Paul Hosford: Fine Gael's US-style attack video may be a new departure in Irish politics
A screengrab of the video clip posted by Fine Gael attacking Independent presidential candidate Catherine Connolly. The attack may signal a new race to the bottom in Irish politics.
In a rainy Gorey on Monday, Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys insisted that she is "a positive person".
Once again, the Monaghan woman's campaign has been accused of going negative, this time in light of an attack video which accuses her presidential opponent Catherine Connolly of hypocrisy in relation to her work as a barrister in repossession cases before her election as a TD.
Before we get to the video itself, the arguments.
The Fine Gael line of thinking is that Ms Connolly has made a virtue of housing during her time in the Dáil while having a previously undeclared professional history in working with banks in repossession cases.
The argument being that one cannot advocate for those who are homeless while working for banks who repossessed thousands of homes between the crash and now. Although, the party has moderated that somewhat to say the issue is not necessarily Ms Connolly's work or even her advocacy, but her failure to declare it.
The party is, in the final days of the campaign, attempting to thread a needle of not alienating the legal classes by criticising barristers for taking on work, but trying to peg back a polling gap between Ms Connolly and Ms Humphreys by hoping that something, anything, will stick to the independent TD, in this case a charge of hypocrisy.
Ms Connolly's argument is that she was a barrister, subject to the cab-rank rule, which the Bar Council says means barristers must "be independent and free from any influence, especially such as may arise from their personal interests or external pressure, in the discharge of their professional duties as barristers".
Ms Connolly has not answered questions on who she worked for or when and has pointed to the Bar Council's guidance.
On Monday she also said:
Now, back to the video.
Parties raising questions about opponents is nothing new, it's part and parcel of the normal course of politics. And it is correct and right to do so. There is no issues with pointing out perceived hypocrisy or a comment or a policy which you disagree with.
But what was striking about the video is how... American it is.
In her email newsletter , journalist Liz Carolan writes about how the video itself doesn't work for any number of reasons, not least that much of its run time is dedicated to Catherine Connolly pointing out failures of government housing and it's failure as a piece of social media content.
But against the backdrop of ominous music, there are quotes from Ms Connolly about both banks and housing which are presented without context. In one, the Galway woman rails against the "criminal behaviour of banks".
In isolation, the viewer is meant to think that Ms Connolly is speaking about repossessions, but this was in fact from a 2017 debate on the tracker mortgage scandal, for which Bank of Ireland was fined €100.5m in 2022, AIB received a fine of €83.3m, while EBS received a fine of €13.4n.
The debate was a motion brought by then Fianna Fáil TD Michael McGrath during which his party colleague Bobby Aylward described the banks' actions as "gross financial criminality on a national scale".
The Fine Gael video had been viewed 900,000 times on X as of 7pm on Monday, but one wonders if that level of attention will mean a new departure in Irish electioneering.
The danger is less in the techniques and styling that in something Ms Carolan has previously written about — the impact this kind of thing has on politics generally.
In a previous edition, she asked if this would be "an American-style race-to-the-bottom attack-fest of an election" and while this campaign hasn't really been that, it may have been the first step towards a new type of politics.
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