Kathy Sheridan: If Verona Murphy is elected on Friday, what will it tell us?

Our leaders are developing quite the annoying habit of chivvying us to move on. Forget about it. Let it go.

It is true that the generally healthy response to most of life’s annoyances is to ventilate the point (or not to bother) and move on. The bigger issues are another matter. By whisking Verona Murphy off to a direct provision centre and fitting her out with sackcloth, ashes and a vanishing trick, Fine Gael is telling us there is no more to see here. Move on.

The voters will decide of course. But here is the intellectually infuriating part.

Is there anyone with a single functioning brain cell who believes that this suddenly contrite, media-shy Fine Gael candidate is the same “local and vocal” individual who famously “shoots from the hip”, the girl who left home at 14 and dropped out of school at 15, the woman who became a single parent and did her Leaving Cert in her 30s followed by a law degree, in the meantime investing in several trucks and elbowing her way into the dog-eat-dog haulage business?

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It's just a year since Miriam Lord in her "Winners, Losers and Total Eejit Awards for 2018" tipped Murphy as Fine Gael's choice in the next election, describing her as "a much sought-after commentator about Brexit and its effects on business. Her impressive grasp of her brief and knowledge of the transport sector has left many Leave cheerleaders floundering ..."

Clearly, Verona Murphy is a redoubtable woman but both these versions of her cannot be true. Is she the will-of-iron woman who overcame deep adversity – including homelessness – to acquire mastery of legal detail and global complexity? Or is she the woman who blurts out a stream of dangerous, evidence-free whimsy about a burgeoning threat from Isis-indoctrinated three-year-olds (among other things), before undergoing an overnight Damascene conversion and offering up her mouth to be gagged?

She cannot be both. Fine Gael says she can.

It’s difficult to say who should be more offended by the charade; Murphy herself, or the plain people being told to move on. Crucially, we are still no wiser about the source of her claims despite the gravity of them.

Career politicians demean themselves by promoting the notion that business success of itself qualifies an individual for public office

“Verona Murphy’s not guilty of anything only speaking her mind,” a local man told The Irish Times. “Verona Murphy is sound as a pound. She doesn’t hang around. She’s not one who ever got anything from anyone else. Anything she has, she earned herself.”

This is a type of defence often raised on behalf of beleaguered types whose political-correctness-gone-mad chip has gone fatal error. Translated, it means that their only sin was to speak their mind and how dare anyone criticise successful business people.

That defence also recycles the myth of the business people who made it entirely on their own. In developed countries, no business is an island. They benefit from the contribution of every inhabitant who together provide social order, the rule of law, a regulatory and physical infrastructure, welfare, health and education systems, training subsidies, business development grants, generous taxation measures, trade agreements and investors who took a punt on them along the way.

Public service

Career politicians demean themselves by promoting the notion that business success of itself qualifies an individual for public office. A lack of business or “real life” experience did not detract from the remarkable public service of Seán Lemass, the father of modern Ireland, who was elected a TD at the age of 25 and became a powerful minister for industry and commerce only eight years later.

By contrast, Boris Johnson had plenty of "real life" experience albeit as an overindulged, lying journalist, who was fired not once but twice, as had Donald Trump, who managed to drag himself into the development game with just the $413 million inherited from his father.

If Verona Murphy is elected on Friday, what will it tell us? That as a strategy, the official “move on” narrative worked. And/or that the voters agree with Murphy’s original analysis and think she was forced into the direct provision visit and the U-turn by cynical party spinners. Either way, it is offensive.

And it is happening while a byelection candidate elsewhere is openly filmed in a halal butchers, challenging the man behind the counter about the absence of pork. “Why not? You’re in Ireland. We love our pork”, she says in querulous tones. “Halal in the middle of Swords ... Okay, well, pork is one of our national foods in Ireland. We love our pork and we’re never going to stop eating it.”

There is no mention of animal welfare, merely this pathetic, nakedly racist protest on behalf of a “national” food, namely sausages and rashers.

We can be casually dismissive about this as the dedicated work of a few conspiracy-minded bigots or the mad, mistaken ideas of relatively decent people. Or from here on, we demand rigorous, evidence-based fact to support every contention by every candidate that crosses our path. Beginning with a demand of the governing party that they begin the process right now.