From top: RTÉ coverage begins for the first of five general elections held during the 1980s; Dan Boyle

Each Great Leap Forward is followed by several steps back.

Dan Boyle writes:

I first cast my vote in 1981. Ronald Reagan was the US President, Margaret Thatcher the British Prime Minister, and Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In the general election of that year the Trinity of Irish politics – Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, had won its usual 95% of the vote. Those of us coming of age then had little expectation that things could change quickly, or indeed change at all.

There were small signs indicating otherwise. A handful of interesting independents were elected. In Limerick, a speak as you found him socialist, Jim Kemmy, was arousing interest. The most that could be said about Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus was his name.

Noel Browne was being elected for his fifth and final political party, Socialist Labour. Sinn Féin, in its Workers Party incarnation, won its first seat since 1957. The first Sinn Féin TD to take their seat in the Free State parliament.

The abstentionists were represented by the election of two H-Blocks hunger strikers. Those behind their election would later claim sole proprietorship of the Sinn Féin handle.

The Abortion Referendum of 1983 allowed some of us at least to fly a flag for another Ireland, even if we never believed that holy, Catholic Ireland was ever possible to shift.

It wouldn’t be until 1990, with the election of Mary Robinson as President, that any election I invested in yielded a positive result.

The nineties and onset of the millennium brought social change at a rate that had barely seemed possible in the previous seventy years of independent statehood before that.

Maybe those of us of a progressive bent got greedy, wanting more change more quickly. More likely having been denied change for so long, progressives have forgotten that change is never relentless nor is it linear. Each Great Leap Forward is followed by several steps back.

I fear that once again we are entering a dark age. The momentum has been gained, and the agenda has been won back by reactionaries. Hard won rights will recede amid much gnashing of teeth.

Despite that I’m not overcome with any sense of impending apocalyptic doom. Or with the feeling of powerlessness of the 1980s. Let them do their worse. They cannot roll back everything. When the argument has been won again, we will be starting from a place still far ahead from where we had begun.

Social justice can’t be guaranteed but it is inevitable. For now, at least temporarily, this is the new normal. We had better get used to it, but not for too long.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Top Pic: RTÉ Archive

From top: Anti-Trump protests in New York, November 12; Dan Boyle

Liberal smugness has been quite content to allow previously inactive portions of the electorate to wallow in their indifference.

Dan Boyle writer:

Political correctness is in the firing line. Its existence threatened by an unlikely coalition of preciousness and prejudice. Those of the lofty left have weakened the tolerance of needing to prevent the use of any language of hate, by zeroing in on what often have been the most petty examples of such speech.

The rabid right exaggerates that the right of free speech itself has been compromised by PC practice and doctrine, when what they really are being denied is the right to express prejudice. 

PC is a convenient crutch for either the left or right. By focussing on it we are ignoring the far more serious trends that have created the shifting political sands of today.

The current shift, which we need to recognise is quite a narrow shift, is based on seeds sowed forty years ago by followers of Ronald Reagan in the US, and Margaret Thatcher in Britain.

This nexus promoted the creed that individualism rather than the common good should inform policy making. For liberals the State exists to meet unmet social needs, needs that become exacerbated in a totally unregulated society.

The real failure of liberalism has been the smug and patronising assumption, that enough of the electorate would always support the common good above individualism.

We are led to believe that this shift has come about because of the participation of those who usually chose not to vote. Those left behind, those who had come to believe that voting changed little.

This has been only partially true.

The political advance of individualism has been led by those who, on the whole, have been doing very well, thank you very much. Their motivation has been to protect their entitlement from uppity others intent on (as they perceive) spoiling their way of life.

These needed to add to their columns by attracting enough of the deactivated votes of the discontented/disconnected to make a difference. Again they have been able to do so by liberal smugness, that has been quite content to allow previously inactive portions of the electorate to wallow in their indifference.

This smugness has left unchallenged the alt. right narrative that has played so strongly to the ingrained prejudices of the individualists and their convenient compatriots from the neglected reaches of society.

This is the template that has been used just as much for Trump as it had been for Brexit, and may yet do in a number of European theatres in 2017.

For liberals to win back the narrative there has to be less head in the air, less Mr. Nice Guy. The extremes of politics, both right and left, have been well prepared to lie to secure their narratives.

Liberals seem to be more prepared to deceive themselves.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle

Top pic: Getty

From top: Hillary Clinton supporters at ther Javits Centre, New York City on Tuesday night: Dan Boyle

Time to bury our misplaced faith in truth – and opinion polls.

Dan Boyle writes:

I could get angry but what would be the point. A world, not mine, exists on an entirely different set of values.

Anger is its soundtrack. It presents itself as the anger of the dispossessed. It has attracted many who are without and many who are left behind, but it is really the anger of entitlement.

The long neglected seek the unlikeliest of heroes. They don’t require logic or consistency. If it isn’t what has been there before, by extension it has to be better.

Characteristics that should be viewed as positives, such the value of experience, are deemed to be negative, if the individual is seen as an embedded part of the system. Paradoxically a maverick can be celebrated for not being experienced or competent or just by being downright gauche.

Too many years ago the BBC ran a entertainingly amusing sketch programme called Not The Nine O’Clock News. One of my favourite sketches had a social worker affecting empathy. He was talking to an interviewer saying “I know these kids. I’ve lived with them for ten years. I understand their problems. Through this I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing that can work is to cut off their goolies.”

Gooly cutting should be an activity we lily-livered liberals could consider taking up. Decades of seeking to understand and trying to empathise with those plights we sought to identify with, only ended up with our patronising them. This is one of those factors that has brought about the world of Trump and of Brexit.

We are now living in an in your face time. To thrive requires an in your face attitude. Ours is not to reason why, ours is to shout loudly and incoherently.

Anger is an energy. Not necessarily a positive energy. It’s enough that it exists. To direct it would be to spoil its effect.

If discourse now consists of irate ramblings, the content of such ramblings need not underpinned by anything as inconvenient as facts. Time was when facts were facts. Now facts are anything you want them to be. As Homer Simpson has memorably said “You can prove anything with statistics. 62% of people know that.”

If anything is to be is to welcomed in these uncertain times let it be that we don’t need to be protected from surprise. The art of opinion polling tells us things we need not know. It leads us astray.

As we bury the effects of a past that seems to have served us badly – an unfortunate attachment to absolute truth; a far too romantic expectation that debate should be civil; or that somewhat silly belief that progress is achieved through consistent behaviour – if we also include in that burial a misplaced faith in opinion polling, then our regret need not be total.

A Brave New World awaits. We have always loved Big Brother.

Dan Boyle is a former Green Party TD and Senator. Follow Dan on Twitter: @sendboyle