Terry Prone: If Taoiseach is to have a public partner, he needs to realise protocol matters

'Mortification arises, first of all, because the coronation makes the audience sit up straight and mind its manners. Which Matt, demonstrably, didn’t do.'

Did the Taoiseach’s partner, Matt Barrett, cause a diplomatic incident when he used his mobile phone after it should have been turned off, to send comments to his 350 private followers on Instagram? No.

Will the UK’s new monarch think badly of Ireland as a result of the medic’s actions? No.

And yet, inside and outside politics, the reaction has been sufficiently negative to force Dr Barrett to apologise "unreservedly" for the posts, in a tweet. 

Given the lack of consequences and the suspicion that King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla might have more to be doing with their time than worry about an Irish medical consultant being minor-league smartarse, it’s worth examining why the reaction has taken the form it has. The nation hasn’t formed a consensus about being morto, but morto is in there.

Mortification arises, first of all, because the coronation was pomp and circumstance as only the UK can do it. When they do it, it makes the audience sit up straight and mind its manners. Which Matt, demonstrably, didn’t do.

 Leadership

It’s a funny thing about how we see our leaders and their partners. We liked Leo Varadkar best of all when he was being formally earnest in that first major statement about covid. Same with Micheál Martin when he’d come down the steps of Government Buildings to update us on morbidity and mortality. They weren’t pompous, but they were inescapably the adults in the room at the right time. And that was just for home consumption.

When anybody from Ireland goes overseas in some public role, even, as with Matt Barrett, a vicariously public role, the nation wants them to be impressive. I remember training a group from a water authority in Essex when Dick Spring was Tánaiste. They had a big screen TV in their canteen which was running a story about the Irish peace process. The group eyed him over their cardboard coffee beakers and then complimented me on my “prime minister”, which he wasn’t. They thought he was a proper representative who spoke received standard English and was gravely authoritative. Statesman, they said, giving me the free gift of their referred approval. It felt great.

When one of our own doesn’t behave as a serious adult in a context where serious adulthood is called for, Ireland experiences it the way a young parent experiences a kicking, screaming meltdown on the floor of the supermarket by their three-year-old. They don’t want to be sympathised with, they don’t want to express shame or try to convince passersby that this child is normally a little angel. They want it over as soon as possible because, no matter how they convince themselves that nobody else has the right to make a judgement, they know a judgement is being made.

Consequences

The Matt Barrett incident doesn’t make anybody in this country ashamed, nor should it. But it does make people, particularly in Fine Gael, do some serious nose-wrinkling. 

It seems odd that a highly educated medical man who has partnered the Taoiseach for seven years would lack the capacity to think through the consequences of his messages. It seems even odder that the partner of a man deeply embarrassed in recent years by the leaked “private” utterances of another doctor, would kid himself that anything on social media can ever be relied on to be genuinely private.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

The public is remarkably flexible in how it relates to the partners of its political leaders. The Tánaiste’s wife has a demanding academic career and wherever possible leaves Micheál Martin to attend public events alone. That option is open to Matt Barrett.

Up to now, he’s been publicly present in the Taoiseach’s life, credited by Leo Varadkar as helping make him — Leo — a better person. Nothing prevents that continuing, if he internalises the obeisance to protocol it requires: to sit up straight and mind his manners.