THE FUNNY THING about Jim O\u2019Callaghan is that the more that seems to go wrong during his tenure as minister for justice, the more inevitable it seems that he\u2019ll be the next leader of his party.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was caught flat-footed by the fuel protests at Easter and exacerbated matters by threatening to send in the army<\/a>. He\u2019s also been at war with solicitors<\/a> for months now in a tug-of-war that is damaging trust in the Irish justice system.<\/p>\n But at the end of the day, what\u2019s more Fianna F\u00e1il than limping from one preventable crisis to the next without ever once thinking \u201cDo you know what? Maybe somebody else could do a better job of this.\u201d<\/p>\n This week \u2014 in addition to getting on Twitter to brag about deporting a few dozen Romanians<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 O\u2019Callaghan reminded us yet again what a big tough guy he is when he intervened to instruct the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) to remove a controversial ad<\/a> that gently tried to open a difficult conversation around consent when it comes to children being hugged or touched by older relatives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having read about the ad before I watched it, I assumed it was some kind of horror show, designed to drum up paranoia that anyone\u2019s kindly old grandparents might actually be child molesters deep down. When, upon watching, I discovered that it was a 26-second clip in which a child looks mildly uncomfortable and confused about what to say as her grandparents approach her for a hug, I thought \u2014 \u201cYeah, I bet there are a lot of kids who feel that way, and those kids and their parents, and indeed their grandparents, should have the space to discuss such an uncomfortable eventuality\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n O\u2019Callaghan took it differently, writing on X: \u201cIt goes without saying that having loving grandparents in a child\u2019s life is an incredibly positive thing to be cherished and not something to be campaigned against.\u201d What should actually go without saying is that the ad does absolutely no such thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ad acknowledges explicitly that these issues are \u2018awkward\u2019 but \u2018important\u2019. Of course, they become a lot more awkward when they\u2019re wilfully misconstrued by a government minister in a bid to inflame the passions of people who, understandably, might feel concerned about a narrative that we all should all be scared of all grandparents \u2014 a point that the ad does not even come close to actually making.\u00a0<\/p>\n There is, of course, an argument to be made that the ad could have been better. Few ads that address such serious topics are perfect. Isn\u2019t the same true of ads about the dangers of smoking, drink-drinking, or the Ronnie Drew chicken* who sings about carbon monoxide?\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, there are innumerable important and instructive reasons why a child might not want to be touched by a relative.<\/p>\n Maybe they would like to be hugged but are suffering from a sensory processing condition that\u2019s confusing and overwhelming them. That\u2019s something you might want to ask your kid about.<\/p>\n Maybe they have been touched in an uncomfortable way by another adult, and they are struggling to trust other adults. That\u2019s something you might want to ask your kid about.<\/p>\n Maybe, in some cases, that relative has acted inappropriately towards them. Let\u2019s do this, actually \u2014 let\u2019s look at all the child sex abuse cases from Ireland in the last 20 years and see how many involved say, a trans person, or an immigrant, and then let\u2019s see how many have involved a close relative.<\/p>\n Not wanting to acknowledge how sexual abuse happens, where it happens, where it comes from, who perpetrates it, is exactly how Ireland worked in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s. And what is the counterargument here, by the way?<\/p>\n I mean what, according to Jim O\u2019Callaghan, is supposed to happen when a child expresses discomfort about hugging an older relative? Their parents should make them do it anyway?<\/p>\n What is so strange about O\u2019Callaghan\u2019s persistent tough guy schtick is that it\u2019s not helping Fianna F\u00e1il politically. The latest polls had Fianna F\u00e1il in around where the polls always have Fianna F\u00e1il. They\u2019re at 18%, which is pretty much within the margin of error of every other polling position they\u2019ve had for the last five years. It\u2019s always somewhere between 16% and 22%, it\u2019s always within a few points of Fine Gael and Sinn F\u00e9in. Jim O\u2019Callaghan could grow himself a foot taller overnight and hulk out like those little aliens from Space Jam, and it still won\u2019t do anything for Fianna F\u00e1il\u2019s standing among the weird, ravenous, conservative, tough-on-crime, anti-NGO, save-the-nuclear-family in his Twitter comments whom he is trying so vainly to impress.\u00a0<\/p>\n But given all the pressure from beneath to act like a tough guy, it should come as no surprise that Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin ended up overextending himself in D\u00e1il \u00c9ireann this week too.<\/p>\n A matter of minutes into a D\u00e1il debate on neutrality, Martin accused Sinn F\u00e9in of past support for Nazism during World War II. This is quite a can of worms to open, given Mr Fianna F\u00e1il Eamon De Valera\u2019s infamous signing of the book of condolence for Hitler, to say nothing of the fact that the party with whom he shares a government can also trace its roots back to an organisation with a fascist ethos. Not one of the three major parties can exactly pat themselves on the back on that particular issue. Still, with Big Jim making it clear how tough he is, what choice does Martin have?\u00a0<\/p>\n O\u2019Callaghan has made it quite clear that he\u2019d like to be the next leader of Fianna F\u00e1il, and at times it has seemed as though he was gearing up to challenge Martin\u2019s leadership. He\u2019s not quite tough enough for that it seems, but if Martin\u2019s position should ever weaken sufficiently, one suspects he\u2019ll be in there.<\/p>\n And yet, perhaps there\u2019s another way forward for Fianna F\u00e1il.<\/p>\n Ryan Tubridy of all people popped back up this week to let us all know he\u2019s still looking for something to do since leaving RT\u00c9, and that he\u2019s considering politics. Fianna F\u00e1il politics, specifically.<\/p>\n \u201cThis bloody politics is coursing through my veins,\u201d he told said during a panel discussion in Galway this week, referring to his family\u2019s long history of holding elected office in Ireland. Tubridy would offer a less cantankerous face to the party. Maybe he can bring his only closely held causes to the fore and turn Fianna F\u00e1il into the party of child literacy.<\/p>\n It would be a far cry from where they are now: the party of throwing its weight around, calling people Nazis, and suggesting children hug adults they don\u2019t particularly want to hug.\u00a0<\/p>\n *I know it\u2019s a canary. I call it a chicken because I don\u2019t like it, and belittling it takes away its power.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE FUNNY THING about Jim O\u2019Callaghan is that the more that seems to go wrong during his tenure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[58418,42,43,2733,3931,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-665895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-carl-kinsella","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-october","tag-surrealing-in-the-years","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}