Why Is Micheál Martin Acting Like an 80s Da?

I think I might have noticed a peculiar memetic phenomenon playing out this week on the worldwide political stage and closer to home; political leaders behaving like authority figures from the 1980s towards their opponents… What's happening in the Zeitgeist that's making these men and their strategists think: In this moment I will behave like the principle called in to restore order to the class by a teacher or a Da who's trying to watch the football whenever they are questioned even a tiny amount by their peers? What’s given them the idea that they should their policies or performance be questioned, the best thing to do is infantilise the questioner, why do they think that will make them look good to us, “the people at home” (as Simon Harris calls us…)

Trump has just tweeted that Zelenskyy can “come back when he’s ready for peace” after the most bizarre exchange in the Oval Office. Like a ma in the 1980s, throwing her son out of the gaff by the scruff of his Man Utd Jersey and roaring “come back when your ready to behave!” Zelenskyy’s crime was the most minor interventions, when he tried to remind Vice President Vance that attempts at diplomacy with Russia had failed before, and he wanted some guarantees that wouldn’t happen again. As they launched a tirade of degradation at him “you need to be thankful” his contributions became clipped as he hung his head and gave up, like a child at the dinner table in a dysfunctional family. 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a new energy in Micheál Martin as I eat up Leaders Questions Tuesday-Thursday (my guilty pleasure). Like an actor in a long form improv, he seems to have been given the direction: no matter what the other actor says, stay on the objective to humiliate them, make the rest or the class (oireachtas) laugh at them and the super objective: stay in power. He’s started to spill the tea on government formation talks, like the tactic of a teacher who scolds a child for laughing at another child’s spelling by announcing to the class that he can’t spell either. A well worn tactic to expose something uncomfortable about the person asking the question, to try and make them squirm and shut up. He’s done it to labour and the soc dems the last few weeks, telling labour they had ‘nothing on paper’ when it came to housing. With Sinn Fein, there seems to be an obviously poorly thought out strategy to connect every question to the conflict in the north of Ireland, the best of which was he was questioned by Sinn Fein about waste in spending in the national Gallery he said “To be fair, members of the deputy’s movement have always valued art down through the years, in different ways” bringing up paintings stolen when everyone facing him was in school - to a canned laugh track. Going on to scold Good Girl Ivana Bacik for hanging around with Bold Girl Mary Lou McDonald. His behaviour has become so “increasingly tetchy” that on Wednesday Verona Murphy the Ceann Comhairle told him to “stop behaving like a child” as if taking over in a long game of mammies and daddies, sick of playing her assigned role she broke character and gave us a dacent bit of common sense… or did she? 

Trump said at the end of his assault on Zelenskyy in the Oval Office “I don’t know what just happened but I know it will make good TV”. As Simon Harris re-enacted his Head Boy days in St David's Holy Faith Secondary School in Greystones he kept referring to “the people at home”. Brecht wrote about “The People” but now it’s “The people at home” like a TV Presenter announcing a competition. All talk of the people watching, no consideration for anyone who doesn’t watch. The people at home an unfortunate or apt phrase given so many people don’t have a home.  TV Executives don’t care who doesn’t watch their programmes, but Governments should. Governments have to govern for the people who voted for them, the people who voted for the Opposition and the huge majority of people on the island who didn’t vote at all. 

 So I wonder, what has gotten into the water of these elected serious statesmen to make them behave like dysfunctional archetypes, frustrated parents, under resourced school teachers, bullies, abusers and sociopaths? 

So many times this week I wondered, is this what they think I want? I wanted Micheál Martin to answer the questions put to him by the Opposition. I wasn’t interested in his lame jokes and the laugh track. I want to see a statesman, not a school principle called away from a leaky roof to save a substitute teacher- because the questions were about over 15 thousand people homeless while 240k was wasted on a scanner, families in emergency accommodation, special needs kids who couldn’t get their teeth pulled and national security. I would have been interested in his actual opinions, even if they are that he is a disciple of neoliberalism. If I tuned into the Dail and they were debating neoliberalism as a concept I would be delighted.

And then tonight it hit me. Good TV. 

How disgusting is that. 

It might be an intentional strategy coined by political operatives in a Dublin 2 pub, scrolling through social media feeling licked, buying a bag and coming up with the genius “Authority Figures 1980s” plan or it might not be intentional at all.

Because most of us grew up with dysfunctional families, we crave drama that trades in dysfunction families, from Eastenders to Six Feet Under to Succession. When we write we recreate what happened to us. We stage our trauma because theres a part of the self that’s desperate to look at it from a distance. Many artists share the experience that years after a work was made public they saw it was all about them. 

And that led me to what, if anything, has changed in Irish Politics in the last while… and then it hit me, the combined opposition. For the first time in our history, there is large group of elected TDs who aren’t in Fine Gael or Fianna Fail. They have demonstrated the ability to collaborate as a group of leaders, and to us at least, the people at home, they look very, eh, functional. They haven’t leaked or bitched, they have shared space, and they have resisted a move to outdo the level of dysfunction in elected politics, the Lowry Heist. They are able to respectfully disagree. If we see the whole of the Oireachtas up until now, as a dysfunctional family, the combined opposition are now like the family members who have been to therapy, or rehab, or joined a gym. Varying threads of this functionality was probably present in previous Dáil’s, but because it was all so fractured we couldn’t see it. 

And we all know what happens when functional family members come home for Christmas, well, just watch the Dáil. 

Dysfunction hates collaboration, respect, the regulated exchange of power. It tries to eat and annihilate function because that's why it breeds more dysfunction and keeps it going. A learned therapist might eventually tell the family member who survived a dysfunctional family unit, graduating to a manageable life, that they need to just leave the house, because there’s nothing there for them. 

And how to connect all this back to Zelenskyy too? Well in a way, he is an outlier of regulated presence in a sea of world leaders lost in narcissism, and he just got thrown out of the White House. 

But I have more hope for our Dáil then that. Harris and Martin are good men deep down. We’re not America. Yet.