Séamas O'Reilly: The streetlights are on and we should use them to find answers and solutions

There’s a common pathology in making the left and right natural opposites, the horseshoe theory

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

There’s an old joke about a fool searching for his keys under a streetlight. A neighbour joins him and helps him look, but to no avail. After a long time, he asks his friend if he’s sure this is where he lost them. “Not at all,” says the fool, “I lost them in the park, but this is where the lights are on.” This week, we’ve seen the Streetlight Fallacy in full effect, as many in the Irish media have tried to discern the causes of the far-right demonstrations outside the Dáil, and decided that the Left must share the blame. Criticising protest (all protest, whatever its causes) appears to be the only streetlight some pundits have, and they cling to it even as its use has lapsed into the realm of the absurd.

There’s a common pathology in making the left and right natural and equal opposites (the horseshoe theory which places any position too far left as being identical to that of their political opposites) preserving some notional centre ground as the natural, sensible position. This is fatuous, on its face, since it is not merely possible, but desirable, to discuss the merits and dangers of political beliefs in and of themselves, not by their philosophical distance from whatever status quo currently exists. When one side is fomenting hatred against immigrants, gays and trans people, and the other objects to their so doing (and wants the housing crisis sorted); ‘Both sides-ism’ is not just inappropriate, but criminally negligent.

What, after all, are the disincentives for right-wing hatemongers? After months screaming obscenities at minorities, barraging librarians and trans people with abuse and setting fire to homeless camps, they finally got the mass media’s attention by bringing a gallows to the Dáil. And for these labours, they have suffered the horrible blow of a slew of columns which spend their word count focusing on the indignities of a notional Left that these fascists despise themselves.

The best that can be said of some of the commentary is that it was confusing. At least half a dozen newspaper pieces and numerous radio segments chose to cover the story through the lens of ‘mob rule’ as if these protests stemmed from punters’ upset at the loss of a football match, or a Black Friday sale gone wrong. These eschewed mention of the actual goals or beliefs of this increasingly organised band of politically motivated far right activists, and with it the necessary reflections on who they were, what they want, and who they hate. Worse, alternative candidates were routinely suggested. Everyone from People Before Profit’s Paul Murphy, President Michael D Higgins, and Fr Peter McVerry, were at some point mooted as being either fully, or partly, responsible for whipping up ‘incoherent rage’ against politicians.

Members of the public protest outside Leinster House. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos

They too, the argument went, have criticised government policy in stronger-than-necessary terms. One might observe that if criticising government policy in strong terms is analogous to demanding said politicians be hung outside their workplace, there are few politicians, journalists or voters in Ireland who would escape such a charge. One must also wrestle with the fact that those who brought the gallows to the Dáil would happily see the likes of Murphy, Higgins and McVerry hung first.

In the case of Murphy, who would go on to find himself quite outnumbered on RTÉ’s Up Front later in the week, some sought to wind the clock back to the 2014 water charges protests, citing the now infamous incident in which minister Joan Burton was trapped in her car for three hours, under police guard, in the middle of a demonstration. Murphy, who was arrested for his part in that Water Rights movement, was several times accused of hypocrisy for criticising these recent protests, and not his own.

The similarities between the two incidents (hostility to government leading to civil disorder) are judged sufficient to ignore the many, and meaningful, differences between a slow march protest against unfair taxation, and racist agitators calling for the execution of their political enemies outside government.

One might wonder why those who wish to draw an equivalence between left and right must stretch back nine years to find such an unhelpful test case, while also developing a specific amnesia about the trials that resulted three years later. At the trials, six of those arrested during dawn raids for false imprisonment were found not guilty, and the seventh acquitted, after the judge cast doubt on 180 garda statements which were directly contradicted by video evidence. (In light of the Government’s stated ‘hands off’ policy with the far-right, we await with interest the dawn raids to be undertaken for those who amassed outside Leinster House with a noose.)

Such fallacies aren’t just bad because they’re incoherent, nor even just because they waste time and oxygen fighting irrelevant ideological turf wars. Their worst crime is that they embolden the enemy, diluting their specific evils and inculcating, within more passive observers, an ambient sense that their beliefs are closer to the frame of common decency than they are.

If someone says people posting rude tweets about the housing crisis are just as bad as people screaming obscenities at our Muslim neighbours, and threatening libraries with closure for displaying LGBT materials, they are doing a moral and intellectual disservice to themselves and others. To put it another way: if a deadly virus is running riot in the streets, and you spend 80% of your coverage on the dangers of the common cold, you’re not just grossly overstating the dangers of the latter, you’re dangerously complacent about the seriousness of the former.

The Left had nothing to do with these protests, other than to tell the powers-that-be that their complacency about far-right agitators was making such escalations inevitable. The streetlights are now on, and we should be using them to search for proper answers and solutions. We’ll need to. After this week’s absurd
exercise in whataboutery, it’s hard not to think that worse is yet to come.