There’s a type of person more to be pitied than laughed at. Your conversation with them starts on the price of onions and comes back to the classmate that wasn’t nice to them when they were fifteen. It doesn’t matter what you start: Greek philosophers, breast implants, climate crisis – it all comes back to that nasty classmate
It has nothing to do with intelligence. This type of person could have an IQ of 180 and he’d still bring things back to the classmate.
One such is the failed politician Michael McDowell. The Irish Times gives him space to express his opinions on topics of the day, and he grabs the opportunity and delivers his piece in commendable prose. Except that, sooner or later, his obsession surfaces and we’re having our ear bent with his oft- told tale.
What tale, Virginia? Why the Sinn Féin tale.
Take this morning in the Irish Times. Michael starts with the topic that’s on everyone’s lips – the Ukraine. Fair enough. We’re drowning in an ocean of analysis but sure a bird never flew on one wing and we’re happy to have another. So Michael puts Putin cheek by jowl with Trump:
‘There is a remarkable symmetry between Putin and Trump. Each is a psychological misfit with strong sociopathic tendencies. Each is part of a kleptocratic campaign to subvert democracy. Each admires the statecraft of the other. Each, I dare say, merits the adjective “evil”. ‘
So far so sensible. But then Michael comes back to the topic that has colonised his mind for some thirty years now: Sinn Féin. Just when you were thinking Michael had found in Trump, Putin and the Ukraine a topic that would be sufficient for his ravenous intellect, he comes swinging back to the same old much-trodden road:
“And a word or two for Sinn Féin’s strangely mute cadre of online trolls. Since we know that Sinn Féin is controlled on the principle of democratic centralism, it follows that the line being followed by their MEPs on Russia is decided back in Ireland by their northern dominated politburo. It has been consistent.”
Michael’s gripe this time is that some Sinn Féin MEPs haven’t been sufficiently committed to his view of the Ukraine crisis. And so he talks about the FARC guerrillas in Colombia, the Good Friday Agreement, IRA weapons…And lots more on the same lines. And you thought the piece was about the Ukraine.
Reading a Michael McDowell column these days is like that Shelley poem, ‘Ozymandius’. The party he led is gone, his Dail seat is gone, but Michael’s “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command” keeps on keeping on.
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Poor Michael. A fine mind, ravaged and tormented, the victim of a single wrecking-ball obsession.
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