Speaking of stirring political rhetoric — don’t mention Leinster House

LEO Varadkar is extremely witty. To this I can testify, having seen him in action at the Trim Swift Festival at the weekend.

The festival celebrates the connection between the Meath town and Jonathan Swift, the satirist, dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral and author of Gulliver’s Travels.

Over the past few years Trim has, each June, brought together a collection of politicians, commentators and academics to take part in an event that really should not work. This even happens in the middle of the festival and takes the form of a dinner in the Knightsbrook Hotel, where a dozen big round tables are populated by guests who pay for the food and the fun — if any — to be found in conversation with politicians, commentators and academics until the moment comes when the reasonably well-known person at their particular table is handed a microphone and a four-minute time limit and allowed to express themselves about Swift, life, the universe, satire and whatever they’re having themselves.

It should not work because the speakers talk before dinner is served and while dinner is being served. No speaker knows in advance whether they’re competing for diners’ attention with a starter or a main course. The waiting staff do their clinky thing throughout. Undeterred, speakers stand to attention and break the rules in whatever way it suits them. Most of the speakers ignore the set theme. Almost all of them disregard the time allotted to them. The result is a series of non-sequitur contributions that last as long as it suits each speaker. You can see why this, on the face of it, simply should not work.

But, like many things in Ireland that should not work, it works perfectly. We won’t go into the things in Ireland that are supposed to work perfectly but which don’t work at all.

It works so well that this year 15 tables were required, as opposed to last year’s dozen, and those tables were packed so tightly with people that if someone needed to take a mobile phone or a hanky out of their trouser pocket, everybody else at their table had to do an accommodating Mexican wave to either side.

One of the reasons it works is that the Trim Swift people have a gift for choosing chairpeople who themselves are aggressively amusing — this year’s was George Hook — and academics who talk like human beings and bring Swift’s love-life into present-day terms, or — in the case of Dr Elaine Byrne — manage to turn a game of ‘25’ into an engaging moral lesson for the nation.

But the main reason it works is because, every year, some speaker says something that makes everybody laugh and think. This year, several of them did so. Leo Varadkar had taken time away from his ministerial duties to prepare a clever Swiftian pastiche.

The storyline depended on a tribe called The Endians, which the audience assumed to signify Fine Gael. It was subtle. It was smart. It was self-deprecating. Self-deprecation is A Good Thing, although it can be overdone. It’s overdone at the point where an audience wants to say “We get how humble you are. We really get it, OK? If you keep going on about how humble you are, we’ll come to the opposite conclusion, so move along, please.”

Mr Varadkar negotiated that fine line with aplomb and sat down to applause threaded through with comments like “He was good last year, too” and shared recollections of what he had said back then.

It’s extremely doubtful that even the biggest fans of the Minister for Bonus Abolition would have been able to quote from any speech the same man has made in Leinster House in the past 12 months.

NOW isn’t that astonishing? The history of parliamentary democracy is replete with examples of thought-provoking oratory on the part of public representatives. Parliament used to be the place to raise and explore new ideas, new variations on traditional modes of thought, or to turn ideas on their side and examine them from a different point of view. It provided the opportunity for great speakers to dream dreams and articulate visions. Today, that rarely if ever happens. If media coverage were the litmus test, then the only interesting things that get said in the Dáil are said during Leaders’ Questions. That’s where the media focus is, and it’s from Leaders’ Questions that most of the sound-bites featuring in news bulletins are drawn.

Leaders’ Questions is an instructive slot. Fianna Fáil fans of Brian Cowen, when he became taoiseach, looked gleefully forward to what they anticipated would be his witty weekly crushing of Opposition leader Enda Kenny. They were to be surprised and disappointed. In his entire time as taoiseach, Mr Cowen never managed to muster anything like the authority, never mind wit, his successor has shown.

The problem with Leaders’ Questions is that it is necessarily topical. That sounds good. It isn’t. Once something is topical, it becomes predictable as well, and so any fool can work out when Roscommon Hospital or the IMF are going to surface. No Opposition leader ever asks a completely unexpected question which might provoke genuinely fresh responsive thinking on the part of a taoiseach.

Of course, there are wider opportunities. The renewed enthusiasm on the part of our parliamentarians for working longer and harder, means that TDs of every hue currently have the opportunity to speak, yet roughly 80% of speeches made in Dáil Éireann are rubbish.

They’re rubbish for several reasons. Quality tends to take root when acknowledged, registered and rewarded. TDs quickly learn that what gets rewarded is controversy and constituency work. New backbenchers on the Government side spend their days bringing interest groups from their home area to meet ministers. Everybody currently involved in this knows it’s about as productive as synchronised swimming, since not even the most impassioned collective pleading can magic money up out of nowhere.

It keeps happening because the local interest group can tell their members they were taken seriously enough for a minister to see them in person, the TDs can shift the blame upwards when nothing concrete comes out of the meeting, and the ministers get a chance to prove that they’re still listening, even though they are not and cannot. That any backbencher might seek, against that background, to make a speech in the house on anything other than the local, immediate and money-related is understandably unlikely.

In all the talk of Dáil reform I’ve yet to hear anybody propose that such reform might address more than numbers and committee systems, and while the various committees allow TDs to ask questions which last considerably longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, they’re not seed -beds of great intellectual speculation or oratory. If you want to hear genuinely fresh thinking and high-end rhetoric from politicians, avoid Leinster House. Head for a summer school or a festival instead.