A Fine Gaeler of the old school, who is not remotely an admirer of the Tánaiste, once described him to me thusly: “A facsimile of a moral man”.
“Facsimile”, of course, describes something that is a copy, but not original. It is a description of the Tánaiste that has always stuck with me. His morality has ever been a copy of someone else’s, reprinted and re-badged to suit the times, and then sold hard to the public with a furrowed brow and a glistening eye.
This has been evident throughout his career. When it was politically useful to have deep and religious convictions on the issue of abortion, he signed a pledge to the Pro-Life campaign that he would never vote to legalise the practice. Within seven years, he was the leading voice on the issue of making abortion legal. If his change of heart had been confined to that one issue, one might be forgiven for thinking that it was sincere. But the truth is that Harris has always picked up, exploited, and then discarded moral causes.
There is no greater example of that than the case of Harvey Morrison Sherratt, the little nine-year-old boy whose needlessly painful life came to a premature end at the end of July.
Simon Harris was once morally outraged by Scoliosis. Not merely eager to fix the problem, but morally outraged by the existence of the problem. His now infamous promise that no child would wait more than four months for surgery by the end of the year was made in 2017. He has been in high political office ever since, and that promise – which generated enormous headlines at the time – has never been kept.
This I think would keep a normal person awake at night. A solemn promise made to some of the most vulnerable families in Ireland. Children living with debilitating pain and real risk to their lives. Families living with the mental agony of watching a child suffer. Families who were given false hope.
I would like to think that most of us would feel shame, having made a promise like that, to people like that, and not kept it. I would like to think that most of us would devote every waking hour available to us to keep our word.
I do not know what goes on in the Tánaiste’s head. Few do, even his closest colleagues. He is inscrutable and unreadable. We can only judge what comes out of his mouth – and what comes out of his mouth is a constant stream of new moral causes. Racism. Gaza. LGBT rights. Ukraine. Climate Change. Back to school costs.
None of these moral causes are his own. Each and every one of them is adopted, re-purposed, and re-packaged into Brand Harris. The message around each is unchanged: He cares. He really cares.
But, does he?
He recognises, I think, that moral certainty is an attractive quality in a politician. More than anybody else in the history of our republic, he has risen to the top by making every mundane political issue into a kind of moral crusade. Other politicians do things because they need doing. Harris promises to do them because they are the kind of thing a really good caring politician would do. He grabs your attention for five minutes on TikTok, or Instagram, and then moves on to the next cause.
In some ways he is the perfect politician for the age of scrolling. He has mastered the social media algorithm… funny dog video; girl hawking her onlyfans; Simon Harris reminding you to register to vote; top ten best goals from 2002; ad for some cheap Chinese tat on Temu…. He takes thirty seconds of your attention, and makes you think he cares.
But it is empty: Social media politics for a social media age. As genuine and as deep as the Onlyfan’s girl’s affections, and as durable as the Temu tat. When he takes his leave of high office, his legacy will be one of entire emptiness. There will be no great void of leadership, and no lasting line of concrete accomplishments.
But there will be a measure of his failure. There will be the headstone of Harvey Morrison Sherratt, dead too soon. There will be the other children and young adults, with their twisted spines and constant pain. The entire performance has only ever been a facsimile of moral certainty, reflected back at a gullible public by a man whose great skill has ever been to pretend to care about things just as much as you do.
He is in many ways the politician who best sums up modern Ireland. Moreso than any of his contemporaries, even those like Mr. Martin who in recent years have come to copy his furrowed-brow style of carefully coiffed decency and moral certainty.
But we are an empty country in the Harris age. Laden with money and morals, more of either than the Government knows what to do with, but barren in terms of accomplishment or delivery. The money, the morals, and the politicians are the lick of paint on a rickety house.
The reality is that this wealthy, oh-so-moral society of ours let a nine year old boy die for the want of treatment that our politicians promised him. And it did so because despite the money and the morals, we are an unserious people, governed by unserious politicians of our own free choosing.