Cheap, personal shots at politicians demean everyone involved

At the weekend, two prominent politicians came under fire for reasons that appear nowhere in the “here be dragons” chapter of the political manual.

Eoin Ó Broin has been tweeting images of nice dinners for a while.

Last December, he prepared a multi-course delight for his in-laws – a “beetroot and anchovy salad, fried mushroom with eggs yolks, slow roast soy and honey pork and cava sorbette dessert”.

Lynn (Boylan, his wife) had pickled the beetroot herself, he added. One wit wondered if Leo Varadkar had hijacked his account – work that one out for yourselves if you can be bothered – but the response was mainly quite admiring.

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It was only when a Sunday newspaper picked up the tweet with added fish puns that some of the crowd steamed back onside

Last Thursday, Ó Broin posted more dinner pictures, this time focused on seafood: “Breaded fried oysters with gribiche dressing and devilled spider crab in sherry and cream sauce”. Thanking the seafood company for delivering the raw materials, cooking it “took a while”, he said to no one’s surprise.

His followers were . . . underwhelmed. Offence was taken at the flaunting of such delicacies while on the average industrial wage (clearly some misunderstanding there about the long-ditched Sinn Féin policy of docking elected members’ salaries), amid numerous references to Animal Farm, champagne socialists and food banks.

The ignorance and bad faith were full on. In fact, Ó Broin’s labour-intensive efforts were as cheap as two Big Mac meals.

Bullet-proof confidence

It was only when a Sunday newspaper picked up the tweet with added fish puns that some of the crowd steamed back onside. One defended Ó Broin’s foodie choices with a Wikipedia clip – “after An Gorta Mór, seafood and particularly shellfish became associated with the poor and the shame of colonisation” – and a lash at “West Brit journalists”.

Another condemned the attempt to define someone’s politics by his dinner. Some wit suggested it was “more what I would expect to be served at the Vice-Regal Lodge”.

Ó Broin tweeted a picture of fresh oysters with Tabasco sauce and further thanks to the delivery company by way of reply. And why not?

Watching a heaving sub-set of social media turn its ignorance and malice on any elected representative is always disturbing

It takes a certain kind of bullet-proof confidence to attach such culinary adventures to your party-of-the-people brand. Now close your eyes for a minute and imagine the scenes if Eoghan Murphy or Alan Kelly tried it.

For all we know, Ó Broin may spend much of his downtime doing fiddly things with rehydrated chickpeas but either way, what class of unfortunate defines a politician by his labour-intensive dinner?

Stereotyping and pigeon-holing are lazy at best. Cheap, personal shots at politicians demean everyone involved. People somewhere have chosen them as fitting representatives (although a subset continues to deny this if a candidate failed to head the poll).

Within minutes of the Taoiseach’s address to the nation on Friday evening – an important one since it was heralding some unravelling of the lockdown and a general sense of the country’s direction – when he was dismissed in a tweet as “The Robot”.

“Never before has anyone spoken so woodenly. So slowly. And. Said. So little. He tried to smile and do the empathy thing, it did not go well. The autocue fought the robot, and won,” pronounced Oliver Callan, performance satirist and impressionist. It got over 4,000 likes. Many of the “bios” of those posting the comments were as tiringly predictable as those of the people commenting on Ó Broin’s seafood exploits.

What is satire?

Apart from that, the tweet made no sense. A member of Varadkar’s own party had got there long before with the same put-downs.

So was it satire? Satire is defined as the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticise people’s stupidity or vice. Even within that generous definition, Callan’s tweet just about qualified as ridicule.

No sharp wit, informed view or mimicry (where Callan can be formidable); just the kind of hot take that characterises the swamplands of social media along with idiotic #notmyTaoiseach hashtags.

What it was not, was satire. Yet Ó Broin reappeared next day to defend Callan’s tweets as just that, tweeting a link to a Callan skit about Varadkar checking his notes on the Late Late Show, and saying a public “bravo” to Callan “for sticking to your guns (urr . . . can I say that as a Shinner?) . . .”

“Criticising, questioning and lampooning those in power is healthy,” said Ó Broin, “and should never be shut down.”

All true, of course, but people are entitled to argue back and many did.

Callan said he hadn’t read them, which is a pity. Many of his Friday critics were not defending Varadkar’s politics; they were saying in summary that even allowing for regular political hostilities, the tweet was incongruous, poorly timed and was devoid of purpose.

Watching a heaving sub-set of social media turn its ignorance and malice on any elected representative is always disturbing, whether it’s about shellfish or addressing a fearful, fragile people. Attempts to engage with the perpetrators or merely ignoring them is often a denial of brute reality as many women – and men – have discovered after a lifetime of being lambasted for not seeing the “joke”. But we do expect others with powerful platforms to see it for what it is.

As for the joke about “sticking to your guns”– “(urr . . . can I say that as a Shinner?)” , it really is too soon. Way, way too soon.