We had (still have) a poet president. Not just any poet president, but a socialist. A man of the people who loved dogs and the League of Ireland. Take that. Old Etonians! Our Prime Minister was the son of immigrants and gay. That was something to be proud of.
The sports of hurling and camogie had recently been granted special cultural status by UNESCO. We had – in the few years earlier – legalised gay marriage and abortion.
Across the water, the British government was fumbling Brexit so badly, they made us look like a nation of hipster Aristotles. It was the ultimate, bloodless, revenge for 800 years of colonisation. It was always cool to be Irish, but Downing Street and the DUP were doing more for our brand than JFK ever did. We were in such a good, smug place.
The auld enemy had been defeated, not by us, but by themselves. We didn’t have to do anything except keep the EU’s hair out of the toilet as it vomited. We were that guy. We were decent.
On the arts side, too, we were growing up. Or dressing down.
Yes, we would always have our Banvilles and our McGaherns, but in Sally Rooney we suddenly had somebody who disrobed us and — guess what — we didn’t look that bad!
Paul Mescal went full frontal, and televisions did not spontaneously combust. The TV adaptation of Normal People was shot so beautifully even the rain looked inviting, making Sligo look like Iowa in a Terence Malik movie.
No longer were we the spud-crunching, brawling toothless alcoholics depicted on Saturday Night Live. Our young men were shown to be emotionally vulnerable, yet well able to still kick a point into the breeze. Our women were being depicted as ambitious, erudite, sexual, even Machiavellian.
And that was just Derry Girls. The world hadn’t seen Bad Sisters yet.
We were about to get the most Irish American president ever, and he seemed so utterly harmless and benign we thought we could put a báinín sweater on him and hand him a pint of the black stuff and Uncle Sam would be ours to conquer.
And that’s when it all went wrong. Standing on the steps of the Blair House, Washington DC, on the March 12 2020, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar stood in a dark suit and a green tie, looking every inch the statesman the man he was visiting (Donald Trump), was not.
We knew what he was about to talk about in the same way a teenager whose stash of prophylactics has just been discovered knows what his parents are about to say to him. Varadkar opened with “I need to speak to you about Coronavirus and covid-19,” and ended with “Ireland is a great nation. And we are great people. We have experienced hardship and struggle before. We have overcome many trials in the past with our determination and our spirit. We will prevail.”
Everybody exhaled, and most people clapped.
Varadkar had acquitted himself well, especially in the comparative context of Trump and Boris Johnson’s clown show. His Aaron Sorkin-esque speeches were a little hard to take for a sceptic like me, there was still enough turf in the goodwill shed to suggest we could survive this dreadful corona business on Seamus Heaney quotes alone.
Then, things slowly began to fall apart. The West Wing speeches gave way to finger-pointing between the ministers and the suits. Department officials became more famous than intercounty footballers.
Nobody wanted to be Taoiseach. Everybody wanted to go to school. We got the plastic paddy president in America, but he turned out to be less Darby O’Gill, more like Warwick Davis in the horror leprechaun movie.
The Yanks came back to patronise us by making Wild Mountain Thyme in Mayo, after which Jon Hamm said “the Irish love nothing more than complaining about depictions of themselves”.
Conor McGregor morphed from a cartoon character in underpants into a societal menace. In underpants.
Our stock began to tank. Even Brexit, though utterly stupid, inadvertently showed up the EU to be the breadbasket of self-interest it is. Our Taoiseach-swapping has become tiresome, even Cillian Murphy winning an Oscar only slightly slowed the inevitable hammering of brittle self-esteem.
Now, we need something.
We need our politicians to stop catching each other out, as if that’s the reason they were elected. We need leadership. We need to self-own and acknowledge the mistakes of covid, of the children’s hospital, of public transport, and children with special needs. We need to sort the housing crisis.
The point-scoring is so, so petty and destructive. We need to pass the Occupied Territories Bill and stop planes carrying ammunition and ordnance flying over our airspace. We need Nicola Coughlan.
We need Rhasidat Adeleke. We need to arrest the slide in our mood and our standards, because four years is long enough to be eating ourselves from within.
We need Normal People Season 2.
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Publish date : 2024-11-01 16:58:00
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