Is merciless treatment of Ming just schadenfreude?

THE excoriation of Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan has been a thing to behold.

He gave the media the stick and they happily battered him with it.

He shot off his mouth about “Garda corruption” and denied having penalty points removed. He went on Vincent Browne and offered pathetic justifications in an excruciating display. He refused to consider resignation when Chris Huhne got jail time. His background as a pro-waccy-baccy campaigner added juice to the coverage: it could be slyly implied that Ming’s brains were too addled for him to know what he was doing.

But it doesn’t answer the question as to whether Flanagan was stupid in this instance, or if he has morphed into our typical notion of an Irish politician: a cute hoor out for himself.

If it is the latter, then he is not very cute: your average backbencher would have had no difficulty coming up with a more credible narrative than Ming did. A piece of Weetabix would have been more believable.

But Ming isn’t stupid. Far from it. Over a decade or so, I’ve interviewed Ming many times, and his intelligence is startling. More importantly, he means what he says. His passion is evident, as is a lack of guile. Not long after Mick Wallace’s fall from grace, Ming said to me, on air, that he probably would be more condemnatory of a Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil TD diddling their taxes, but found it difficult in the case of Wallace, because he knew him and liked him. It’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit in politics. If politics is the cold and careful marshalling of information to give yourself maximum advantage, then Luke Flanagan is, indeed, a terrible politician.

He was, let’s remember, elected along with a tranche of other independents in 2011, at a time when the public thirst for a new type of politics was never so acute. Two years later, we have a coalition acting largely the same as the last coalition, and Fianna Fáil apparently coming back from the dead. So much for the new politics. And, since that time, I’ve sensed in Ming an increasing exasperation; perhaps a slow realisation that the dramatic change he, and others, hoped to bring about simply isn’t going to happen. He denies it.

None of this is by way of explanation or even mitigation. Ming was astoundingly stupid, at best. But amidst all the media indignation was a touch of schadenfreude: a satisfaction that Ming got what was coming to him for thinking he could change anything and for being so voluble about it. He’s now in with the rest of the cute hoors. Public order is restored. And we can go back to thinking of our politicians as flimsy, two-dimensional beings, driven only by lies, ego and greed.