Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So says Newton’s third law of motion. Newton may have done well to name this his third law of politics and everything else. Ever since Ireland was certified as an economic basket case in 2007 the wealth obsessed political élite of the country have been on the run – sometimes they have actually been on the run. As the last strongholds of the right, locked in their kleptocratic modes of thinking, have lurched ever further to the right in their drive to pay the unpayable by thieving from the poorest the left has gone from strength to strength. So much so in fact that the government has now found it almost impossible to enforce water charges on an increasingly radicalised working class population. Now even the promise of imprisonment is working in the favour of the left, with each anti-austerity demonstration in the capital being bested by the next. Revolution, it would seem, is not completely off the cards. The neo-liberal and Thatcherite right has not gone away. It has merely been plotting its next move. One manifestation of this was in yesterday’s Renua Ireland débâcle.
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Renua Ireland (@renuaireland) March 14, 2015
Without exaggeration I can say that what unfolded yesterday was a political shambles that might have done better had it been launched not on Friday 13th but on April Fools’ Day. If they had a donations button for Comic Relief I definitely would have contributed. Every right-wing reject and wannabe was on the list, and the show was one relentless line up of absurdities. It wasn’t only that it was launched in the Science Gallery under a wall graffitied by transition year pupils, it wasn’t just the manic look on Lucinda Creighton’s face or her whiter-than-white futuristic outfit, or the hilarious radio interview with Terence Flanagan asking his mum for the answers – it was everything. None of it could have been done worse. No one thought of opening a Facebook account before the launch, and, more crucially, before some prankster did. No one spell-checked their website. Sure, the website looked like it had been written in Mandarin and translated into English with Google Translate. The rebirth of the Irish right was like a bad episode of the Apprentice, and I was hoping that Bill would turn up and fire someone – even if just to spare them more humiliation. Who said politics was boring?
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