SO, IF I've been following events in the Dáil this week correctly, junior Government Minister Conor Lenihan apologised for calling Fine Gael's Leo Varadkar a "fascist", although he insisted he hadn't really called him a fascist, and the official record of the House agreed with him, writes Frank McNally
Hmm. I think this calls for a further amendment of Godwin's Law, the celebrated axiom on fascist insults - which, readers may know, was formulated in the early days of the internet. In its original form, Godwin's Law states that, as an online debate on any subject develops, "the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".
Although he framed it in mathematical language, as a kind of physical constant, its creator Mike Godwin had a campaigning aim. He hoped that awareness of his law might discourage trivialisation of the Nazi horror through its overuse in analogy. Nearly two decades later, it is unclear if he succeeded.
As the comment Mr Lenihan didn't make but apologised for shows, references to Nazis (FG also alleged he made a salute) remain a popular weapon in debates about subjects that have nothing to do with the Holocaust. Militant smokers, for example, protesting against state regulation of their habit, are still prone to wrapping themselves in the suffering of the death camps, when occasion demands.
But whatever about the law's success in discouraging such misuses, it has certainly achieved fame on and beyond the internet, taking on a life of its own in the process.
Godwin was not the first to complain about the overuse of Nazi analogies. As far back as the 1950s, a writer identified the limiting effect on public discourse of the "Reductio ad Hitlerum" tactic. And although this was not Godwin's primary concern, his law was soon amended to cover it.
A popular corollary - now widely confused with the law itself - states that whenever any participant in a debate resorts to a Nazi analogy about his opponent's argument, the debate on internet thread automatically ends, and the maker of the comment is deemed to have lost.
Of course, someone might use such an analogy with the deliberate intent of collapsing a discussion. But this is covered by another amendment to the law, the so-called "Quirk's Exception", which allows a transparently ulterior Nazi reference in a debate to be ignored.
Yet another offshoot - a kind-of parallel to Godwin, currently being illustrated by the US presidential campaign - says that as the probability of a liberal candidate winning an election increases, the likelihood of him being called a "socialist" also approaches 1.
Where Conor Lenihan's case fits into any of this I'm not sure. I suspect that apologising for a Nazi analogy while insisting that you didn't make one in the first place is a uniquely Irish contribution to the art of rhetoric. But the impulse to retract such a non-statement due to the moral outrage it causes is surely worthy of a codicil to Godwin. I propose that we call it the "Lenihan Paradox."
ON A slightly related topic, the Vanessa Feltz Show on BBC London rang me yesterday to see if I could explain why the term "leprechaun" is an insult in Ireland. The question arose from a court case in Liverpool, in which a Belfast woman brought charges of racially aggravated harassment against her neighbour for allegedly calling her a "f***ing leprechaun".
In the event, the case collapsed when the crown prosecutor conceded difficulty in proving that comparison with a centuries-old mythical figure, which had been extensively promoted by the Irish tourist industry, constituted a crime. The defence had shrewdly hired a lawyer of Irish ancestry, who argued successfully that the charges were political correctness gone mad.
As for the general point, all I could tell Vanessa was that, vis-à-vis the term "f***ing leprechaun", it might be the qualifying adjective rather than the noun wherein the insult lay. Of itself, the L-word itself could be innocuous. Against which, I also had to cite the incident before the current Ireland-Australia international rules series in which a former Australian coach referred to his Irish counterpart as a leprechaun, without any expletive.
This might have been interpreted as an affectionate comment on Sean Boylan's diminutive stature and his magical properties as a herbalist. But it was generally interpreted on the sports pages as a "jibe", and Boylan was commended for refusing to respond in kind.
The Reductio-ad-Leprechaunum tactic was puzzling to Irish people, I said, because we never used the term ourselves. Indeed, leprechauns did not impinge much in modern Ireland generally. Even if we invented the concept, we regarded other people's obsession with it - especially Irish-Americans' — as a symptom of plastic Paddyism that had nothing to do with us.
When Ms Feltz countered that everywhere visitors turned in Ireland, they were confronted with leprechaun motifs - in souvenir shops, certain bars, etc - I couldn't contradict her. Locals avoided such places so studiously, I suggested, that we didn't even notice them any more. The only other possible explanation was that leprechauns had evolved in recent times, and they only ever appeared now to foreigners.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie