Competence is all that matters so why do we put up with ageism?

Now that the Labour Party has had a good long look at its navel as part of its elongated but deeply democratic leadership election process, is there any chance they might get up on their hind legs and address the one issue that surfaced, and re-surfaced, constantly, in a form of unchallenged stereotypy, throughout the contest?

I’m talking about ageism. Rampant, rancid, going on apparently unstoppably, right now, inside the Labour Party and outside the Labour Party.

Inside the Labour Party, over the last few weeks, the talk was of fresh faces and young talent, both of them pretty crude euphemisms indicative of anti-age prejudice and also startlingly inapplicable in the context. Pick one. Any one of them. Let’s, just for an example, choose the Minister-to-Be-or-Be-Hellish-Surprised Kelly. Alan Kelly’s admirers would claim that he has a perfectly delicious face. In addition, he may be in a position to provide proof that his face hasn’t passed either its sell-by date or its use-by date.

It is, nonetheless, fresh only in the sense that we don’t instantly recognise it when it pops up on the box, the way we’re used to recognising that of Ruairi Quinn or Eamon Gilmore.

The running theme of the contest was that stale (i.e., well-known) faces and old talent (i.e., older than fifty-five) should be dumped in the wheelie bin. Media bought into this theme with such enthusiasm that Pat Rabbitte got bemusedly ratty over an RTÉ’s news and current affairs interviewer suggesting he get the hell out of his Ministerial office in order to go home and raise a spud or two.

I exaggerate. The RTÉ man wasn’t prescriptive about spuds. Minister Rabbitte could have chosen to grow grapes and/or scallions, as far as the questioner was concerned. The issue wasn’t the produce. The issue was him being past it, due to his longevity.

Pat didn’t quite say he’d rather be dead than take up the compost-and-carnations option, but he ran it close, announcing that he was bad at gardening and wanted no part of it. He then gathered himself into a bundle, gave out about being asked ageist questions and told the interviewer that the interviewer was pushing along in years terms, also.

Now, all this “mine is younger than yours” badinage clearly floated over the heads of the Labour Party’s members, who, thanks to an electoral system dreamed up, at least in part, by Examiner columnist Fergus Finlay, demonstrated an admirable contempt for ageism. They elected a woman as Leader who is older than Pat Rabbitte, and the interviewer who puts her age to her as a potential performance- diminishing factor is likely to get their lungs handed to them.

Maybe now that Labour has rejected ageism in the picking of its own leader, it might take up the issue of ageism, which nobody owns and nobody in politics seems to care about. The reaction to the Rabbitte episode, what there was of it, tended to be along the lines that wasn’t Pat very funny all the same, telling the RTÉ guy he was getting along in years, too.

No organisation rose up to say that it wasn’t funny, or to challenge the general trend of commentary — ironically started within a political party, which, last time I looked, was supposed to be about equality.

In America, while attacking Hillary Clinton for any number of reasons is safe and productive, it is neither safe nor productive to attack her as being too old for the Presidency.

One reason for that is the AARP, the association for retired people in the US, one of a bunch of organisations that will bite chunks out of any politician who doesn’t understand the importance of the grey vote or their rights and entitlements.

The AARP, which is aggressive and well-funded, has no equivalent in this country. It spotted, long decades ago, that the grey market was huge. That people over fifty (the AARP, like the Jesuits, likes to start at the young end of the age spectrum, relatively speaking) have money to spend. Having copped on to that basic general truth, the AARP moved on to the realisation that people over fifty also have books to read, places to go, gyms to join and grandchildren to treat. They’re also smart enough to realise that joining an association like the AARP delivers discounts which quickly repay the cost of joining. Typical discounts? Five dollars off every twenty five dollars spent in Toys R Us or 20% off a hotel or car rental bill. Not to mention magazines, medicines and insurance.

AARP members also get ferocious advocacy on their behalf, whereas here in Ireland, the organisations devoted to older people are rarely, if ever, aggressive in their advocacy. That may be because so many not-for-profit bodies get money from the Government, and, particularly at a time when Government purse-strings are tightly drawn, it may not seem like a good idea to attack the powers that be, in case they turn mean on the money front. Easier to go along with a genial presentation of ageing which surfaces once a year in the form of pictures of older people doing unexpected stuff. The problem is that ageism stops older people continuing to do quite ordinary stuff. Like their job. Like getting elected. Like being a minister. And nobody’s out there shouting stop.

Nobody is saying that it’s unacceptable to bring a particular age group in society into disrepute by the use of casual contempt deployed in public discourse. Whereas women’s groups would be up in arms — and rightly so — at any public rubbishing of woman, qua women, nobody has risen up to protest about the rubbishing of one complete sector of Irish society — indeed, one enormous chunk of the demographic — by implying they’re useless, second-rate, spun-out and rendered somehow distasteful by their very existence.

Why not? Perhaps because many of the great female fighters who brought us the first wave of female freedoms have been silenced by death, dementia (their own or that of the partner for whom they care) or the age-related myopia of media, which loses sight of women once they head towards 60. Maybe because potential spokespersons are spooked by fear of being painted into the Old Corner, which is never going to be positive.

The need is for an organisation that doesn’t start with illness or passivity attributed to people over sixty and doesn’t patronise them (“aren’t you marvellous, all the same.”) The need is for a few famous older people unafraid that speaking up for their peers will push them into the media petting zoo reserved for that age-group.

It’s illegal to discriminate against anybody based on age — but it happens all the time. It’s wrong for politicians to talk of other politicians as if age and experience were disablers, rather than enablers.

Competence, not age, should be the qualifier.