Deputies, with all due respect grow up

Green TD Paul Gogarty was lambasted in the press for saying “fuck you” to Labour’s Emmett Stagg in the Dáil – well, for saying “f—k you”, at least according to the bowdlerised reports in Irish newspapers.

This use of “the most unparliamentary language”, as it was described by both Gogarty himself and the acting chairman of the Dáil, immediately led to a flurry of reports and, thanks to comments posted on social networking sites, became international news. It was as though someone saying the word ‘fuck’ was the most important issue in the land.

Gogarty himself later inflated the significance of the issue, retelling the episode to an interviewer in absurd terms: “I had that gun in my hand,” he told Marian Finnucan on RTÉ Radio One. Apart from the absurdity of describing the word ‘fuck’ in terms reserved for shooting someone, Gogarty is also attempting to deflect blame from himself in a very modern way. According to Gogarty, swearing at his interlocutor was not an act of free will but one of compulsion.

This in itself is fairly insignificant – or it would be if he simply said: ‘I was angry and said something I regret’. Instead, however, Gogarty’s gun analogy pushes his swearing into the domain of cod-psychology. Rather than being a meaningless angry outburst, Gogarty frames his remarks in the kind of language that attempts excuse him not by simply owning-up to losing the head but by framing his anger in terms of an ‘irresistible impulse’, the defence that saw the guilty accused get off scot-free in Otto Preminger’s classic film ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ – and saw Loretta Bobbitt walk out of court a free woman after performing some improvised surgery on her husband that would make it impossible for him to follow Gogarty’s imperative.

We can see this cycle of emotion-led denials in every sphere of public life today. Tiger Woods, recently forced to publicly confess to having had extra-marital affairs, is now reportedly being treated for ‘sex addiction’, a made-up ‘disease’ that covers simple infidelity. Woods has undoubtedly been forced into this position by the absurd levels of press attention his private life is getting. Admitting to having ‘a problem’ and seeking help is simply the first move in today’s ridiculous twelve-step-like confessional culture. Doubtlessly it won’t be long before a tearful Woods appears as a guest on a daytime chatshow to be born anew in the healing process of being interrogated and humiliated in front of a studio audience. The idea that Woods should simply say, ‘This is none of your business’ is completely beyond the pale today.

There’s no denying it: Gogarty’s outburst on the floor of the Dáil was funny. That alone was sufficient reason to report it. After all, it’s a little hard to imagine that a bunch of hardened reporters have never used variations of the word to describe, for instance, politicians, their bosses, people they’ve interviewed, ‘commentors’ on web sites, letter-writers, bloggers, colleagues, their mothers and so on. But let’s not pretend it matters.

For a start, Gogarty has form, as the Irish Times reported in 2008: “Deputy Paul ‘No-Go’ Gogarty’s approach to politics is unconventional at the best of times, but he surpassed himself recently by rolling around the floor and playing dead while a political rival was making a speech.” (1) One Fine Gael TD slyly suggested Gogarty has mental health problems. (2) The truth is, though, it’s more likely that he is, ‘in the most unparliamentary language’, just a bit of a dick.

Gogarty’s childish antics are of no particular significance except insofar as they tell us how utterly irrelevant goings-on in the Dáil are. What does matter, though, is the increasingly common reflex that sees anger patholgised as a symptom of something deeper and darker. This is complete nonsense – anger is a perfectly normal emotional response to being baited as Gogarty was. Pretending that it has some meaning is another twelve-steps down the road of ‘emotional correctness’, at the end of which lies ever-greater analysis of and interference in our private behaviour.

Jason Walsh is a journalist based in Dublin and the editor of forth

(1) Miriam Lord’s week, Miriam Lord, Irish Times, November 11, 2008
(2) FG: Gogarty a rebel without a clue, Irish Examiner, October 31, 2009