In November 2010, The Irish Times published a strident editorial under the headline “Was it for this?”. The piece castigated the then Fianna Fáil-led government for bringing the country to the edge of bankruptcy and the title was a direct reference to the WB Yeats poem September 1913 – a Leaving Certificate staple that rails against the demise of idealism and patriotism in fin de siècle Ireland.
The key line in the editorial was “we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund”.
It struck a nerve with Fianna Fáil and its leader at the time, taoiseach Brian Cowen. And it still rankles, according to reports over the weekend, that Cowen refuses to accept the description of the events as a surrender, according to a new biography by Gary Murphy called Brian Cowen: Anatomy of a Taoiseach.
“What we did was to subject ourselves to a period of fiscal discipline which was in our own interest to observe, given that the Troika was the only way to access the money we needed to keep the country functioning,” the former taoiseach countered.
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Cowen is of course technically correct. The decision to hand oversight of your fiscal policies to someone else is, in many ways, the ultimate act of sovereignty. Cowen’s government did have choices. The trouble was that none of them were good ones.
It is understandable that Cowen should rely on such solipsism to defend what remains of his reputation, but his real problem is that nobody seems to agree with him or care.
Michael O’Leary, the bombastic Ryanair chief executive, faces a similar dilemma as he ploughs a lonely enough furrow on the appropriate use of the word rape. In his latest publicity-catching outburst, O’Leary likened his rivals to “high-fare rapists” and predicted their passengers would soon realise this and switch to Ryanair.
He could also have predicted the reference to rape would not go down well in all quarters. “Undoubtedly, the words of high-profile individuals can contribute to trivialising and tolerating sexual violence in our society. And for many survivors of rape, his words will be deeply hurtful and angering to hear,” cautioned the chief executive of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Rachel Morrogh.
She offered O’Leary some sensitivity training. If he had accepted, Morrogh could have sold tickets and hit her annual fundraising target overnight. O’Leary declined and wrote back arguing that “I certainly did not trivialise the crime of rape as you wrongly claim”.
He added that he clarified at the time his position on rape. “I was asked what I thought of rape and answered that it was a heinous crime,” he said. “I could not have been clearer.
“I am quite clear that no remarks of mine could possibly trivialise the heinous crime of rape.”
You are still left wondering how it can be so clear to O’Leary that he did no harm referencing this heinous crime when trash talking his rivals, yet it is far from clear to the rest of us.
There is maybe, just perhaps, a sliver of an argument here about the importance of context. This tends to get overlooked a bit in the current climate. Certainly, my dictionary tells me the broader definition of the word rape encompasses the seizure, carrying off, or violation of something. But if that is O’Leary’s argument, he is in Cowen territory.
Still, it remains his prerogative to argue that the reference was not harmful.
Ultimately, it is for the board of Ryanair to decide if such utterances are appropriate for the chief executive of an airline that employs thousands of women and who has just received a pay package that could be worth more than €150 million in time.
Interestingly, women are well represented on the board, making up half of the directors. Amber Rudd, the former UK home secretary who has spoken out against violence against women many times, is on the board. Elisabeth Köstinger is also on the board. She is a former MEP and member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality.
The other four women on the airline’s board – Róisín Brennan, Emer Daly, Jinane Laghrari Laabi and Anne Nolan – are well-respected business figures.
Even if they decide to give O’Leary a pass – as it seems they have – they should at least be concerned that he now needs to punch down so hard to generate the shock publicity for which he is famous. We may have witnessed peak O’Leary.
