Comatose campaign enlivened: Challenging PC limits of Áras debate

Presidential candidate Peter Casey has enlivened an otherwise comatose, and if the polls are right, pointless, waste-of-time-and-money race for the tenancy of Áras an Uachtaráin, by pressing the Defcon 1 button on political correctness.

Though he languishes at the tail of the field, on 2%, while the incumbent, Michael D Higgins, enjoys what seems an unassailable lead, on 64%, Casey has indeed done the idea of free, meaningful debate some service, even if unintentionally — especially as today’s mores so often preclude it. Unfortunately, so much of today’s political debate, among the adults anyway, is like the bizarre practice indulged at one of those universities where sensitive, snowflake students must be forewarned that the truths they are about to be exposed to might rattle their emotional equilibrium.

It is all-important to recognise that celebration of free speech, even if you disagree strongly with Casey’s remarks about Travellers or those who need social housing. Dismissing his remarks as hate speech, counterintuitively, helps advance the cause of those who advance them. The great principle of free speech allows anyone who cares to do so to try to refute his arguments. Real debate is a two-way street.

Of course, the usual voices reacted in the usual way — some may even have choked on their pinot grigio — but Casey’s contribution was, in the three-card-trickery of political debate, a refreshingly honest expression of a heartfelt, if uncomfortable, opinion. And those who dismiss his views as unrepresentative, as socially regressive, might consider what has happened in elections where similar, unfiltered, and disdained views were expressed.

The world has to endure US president, Donald Trump, because he tore up the PC rule book on how opponents might be attacked; we have, or may have, Brexit because post-truth, post-shame campaigning won.

Established only five years ago, the hard-right Alternative for Germany is now a power broker, a position it hardly reached by pulling its punches. Austria, Italy, Hungary, and Poland are other countries where regime change — hardly an adequate description of the veer rightwards — came after candidates said the, in PC terms at least, unsayable. Marine Le Pen got one vote — 33% — for every two votes French president, Emmanuel Macron — 66% — got. She did not achieve that by sparing anyone’s blushes. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does politics. If there is a no-man’s land between what is regarded as acceptable, civilised debate and hate posing as argument, someone, some voice, will try to fill that space and maybe not with the best outcomes. Populism depends on exploiting that lacuna.

Casey will not be president, but it would not be surprising if, despite the barrage, he won considerably more than 2%. This may or may not be a reflection of his views, but it would underline how very disenchanted so many people are with the utterly contrived choreography of today’s politics — of which the presidential election is a perfect example. Casey’s close-to-the-bone remarks may, in a small way, help encourage realism in political debate, but that can only happen if the line between discourse and diatribe is recognised and held.