New party needs a reboot already: it’s devoid of passion or purpose
WHAT is the point of Reboot Ireland?
Apart from interviews with its leaders, the new party consists of a website with a couple of pretty pictures, four bland sentences constructed to be as inoffensive as possible, and nothing else.
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Well, sorry. There’s also a Facebook page that has (as of yesterday evening) 184 likes.
I was one of those likes, because I hit the like button to make sure it was working. It had to be broken, I thought, because how else could the best-and-brightest new idea in Ireland’s politics have scored so badly?
There’s also a Twitter account that gets tweets from loads of people making fun of the name Reboot Ireland’s leaders have chosen for their party.
#rebootireland? You mean like this, lads? That'll work. pic.twitter.com/m21ZIOeOaj
— Pat O'Mahony (@patomahony1) January 3, 2015
The phrase “their party” refers to Lucinda Creighton, Eddie Hobbs, and a councillor from Offaly whose name I can’t remember. They want us all to give them €1m, I read in the newspapers, so they can mount a national campaign.
What do they want to campaign about?
They want to champion human inventiveness. They’re passionate about building a new economy that supports entrepreneurs, employees, and small businesses. They’ll fight their way towards a spirit of entrepreneurism in our public sector.
That’s only the half of it.
By hook or by crook, they will create a political system that supports freedom of thought, difference and independence.
And, no matter how many sacrifices they have to make, they will underpin Irish society with fiscal and social policies that have a “Minimum Lifestyle Standard”. (Notice the capital letters — this won’t be one of your bog-standard minimum lifestyle standards. Reboot Ireland is going for the big one — a Minimum Lifestyle Standard with capital letters, no less.)
In a lifetime of involvement and participation in political activity, and a half-lifetime of commenting on it, I have never seen such compete claptrap.
We’re supposed to believe, according to Reboot Ireland’s interviews, that 100 of them have been working in secret on this for months. And this is the best they can do? Not one spelled-out idea?
I’m all in favour of the members of a party deciding its policies. But every substantial political party in Ireland has been built around a substantial idea — an idea that can generate real passion.
This is the flimsiest foundation stone any party has ever had under it.
There’s no anger here, no passion, no conviction.
It all reads like it was written by people who fancy themselves as marketers, or merchandisers.
Some political parties want to fight for the poor and the downtrodden. Some want to fight for the free economy. Some have single, critical issues, such as the environment.
This crowd wants to champion human inventiveness.
When the party’s founder, Lucinda Creighton, is asked about the first national campaign in which it will be be involved, the referendum on same-sex marriage, she says that she’ll “probably support it”, but her party won’t take any position on it.
If that’s her idea of leadership, God help us all.
Thanks for the feedback both critical & positive today. An exciting journey ahead. Let's hope we prove the cynics wrong #rebootireland
— Lucinda Creighton (@LCreighton) January 3, 2015
Serious political parties don’t opt out of taking positions on controversial subjects. People who believe you can build a political party on merchandising do.
When you read the drivel Reboot Ireland have produced so far, and then you watch Charlie, the TV show, you get the point.
Charlie got off to a cracking good start on Sunday night.
It’s rare to watch a TV show that is genuinely hard to believe, even though it’s about stuff we all lived through. If it was political fiction, it would probably be dismissed.
Sure, some of the relationships in the series seem stretched, and not all the characters are as sympathetically written as I’d like them to be.
But the creators of the show have got the central character, Charlie Haughey, spot on: Haughey’s certainty about his own abilities, coupled with the chip on his shoulder that never left him; the way he literally handed out gifts and goodies to his constituents, side by side with the grubby venality that made him the property of any rich man with spare cash; his charm and his anger, his oratorical gifts and his foul mouth; his potential for greatness and his ultimate corruption.
All the contradictions within him led to the most remarkable contradiction about him: no politician in the last half-century in Ireland was followed with more passion and fervour, and yet none was ever opposed with more determination and fervour.
To follow Haughey required blind loyalty. But opposing him required courage, because he could be both fearful and dangerous.
Those who opposed him included journalists and other politicians.
And, of course, among the most important of those who opposed Charlie — and yet spent a good deal of his political life working alongside him — was Des O’Malley, whose book I’m reading at the moment, and who is really well-portrayed, in the TV show, by a young Irish actor, Marcus Lamb.
O’Malley went on to found the Progressive Democrats. (By the way, I can just imagine O’Malley’s reaction if some bright spark suggested to him that he could launch a party without a name.)
Throughout their history, despite the occasional contradiction, the PDs believed in free-market economics, but were liberal on a wide range of social issues.
However, the visceral motivation behind O’Malley and the PDs, the thing that was in the gut of the party, was a revulsion against Haughey and the politics that he represented.
If it hadn’t been for Haughey, O’Malley would never have opposed Fianna Fáil, and would ultimately have led it.
Maybe the difference between the PDs and Reboot Ireland is simply this: The PDs had ideas, and people able to articulate them.
But, over and above that, they were driven by a passion — a need to rid politics of something dangerous and corrupting.
Reboot Ireland, on the other hand, has nothing in its guts, apart from, maybe, a bit of a whinge.
At a time when people throughout Ireland are genuinely angry at the mess that has been made of our politics, when the overwhelming sense is that we have been managed, rather than led, through a period of austerity, when there is real room for new ideas and passion, Reboot Ireland seems to miss the point entirely.
It’s perhaps not surprising that so many of the likely candidates — Shane Ross, Stephen Donnelly, and others — have fought shy of following the leadership offered by Lucinda and Eddie.
Perhaps Reboot Ireland thought that by launching something now, no matter how meaningless and amorphous, they would occupy some sort of commanding position in the centre right, and prevent others from making shapes.
I suspect that was yet another miscalculation. The process of building alliances will go on for a while yet.
Reboot Ireland might be out ahead of the posse, but it’s riding a pretty lame, tired old donkey.
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