Leo Varadkar's Gaslighting.

Political Considerations Explain Official Ireland's Moral Equivalence.

Leo Varadkar’s statement on the safe return of Irish Israeli girl, Emily Hand, after abduction in horrific circumstances and a 50 day sojourn as a hostage in Gaza was pitched in such a way as to take the focus away from what had happened to Emily to the happy outcome of her release.

Whatever the, arguably tight lipped, largely inferred denunciation of Hamas (he didn’t name them) that followed in the statement, the tone was set by Varadkar’s echoing of the story of the return of the prodigal son from the Gospel of St. Luke. ‘Emily was lost and is now found’. Whatever one might think about the appositeness of such a reference in the circumstances, there is no doubt Leo Varadkar was speaking figuratively, not literally which is how the Israeli foreign minister, Eli Cohen, chose to interpret his comments.

However, the Israeli foreign minister was right to take issue, not on the basis of the statement’s literal accuracy but because it glossed over the guilt of those responsible for her ordeal and the savage killing of other children on the day Emily was taken.

This is all of a piece with Varadkar’s fudging over an eerily similar act of violence against children outside a Dublin school last week. The Taoiseach’s reaction made for an interesting contrast with those of other leaders following terror attacks in their countries in recent years. Varadkar made a statement the following day in which he deplored the violence outside the school side by side with the arson, looting and violent protests that followed it. He said ‘both incidents shamed our country’.

There is no moral equivalence between stabbing children at random outside a school and looting property. It does not minimise the latter to say there is a category difference between the two evils. The looting and destruction is home grown evil. Ireland has seen it before. Every western country has. The vicious, calculated knife attack against small children by someone believed to be a stranger to them is not alone unprecedented in Ireland but belongs to a new and alien category of evil whose roots are not in our culture. We have been given little information about the assailant, so the jury is out on whether this attack could be described as ‘terrorist’. But what is clear enough is that it was a calculated attack on the most vulnerable and defenceless. It was an act of terror. It was a hate crime in its most odious and potentially most lethal form. Everyone recognises that, and Varadkar and other politicians and Irish mainstream media can gaslight all they want but all they are doing is driving people with well grounded concerns into the political arms of rightist extremists.

The issue of undocumented males, unaccompanied by families, being housed in working class areas of Dublin and in towns around Ireland has already generated considerable public protest. The government’s response has been to draw focus to far right groups as the instigators and abettors. There has been no acknowledgement that there are legitimate grounds for concern around admitting undocumented foreigners, specifically young males, into the country and housing them in groups in the heart of urban and rural Irish communities. There are of course other reasons too. Ireland’s intake of immigrants is set against the background of a housing crisis. No notion of charity requires you beggar your own people in order to help others. Even the highest bar of charity, as set out in St John’s Gospel, demands we give a coat to the poor only when we have one left for ourselves.

Yes, the extreme right is a growing force in western society. Yes, they exploit and amplify community grievances. In Ireland they are defined by a narrow nationalism, historical nostalgia, frustrated entitlement, anglophobia, ideological intolerance and anti-semitism. Yet, the foreigners that give them most concern are not Jews but Muslims, now that the English are gone, or almost gone to their way of thinking. Like all popular movements, they draw enforcement from opportunist delinquents and malcontents whose criminality finds shelter under the flag of an ideology that feeds their grudges.

We hear few concerns in Official Ireland about the far-left. The term made a rare appearance in recent days when the Tanaiste, Micheál Martin, was heckled to inaudibility at an event in Cork city by a group demanding the dismissal of the Israeli ambassador to Ireland. After the event, the Tanaiste made a rare defence of the right to free speech and opinion. Demanding the dismissal of the ambassador when the government was actively working for the release of Emily Hand shows the same tin-eared irrationality as the extremists on the other side of the ideological fence. With extremists of all colour the corrective balance supplied by rationality is missing. Feelings are supreme. When the feeling is hatred, there are few limits to where it can lead.

The Irish government needs to reckon with both forms of extremism. It needs to ask why it is so focussed on rightist extremism. They may say the extreme right is in the ascendent and so more dangerous. The question as to why that is so in any given time is worth considering. Could it be that extreme leftism is, well, just that, an extreme expression of opinion that also has a centrist or moderate platform in public life. Extreme right, on the other hand, appears not to have a centrist flank at all or at least one that is acknowledged as such and given space to speak in the public square. As a consequence, all public expression of right-of-centre opinion is characterised, correctly and incorrectly, as ‘far right’. There are consequences to silencing voices. If people on the centre right can’t be heard they’ll throw in their lot with the maverick rightists who are not so easily cowed or have little to lose just to send a message to the establishment.

In actual fact, the momentum is with the left of all shades at this time, not the right. Politicians’ deference to progressive leftist ideology reflects that and explains it. It explains why they can’t say what needs to be said on occasion after occasion. It is why they can’t even define a woman or a man. It’s why they can’t express robustly what the country feels when a man who was welcomed into this country lashes out with a knife at little children outside a school. It’s why information about the perpetrator in this case is singularly unforthcoming. It is this cowardly equivocation and reticence that is puffing the sails of rightist extremism. Unless our ruling class change tack, they may indeed find their fear of a rightist revolt is indeed well grounded. What they probably won’t see is that it is grounded in their own cowardice, lack of leadership and refusal ‘to read the room’ where the Irish electorate are concerned.