Mick Clifford: Eamon Ryan, Eoin Hayes, and the race to ruin political reputations
Change Back Has It’s As Be Get He Buildings To To Left, That Isn’t Speaking Now Government Made Ryan That At This Everybody Bad Media To Climate Out Pretending Thing The As Can Eamon
Two politicians, one going out the door, the other arriving in, had their reputations trashed this week. What occurred tells a lot about how a particular brand of politics is practiced today. The first involves Eamon Ryan.
A report on a Cork County Council meeting on Tuesday’s had the headline: Cork councillors hope Eamon Ryan’s departure ‘might benefit us’ as they renew bid for rail link.
The item on the meeting’s agenda was a proposal to open a rail link between Midleton and Youghal. The meeting was told that the outgoing Minister for Transport’s secretary had written to the council to say their proposal could be directed at an upcoming review.
Independent councillor Mary Linehan-Foley said “on the plus side we will have a new minister shortly.” This was a reference to Ryan, who annoyed some of the councillors a while back. Fine Gael councillor Rory Cocking said that Ryan’s departure “might benefit us”.
A central tenet of Ryan’s agenda while in government was to increase public transport, particularly rail. Yet these people were suggesting he had a negative impact on this rail project. It was as if debating the rail line was to be used to have a gratuitous cut at Ryan rather than dealing with the facts. In this respect, the tenor of the talk about Ryan sounded like it was lifted from social media where narrative trumps facts and the main thing is to display one’s firmly held negative view about somebody rather than objectively assessing that person’s performance.
In this, the council echoed the same kind of small-minded and silly attitude displayed towards Ryan in tracts of rural Ireland.
At the 2020 election Ryan and his party, like others, made promises. To the greatest extent the Greens kept those promises, and managed to push their agenda to the heart of government. By the standards of what democratic politics is supposed to be about, it was a serious achievement.
For their trouble, the Greens were then decimated in last month’s general election. Their fault was they did not, like most others, duck, deflect, divert from or bullshit about the existential threat of climate change. They bore the inconvenient truth and provided others, including their coalition partners, with a foil, a bogeyman to which could be assigned blame for all the changes required to lessen threats to the planet.
Ryan was not infallible but he was resolute in pursing what he saw as his duty. At times, he suffered from foot in mouth disease. What should have been considered a quirk was presented as proof that he didn’t know what he was doing. The particular changes required of rural Ireland meant that he ended up being cast in those parts as some sort of gormless city boy out to save the planet by destroying a way of life.
Now that he has left, and the Greens, for the moment at least, with him, everybody can get back to pretending that this climate change thing isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. Sure, nothing will fall apart this side of the next election and after that won’t Flash Gordon be along at some point to save the world?
Eoin Hayes, the newly elected Social Democrat TD, got the mother and father of roastings this week. On Tuesday, he made a serious error. He told reporters that he had divested himself of shares before he got into politics when he was elected to Dublin City Council last June.
He has received the shares as part of his employment for a company that he left in 2017. The company does work for the Israeli military which is currently engaged in the daily slaughter in Gaza. In reality, he didn’t sell the shares before last June’s local election, he sold them the following month for a sum just short of €200,000. The shares he sold would be worth around €500,000 today.
He was wrong to give false information to the media but he was under pressure, is new to the job and apparently fretted that he was landing in controversy at the outset of this fresh career. Was there a major material difference between selling prior to the June elections or within weeks after it? He should have got a warning and a slap on the wrist.
The Soc Dems duly suspended him. This was where things got ropey. Suddenly, the airwaves and press releases were clogged up with the likes of Sinn Féin declaring that Hayes should resign his seat. Matt Cathy said Hayes had been elected under “false pretences” as he had “profited personally from a company that benefited from Israeli breaches of international law”.
Richard Boyd Barrett said it took a lot to shock him, but Hayes and his shares shocked him. Every time Richard is on the TV he looks shocked, en route to apoplexy, but maybe that’s just his default position. The Soc Dems themselves changed tack on the original charge against Hayes and curled inwards in shame that such a tainted individual had run under their banner. The deputy leader, Cian O’Callaghan, said he didn’t know at this point whether there was a way back to the party for Hayes.
Has politics come to this for people one might have considered serious? Hayes gave up what appears from this vantage to be a financially rewarding career to pursue a life in politics. He chose a party that allegedly is concerned with equality in society. And now he is considered unclean because a former employer who paid him in shares works with the Israelis and he didn’t divest himself of these legacy shares quickly enough?
Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have stayed completely schtum about this “controversy”. No doubt they are too busy laughing at it all in between their talks to form a government. One big advantage FF and FG have over those flailing around to signal their virtue is that they understand the electorate. They know the electorate is not the denizens of social media, nor is it those in the public sphere who lecture about compassion as if they have sole purchase on it.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael know that beyond the righteous bubble inhabited by some who describe themselves as progressive, most people are compassionate for those in dreadful circumstances but recoil when they feel lectured to. Maybe that’s one of the reasons there was no real alternative at the last election.