Fergus Finlay: We must not allow empathy to be replaced by fear and intolerance

Dance act Unity performed on Britain’s Got Talent on Saturday night. Their dance was simple, expressive, and choreographed to capture a sense of unity — a band of people moving as one.

It’s taken me years to get over it. Five years ago I admitted here — right here — that I’m a big fan of BGT. Britain’s Got Talent, to those of you not in the club.

And the dog’s abuse I got! Who did I think I was, oul fella’ like me, watching that cheesy, schmaltzy crap? Didn’t I know they were only in it for the money, that it was all fake? How could I possibly pretend to be a serious commentator about anything if that’s how I spent my Saturday nights?

And they were right of course, my critics. I’m shallow and superficial. I love Bake Off too, and MasterChef and all the RTÉ cookery programmes with Mark Moriarty and Neven Maguire and the rest. I blub in front of the Repair Shop on BBC and I can’t wait for the reveal in DIY SOS The Big Build (especially Baz Ashmawy’s Irish version, which should be on every night of the week, although RTÉ should stop over-using words like deserving and worthy to describe the families they work with).

But I do get the criticism of Britain’s Got Talent. It’s a big-budget tv variety show, designed to make as much money as possible for its owner/creator Simon Cowell. It breaks a lot of hearts among its performers, and it often makes questionable decisions in relation to child contestants.

Perhaps the biggest criticism is that it’s frequently cynical — often showcasing singers and dancers against a background of very sad stories. The aim, clearly, is to manipulate the emotions of its audience. Often that seems to matter more than the quality of the performance.

But every now and again something happens that just stops you in your tracks. Last Saturday, a group of young people took to the stage. All shapes and sizes, all dressed in black. They explained that they had developed a dance to celebrate difference. And they began to dance.

Dance act Unity performed on Britain’s Got Talent on Saturday night.

But it started with Emma, telling the audience that because of her Downs Syndrome, people kept telling her of the things she couldn’t do. They keep saying I can’t, she said. I will.

Then Declan, who is gender fluid, talked about the labels and the things people said. They say I can’t be who I am. But I will. Steph and Lilly have come out as gay women and attract negative comments for things as simple as holding hands in public. They don’t want us to show our love, they said. We will.

And there was more. Junior was bullied growing up because he was a boy who lived to dance. But what a dancer he has become.

And Kira, who I think moved me the most. Short and stocky, she described how society had conditioned her to believe she’d never be good enough because of her size. I have to change my shape or I’ll never make it. But I will make it.

All of these individual interventions, some recorded and some spoken live, happened in the course of a dance that was simple, expressive, and choreographed to capture a sense of unity — a band of people moving as one.

Then it was over. I found it really moving, the sort of thing you see only now and again that stays with you for a long time. But it was oh so woke!

Simple, beautiful, and utterly subversive, because it was a massive political statement disguised as a dance at the end of a televised variety show.

 In a climate that increasingly seems to hate and despise anything that can be called woke.

The dancers looked nervous, anxious even, as they waited for the audience reaction. I felt that slight bit of tension too. What if they were booed, or the audience ignored their message? What would that say about the attitudes of ordinary people?

But I don’t know if there has ever been a bigger, louder, or longer standing ovation at any of these shows. The judges were in tears and the several thousand-strong audience was on its feet.

What happened next doesn’t matter really — pure showbiz schmaltz as Simon decided to break his own rules and give them a golden buzzer, even though all the golden buzzers had been used up.

That’s not important. What matters is that a simple direct statement, made by and about people who are subject to discrimination day in and day out, made such an impact.

Assault video

While that programme was being broadcast on our tellies, a young Irish boy was recovering in hospital. He had been savagely beaten up by some of his classmates because he was seen as different in some way. They seemed determined to make some sort of statement because the entire incident was videoed and shared. By now it has apparently been viewed millions of times. The assault is now, it seems, being investigated by Gardaí who understand and specialise in hate crime.

I haven’t watched the video. I can’t understand why anyone would want to unless they were investigating the crimes involved. I find it hard to come to grips with what must have happened to enable boys — that’s all they were — to beat so mercilessly one of their own. Because he was a bit different.

That young boy will carry physical scars for some time, and emotional scars for a lot longer than that. But the boys who attacked him have been damaged too. 

Some perverted idea of masculinity has been inculcated into them — I don’t know how — and it has robbed them of the better side of their natures, at least temporarily.

It has been impossible to ignore the videos of anti-immigrant marches, with people carrying placards saying, “no to unvetted men”, and warning communities that their wives and daughters weren’t safe. It’s not unvetted men these marchers are worried about. It’s men of a different skin colour or a different accent.

Why are we so terrified of difference? Many of us who were born and raised in Ireland can still remember “the Mailboat generation” — thousands of Irish people who went to the UK for a better life. The Central Statistics Office has estimated that between 1940 and 1970 the people who left on the mailboat, carrying nothing but a cardboard suitcase, lived in miserable digs throughout the UK and sent home an average of €183 million every one of those years.

The vast majority of those emigrants were men alone — some with the rural Irish accents of their place of birth. None of them “vetted”. All too often confronted by boarding house signs that read No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish.

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And yet the spectre of men who look and sound different is generating fear and anger in different parts of the country. In some cases the fear appears to be spontaneous, in too many others it is being stoked and fomented in the name of some perverted nationalism.

It’s not natural, that fear. What is much more natural is the empathy visible in that audience on the telly. If that empathy, little by little, is allowed to be replaced by fear and intolerance, the world won’t be just a much more dangerous place. It will be far poorer too.