Stephen Rae is the former group editor-in-chief at INM, Ireland’s largest media group. He is now principal at Kobn.ie, Leaders Advisory. He is also a media investor and consultant.
DUBLIN — Ireland was doing so well on the global stage.
In July we had just secured a seat against the odds on the U.N. Security Council, beating off the might of Canada. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe — also against the odds — was voted president of the Eurogroup the same month. The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t having as ruthless an effect on the Irish economy as on many of our EU neighbors. Even the leadership shown by then-Prime Minister Leo Varadkar through the worst of the first wave in March, April and May helped resurrect his national and international reputation after a bruising February general election.
For me, the curse set in precisely on Monday, July 20, when the Guardian published an editorial titled, “The Guardian view on Irish politics: an enviable beauty is born.”
It heaped poetic praise on Ireland. “In the archipelago of offshore European islands we inhabit, a new nation is growing in importance. This new nation is not the divided, tragi-comic ‘global’ Britain of Boris Johnson’s sloppy and incontinent imagination … The new nation is the Irish Republic,” the newspaper revealed.
Commentators here are now surveying the damage — particularly to our reputation on the EU stage.
The paper concluded that “Ireland’s influence over the EU’s Brexit stance is immense. Its EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, has the crucial trade portfolio,” going on to list other prominent Irish figures on the international scene. Twitter was set alight as people initially beamed in the glory, to be quickly followed by the cynics who argued we should no longer be flattered by praise from a former colonial power.
Then came August and the so-called golfgate scandal in which dozens of Ireland’s political elite were caught out attending a dinner organized by the parliamentary golfing society that broke coronavirus rules. The fallout claimed several political scalps, prompting the eventual resignation of Hogan — and the rest, as they say, is history.
Bruised and battered by six torrid days of controversy in Dublin and Brussels, commentators here are now surveying the damage — particularly to our reputation on the EU stage.
What it has shown is that, despite everything else that emerged through the controversy over Hogan’s quarantine movements, Ireland still has a robust media and vibrant political scene.
Vibrant, however, does not equal stable when it comes to government. The coalition formed over the pandemic summer following epic negotiations is composed of three parties — Fianna Fáil (led by Prime Minister Michéal Martin), Fine Gael (led by Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar) and the Green Party (led by Eamon Ryan, the minister for climate action, communications and transport) — and they have been off to a very shaky start.
It’s clear the troika has not gelled (the first two parties are civil war rivals from the foundation of the state almost 100 years ago) and the personalities are taking a lot of time to figure each other out. About the only thing they have agreed upon was getting Hogan to resign.
Irish media, meanwhile, does not take its cue from politicians or government and positively bristles at any attempt at political interference. That is just one of the reasons Hogan suffered a different fate from that of U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s top adviser Dominic Cummings, who kept his job despite an equally prominent quarantine controversy that played out on the front pages.
Jon Williams, the managing editor of Ireland’s main television station RTÉ, is in no doubt that Ireland is different when it comes to media consumption.
“In my experience, the Irish people are more interested in — and, in general, more knowledgeable about — news than those in either the U.S. or U.K.,” said Williams, who has spent much of his career in senior roles in the U.S. and Britain, at ABC and the BBC. (RTÉ’s Brussels bureau chief Tony Connelly was the one to conduct the interview with Hogan that provided the quote that finally led to the commissioner’s exit.)
“Maybe it’s because we’re on a small island looking out, maybe it’s because of Ireland’s storytelling tradition … the people of Ireland understand the value of journalism, and that what we do really matters,” he added.
Unlike the U.K., where the bulk of the mainstream media are right-leaning, Conservative-supporting newspapers, Ireland’s big media is a center-left and independently minded grouping in a highly competitive and struggling marketplace.
Former Commissioner Phil Hogan | Lukasz Kobus/European Union
The Irish Times, the country’s “paper of record,” sits in the center-left sphere. That is not to say that all of its columnists follow the same narrative, though. Prominent political commentator Stephen Collins was aghast that “a spineless government running scared in the face of a hysterical media has done serious damage to the national interest by forcing the resignation of Phil Hogan from one of the most powerful positions in the European Union.”
The same paper on Monday carried a column from Eoin Drea of the Wilfried Martens Centre, which said Hogan’s resignation “will encourage other states, such as Italy and Germany, to more quickly pursue deeper monetary integration which will also challenge Ireland’s existing economic model. No country in Europe willingly gives up a trade commissioner. From a Brussels perspective, Ireland has literally gone kamikaze on its own economic interests.”
They say a week is a long time in politics. It is certainly a very long time between “silly season” July and the most torrid Brussels August in memory.
But perhaps the most important takeaway from the past few weeks is that despite our many challenges — and a no-deal Brexit is the biggest one — the Irish do have a vibrant rainbow of opinions and are not afraid to share them, even if it comes at a very high price.