failed us for a very long time, and which belongs in the past.

It’s worth bearing in mind, by the way, that the most widely beloved (and most consistently progressive) major figure in Irish political life is our President. He is, at 83, older than both Biden and Trump. Even at an allegorical level, the equation between youth and progress on one side, and age and decline on the other, does not quite work out.