When the Taoiseach compared Micheal Martin to a hypocritical priest in the Dail last week, it was revealing.
The personal attack could fall into what psychologists call “projection” – attributing faults that are actually in yourself on to others.
Fittingly, it goes back to the Bible: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?”
Varadkar is the high priest of a party that has warped into a peculiarly distorted form of selective “liberalism” – with a unique brand of conservative, right-wing, progressivism that is quasi-religious.
It’s the Fine Gael church of identity politics, led by the self-appointed heroes of politically-correct Ireland, who have all had epiphanies and are now supposedly the right-on risen.
Presiding over a palliative Government that is using the old bread and circuses political trick to pander to popularity.
Let’s call them the Woke-Us Dei: featuring Varadkar, Health Minister Simon Harris, Housing Shambles head Eoghan Murphy and the recent addition Charlie Flanagan.
The Woke-Us Dei quadrumvirate were there for the photo op at Gay Pride, decked out in rainbow gear, waving the flag, marching behind the banner. It’s easy to support LGBT rights – what normal person doesn’t?
But what about the other marginalised groups, that the original
radicals of Gay Pride campaigned alongside?
What about the sick, victims of injustices of the Irish health service, particularly the cervical scandal?
Or those whose lives have been destroyed by the housing crisis they engineered and are maintaining?
What about Fine Gael’s own Frankenstein monster, the 10,000 mostly women and children living in emergency accommodation in hotels when there were none there just a few years ago?
The new church is good at moral preening on easy, already-won civil rights, such as discrimination based on skin colour, sexuality or gender: equalities we all agree on, but which our politicians seem to want a round of applause for supporting in 2019.
They also happen to be issues that don’t cost money, but save it. They stand against all “isms” but embrace the one that underpins them all, rankism.
They’re prone to telling us about their awakenings on emotive issues like abortion and gay marriage. Harris was once so anti-abortion he wrote articles about it, quoting Voltaire.
A few short years later he was the pin-up of the Repeal movement, with duped women holding up placards saying: “I fancy Simon Harris.”
Leo Varadkar was strongly against civil partnerships for same-sex couples, saying in a deeply conservative and impassioned 2010 Dail speech that a child should be raised only by a mother and father. They repeatedly fail to stand up for civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the presumption of innocence.
Simon Harris says bringing in exclusion zones around hospitals to ban pro-life protests is a “major priority”, even though we already have existing laws around harassment that would not undermine the freedom of protest.
Wouldn’t Irish women be better served if the minister prioritised
free contraception, to prevent a
crisis pregnancy, for which the Government’s only solution currently is a free abortion?
His tolerance only extends to those who fall into stride. Parents so fearful of vaccination they were prepared not to give their children jabs against serious illnesses were threatened with a school ban – obey or be punished.
Justice Minister Flanagan has transmogrified into a crusader for every ID-politics bandwagon, to the point of being “fascistically PC in confused ways” as the writer Bret Easton Ellis nailed this new political trend as.
If he’s not out with his cape on, ostentatiously signing unnecessary exclusion orders to ban a moron hate-preacher from entering Ireland – when we already have incitement to hatred laws – he’s publicly chastising a relic of a bishop for saying gay culture isn’t compatible with
Catholicism.
He has spent €1million on an anti -sexual harassment campaign utterly perplexing in its paranoid propaganda – featuring a woman who looks like your elderly aunt being nice to a young lad on work experience and some fella who fancies his wife at a party.
But he showed what was described as his “deep-rooted prejudices” when he objected to others wearing the Easter Lily, to commemorate Ireland’s patriot dead, in the Dail. Eoghan Murphy will show up at all the right marches, but he heads a department that is anti-social housing and his future vision for Ireland is one where we all live together in overpriced hostels.
Our fake woke “liberal” leaders pretend compassion, but only follow fashion. They have been the most divisive government we have ever had, creating a chasm of wealth inequality that harks back to feudalism.
They may preach publicly for all the right causes in the liberal prayerbook – but ultimately they stand for capitalism without a social conscience.
