Séamas O'Reilly: Politicians are increasingly sharing their personal lives online for internet points 

Discussion of Leo Varadkar's pre-prepared meals prompted the FSAI to issue advice this week. Picture: Instagram

Like many of you, I found myself looking at the contents of Leo Varadkar’s fridge the other day, when he shared a bewildering photo showing a vast array of uncovered food containers, filled with inscrutable food. He captioned it: “Matt has the meal prep done for the week. Fair play!”

Just like Leo every mealtime, I found there was a lot to unpack. What were these foods, which were almost but not quite identifiable — are those eggs? Omelettes? Is that ... is that a hard slab of dry ham hock? — and why didn’t any of their containers have lids?

Within a day of this non-news, Leo had returned to Instagram to assure us that he does cover his sad little prep containers, and that they sometimes include veggies too. This prompted BrownSauce TD to tweet: “Mad that he has responded to this and not the housing crisis”, a line I can’t beat so am forced to include here in full, with nothing but admiration. 

By then, the Food Standards Authority had already been moved to issue a warning to the entire country about storing food correctly, which is probably about as bad as “sharing a picture of your fridge” can go. I won’t pretend I didn’t find this delightful.

I’m not going to get into the ifs and buts of dieting and meal prep, my disinterest in what other people eat is one of the main reasons I never got the Instagram bug in the first place. But I have questions. 

Why would you pre-cook eggs? Leaving aside the very real risk of contamination and decay inherent in leaving eggs in a fridge for a few days, the process of taking them out of the fridge and reheating them would take you approximately the same amount of time it takes to cook them from scratch. This would also have the side benefit of not a) tasting awful or b) giving you a zesty new strain of salmonella unique to Dublin 8.

And so here, having pleaded disinterest, I’m caught in the rabbit hole of thinking about all this. 

I suppose what we’re witnessing is the paradox of relatability. I don’t know if it’s necessary, or even desirable, for public figures to be relatable, but it seems increasingly important to them, and as much as I try to live and let live, every time they attempt to do this, it leaves me scratching my head.

There is a tendency to view all politicians as, basically, weird freaks. It’s a temptation I won’t fully resist in this column because lived experience has taught me that this might indeed be true. But there’s also a gnawing sense of self-interested horror when I see a picture like this; the fear that if someone saw the things I say, do, eat, or search on the internet, they’d think me a freak too.

The horror is that in sharing ourselves to people, we might realise we’re more alone than we ever previously thought or as Tim Kreider once put it, with chilling concision: “If we want the rewards of being loved, we must first submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

Do we really want to know our rulers? Do I want to see their dinner, pick their brains on their favourite movies or workout routines? No, but the problem is once that information is out there, I find I cannot look away.

And, whether by design or not, we get a news cycle talking about their favourite album, or their thoughts on football, when we should be talking about how there are about eight houses for rent in Ireland and every sixth building in Dublin is a hotel. 

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Perhaps it’s better to keep the veil obscured, to cloister our masters in professional anonymity, as dehumanised as the Wizard of Oz, so we can judge them by their words and deeds and not the baffling contents of their fridge.

The modern age has tried to make us friends with all these people, and to then mine content from that friendship. 

“We’re not so different, you and I” — the Tánaiste, foreign affairs minister, or UN secretary general seem to be saying, without realising this makes them sound like a Bond villain who’s strapping you to a table and pointing a laser beam at your crotch. 

The trouble is that the very things which often drive people into a life in frontline politics, are probably the same things which might alienate them from the vast majority of people. People who, like me, would sooner eat four-day-old eggs and leathered ham, than run for public office.

This is not all new, of course. US presidents from JFK and Bill Clinton to George W Bush, were said to have beaten their challengers for the White House, at least partly, because they seemed more like the kind of guy people wanted to go for a beer with. 

I don’t want to go for a beer with a politician any more than I want to have one with my surgeon, or pilot, but it’s clear that some politicians are better at “seeming human” than others, and that it’s becoming harder and harder to hide now that they must, like all of us, share their lives, unvarnished and unprompted, to millions of people at a time, just for meaningless internet points.

In the end, what could be more relatable than that?