Gareth O'Callaghan: Are we starting to acknowledge that there’s an outlier in each of us?

Last June, Zohran Mamdani was accused of running a campaign full of crowds, slogans, and big promises. This week he proved his opponents wrong and won

Without Albert Reynolds, the outlier, we most likely would still be years away from a peace agreement in the North. File Picture: Eamonn Farrell/ RollingNews.ie

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.

There's a collective yearning for change in the air - of old, rigid structures crumbling and a rejection of societal norms that no longer serve a purpose. 

A part of that change happened last Tuesday when a 34-year-old Muslim immigrant, a democratic socialist called Zohran Mamdani — who was born in Kampala, Uganda, and moved to Manhattan with his family when he seven years old — was elected mayor of the biggest city in the US by population.

To put it in perspective, imagine a young Muslim immigrant from Karachi becomes taoiseach following the 2044 general election. He came to Ireland in 2023 when he was 18. He put himself through college studying law at UCC while working two part-time jobs seven days a week. It’s called the future.

I’ve been following Mamdani’s campaign, which promised greater rent control, free day care, and city-run neighbourhood grocery stores.

Mamdani, who has lived most of his life in subsidised housing, made a promise to 8.5m New Yorkers in his victory speech, which echoed that Gandhi quote: “I will wake up each morning with a singular purpose: To make this city better for you than it was the day before”.

What I like about him is that he is an outlier — an establishment outsider — and that’s precisely what got him elected. He told his supporters he wanted to create an “inclusive and progressive future” and “a world marked by equality, sustainability, justice, and love”.

They’re not words you’d associate with an election campaign; more like a throwback to 1967’s “Summer of Love” hippy revolution — a shift in consciousness when American teenagers tried to recreate the lost golden age of bliss.

Last June, Mamdani was accused of running a campaign full of crowds, slogans, and big promises. This week he proved his opponents wrong and won.

What makes him different? Well, in April 2021, he joined a sleep-out to push for higher taxes on the wealthy. Later that year, he joined a 15-day hunger strike to support debt-ridden taxi drivers struggling to make payments on the prohibitively expensive “medallions” they need to legally pick up passengers. After two weeks without food, he left the protest in a wheelchair.

New Yorkers elected leftist Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor this week. Picture: Angelina Katsanis / AFP

We live in a country that is struggling to break away from its tendency to breed sameness — especially in politics. Sameness is to blame for its failure to honour its promises. Politics is not evolving with the society it claims to represent. Our leaders are drowning in political fudge, champions in the game of how to evade or be vague.

Political outliers are rare. They don’t do things by the book, or fit into the conventional model of what passes for a leader. The cut-throat world of politics doesn’t bother them, because they refuse to let it get in their way.

They don’t procrastinate. You don’t realise how amazing they were until they’re gone.

John Hume was an outlier. In an interview from his home in Derry in 2006 with Marika Griehsel, he told the story of how his father once said to him: ”You can’t eat a flag.”

The moral of the story was that “real politics is about living standards”.

“It’s about social and economic development. It’s not about waving flags at each other.”

Another outlier was Jacinda Ardern, elected New Zealand’s prime minister and the world’s youngest serving leader in 2017. Her aggressive approach to covid, by way of a strict national lockdown, won her international praise. She took a pay cut to show solidarity with those affected by the virus. Instead of clinging to power for the sake of it, she knew when it was her time to go. She won hearts and minds.

So who are the outliers in Irish politics? Right now, there are none.

When was the last time an Irish politician inspired meaningful change? We now have two governing parties that look and sound the same.

It wasn’t what the electorate wanted, but we weren’t given a choice. Without choice, politics falls flat on its face

We are grieving the state of our country and what it has been allowed to become in recent years, but that grief is falling on deaf ears.

Could you imagine a world in which everyone thought the same?

That’s what Micheál Martin and Simon Harris believe is best for this small country of ours. I don’t want to live in that world.

Judging by the recent presidential election, the vast majority of those who voted don’t either.

I grew up in a Fianna Fáil household where Jack Lynch was revered. I voted for the party for the first time in 1981, because it was known as the party that got things done.

I might have been naïve in my innocence surrounding the integrity of Charles Haughey’s politics, but those days are long gone.

We badly need a political outlier to breathe hope back into a depressed nation. If Amazon delivered at the same pace as our current Government, it would have gone out of business years ago.

When you can’t afford to buy a house, or healthcare, or good quality food at the supermarket, or feel safe in your neighbourhood, or find suitable childcare for your children without having to up sticks and move to a town 90km away, then it makes no sense to believe that a government has your best interests at heart.

When I think of outliers in Irish politics, I’m reminded of Albert Reynolds. He was an outlier because he was also a successful businessman — Ireland’s first entrepreneur-turned-politician. 

He treated political fudge with contempt

I can recall in 1987 when he forced the oil companies to lower the price of petrol by 10p a gallon (almost €1 in today’s money). He also instructed the ESB to lower the price of electricity.

He was ruthless. In the space of 15 minutes in February 1992, he sacked half the Cabinet Haughey had left in his wake — eight Cabinet ministers and nine ministers of state — in the biggest reshuffle in history.

When chief whip Dermot Ahern demanded to know how he had arrived at that point in his career, Reynolds bellowed back: “You didn’t. You just backed the wrong horse”.

Fergus Finlay said of Reynolds: “He was the most dogged, most persistent, most straightforward and most single-minded person I’ve ever met in terms of the pursuit of an objective”.

I often wonder what type of president he would have made.

President-elect Catherine Connolly pays a visit to President Michael D Higgins at Áras an Uachtaráin ahead of her swearing in. Picture: Colin Keegan/Collins, Dublin.

He never got to find out, having been shafted by Bertie in 1997 in favour of Mary McAleese. Without Albert Reynolds, the outlier, we most likely would still be years away from a peace agreement in the North. On Tuesday, Ireland will have a new president — an outlier. In a country where successive governments have made mental health an afterthought — “something to address once other priorities are met”, as Catherine Connolly described it on World Mental Health Day last month — Connolly has said she will use her office to ensure it’s never pushed to the margins again.

She is not afraid to take risks. It’s worth remembering the 2007 general election when Labour decided not to put her on the ballot for Galway West.

She wanted to run as her party’s second candidate but Higgins wasn’t having any of it. She left the party and embarked on a career as an Independent.

Now the country will get to see if her greatest quality really is as an outlier.

A shift in consciousness is impossible to stop. Maybe we’re starting to acknowledge that there’s an outlier in each of us. We are bigger on the inside. We owe it to ourselves to set that free.