Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records
Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you too
- Eminem
(Briefly) how we got here (since 2008 or thereabouts): a financial crash caused by international capital; the decision to rescue those responsible at the expense of working people; the choice to enact austerity that not only forced these working people to pay for that rescue but also transferred wealth from the bottom of Irish society to the top; the continuing lie we’ve left that austerity behind; the policy of running Ireland as if it’s a company, with healthy balance sheets, whose majority shareholders are foreign capitalists. In short: politics – the distribution of resources to some but not others; the prioritisation of certain interests at the expense of those outside. (This definition of politics is distinct from how political correspondents treat the word, using it to refer to the soap opera of who gets to sit in cabinet, who has to make do with junior ministries, who around Leinster House has fallen out with each other on a given week.)
The politicians and parties who made these choices, who partly write the society in which we live, believe in the validity of their political project. They did so in good faith, to use a term Paschal Donohoe spoke in the Dáil today. Whether they speak about this project in good faith is another matter. Donohoe also said now is “a time in which we seek to look at how politics can unite people and bring people together”, encouraging if nothing else the question of who is this “we”. The slow march of history of this state shows us that politics – as practised by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and whoever decides to prop them up up in government – has never been about unity but rather deciding which groups are granted some level of privilege.
People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy had asked Donohoe about the Irish Central Bank’s facilitation of the sale Israeli war bonds, marketed by that state as a means of supporting its ongoing genocide in Gaza. He got quite the response.
“I am reminded again and again that for somebody who claims to be on the left, for somebody who claims to be part of a movement that is about tolerance and inclusivity, there are few figures who serve that agenda less than you. Your language is consistently poisonous. Your language consistently looks to demonise those who are acting in good faith. You in turn, in your own way, are a contribution to the decay of standards and how we can engage with each other and debate issues,” he said.
Príomhoide Ó Donnchadha.
Mind your manners
Tolerance, inclusivity, good faith, standards, respectful debate: these are what liberal democracies require of its people, what parliamentarians expect not just of each other but those subject to their rule. When those asking for these values and standards break material promises, they offer neither apology nor acknowledgment. The passage of the Occupied Territories Bill was a pre-election promise, now being broken, with the breakers not even gracious enough to their subjects to say so directly, instead using off-record quotes in media. When we found out Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael lied about missing their housing targets during last year’s general election campaign, Simon Harris’s response was one of, ah well, saying you can “only mislead the public if you provide information to the public that you know to be untrue”.
When this is what we’re asked to tolerate, tolerance shouldn’t be an aspiration. “The conditions under which tolerance,” wrote philosopher Herbet Marcuse, “can again become a liberating and humanising force have still to be created.” We should resist calls to tolerance not only because these issues shouldn’t be tolerated, but also because our ruling class weaponises the act of tolerance itself. It’s been perverted, wrote Marcuse. “When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralise opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual, in his consciousness, his needs, when heteronomous interests occupy him before he can experience his servitude, then the efforts to counteract his dehumanisation must begin at the place of entrance, there where the false consciousness takes form.”
What we’re being asked to tolerate (just recently): a housing market demonstrably made more for foreign pension funds than the record high 15,000 homeless people in the country last month; state forces that choose to brutalise groups like Mothers Against Genocide engaging in peaceful protest outside Dáil Éireann, while allowing those complicit in that genocide to walk freely; a defective block crisis in the west and northwest of the country for which the state is trying to exclude those affected for redress; hospitals that, according to an NHS consultant, have conducted unnecessary operations on child patients, with some of these operations “purely for financial gain” – something on which our health minister is yet to meaningfully comment; the build of a state so bereft of independence or sovereignty that its fortunes seem inextricable with the whims of the US president and the multinationals from the country he leads.
And so on.
Our ruling parties can credibly claim tolerance for their project persists. They rule after all. But that tolerance decreases: though the tolerant walk among us their numbers are fewer than any time of the Free State’s history. The intolerant may struggle, as Paschal Donohoe and Sharon Ní Bheoláin found this week, with matters of good grace and etiquette. But their historical antitheses haven’t achieved much.
