Fintan O’Toole: Varadkar’s vacuous slogan reveals mean streak

He's at it again. In his end-of-year briefing for political correspondents Leo Varadkar provided a preview of his election slogan for 2020. And it's going to be the same mindless mantra that saw him home in the Fine Gael leadership election in 2017.

Looking forward to the general election, the Taoiseach said that “part of the reason why we’ll seek a mandate for the next term is so that we can do a lot more for all those people who get up early in the morning, all those people who work really hard and pay a lot of tax”.

He obviously believes that the catchphrase is a winner. In truth, it manages to expose and encapsulate his two rather contrary weaknesses – a tendency to vacuity on the one hand and to nastiness on the other.

I must admit that I’ve despised the phrase ever since Varadkar started using it because both my parents were people who got up before the “people who get up early in the morning”.

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While Varadkar is obviously convinced that the slogan makes him the chosen conductor of the dawn chorus of chirpy citizens, it is uncomfortably revealing of his own mean streak

My father was often up in the dark hours to walk or cycle from our house in Crumlin to Donnybrook garage to take out one of the first buses that got other people to work. My mother got up at half past five to cycle to Burgh Quay to clean the offices of the Irish Press before the journalists got in for the early shift.

Neither of them is the sort of person Varadkar wants to represent. He has no interest in or understanding of the lives of people who work in low-paid jobs – to merit his concern one must “pay a lot of tax”.

Elderly parents

“People who get up early in the morning” is a category with no distinctive content.

Single mothers get up early in the morning to feed and change little babies that stir before dawn. Carers get up early in the morning to calm elderly parents with dementia who wake in the dark and don’t know where they are.

Aspiring writers get up early in the morning to get a few pages of their putative masterpiece done before the kids wake for school. Obsessive gamers get up early in the morning to get back online.

Statistically, the people least likely to be up early in the morning are those who live in Dublin 4 and on the Dingle Peninsula. What unites them in this regard? Nothing. As a social description the phrase expresses only the glibness of the speaker.

Yet as Simon Coveney pointed out when Varadkar started peddling it in 2017, its real purpose is to set people against each other: "that kind of language is about separating the public sector from the private sector, separating the achievers from the non-achievers".

Hence the way it manages to be both empty and nasty – it says nothing in itself but suggests the existence of two opposed categories of Irish people, the virtuous early-risers and the bed-bound good-for-nothings.

While Varadkar is obviously convinced that the slogan makes him the chosen conductor of the dawn chorus of chirpy citizens, it is uncomfortably revealing of his own mean streak.

Insofar as it has any meaning at all the motto actually evokes the great failure of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – the construction of a society in which people "get up early in the morning" to sit in traffic and crawl, stressed and hypercaffeinated, to work.

Terrible planning

Terrible planning and appalling housing policies have created a way of life in which, in the 2016 census, one fifth of workers in Wicklow and Meath had a commute of one hour or more to their job, along with around one in six of those who resided in Kildare, Laois, and Westmeath.

Getting up early in the morning isn't a badge of honour or a sign of virtue or a mark of the true entrepreneurial spirit

Nearly 200,000 people spent an hour or more commuting to work in 2016, with an average travel time of 74 minutes. Conversely, only one in four commuters had a travel time of 15 minutes or less.

These figures have almost certainly worsened in the last four years as more and more people have been priced out of Dublin by the Government’s disastrous housing policies.

In this real world getting up early in the morning isn’t a badge of honour or a sign of virtue or a mark of the true entrepreneurial spirit. It is a cruel necessity.

It is bad for personal health and for family life. It is environmentally unsustainable – one of the reasons Ireland is among the worst countries in Europe at controlling carbon emissions in that Ireland is also one of Europe’s most car-dependent societies.

Every national plan over the last 30 years has recognised the scale of this problem and promised to tackle it. No government has done so, and Varadkar’s has managed to make it worse by making Dublin uninhabitable for ordinary, young, working people.

Instead of flogging divisive slogans, Varadkar, like anyone else who claims to be able to lead Ireland for the next five years, needs to speak to the need for a profound transformation in the way Irish society must organise itself as a decarbonised economy.

He needs to tell us how we will get to a point where many fewer people have to get up way too early in the morning.