GAVAN REILLY: Trump, Capitol Hill, and the mob outside the Dáil gates

Those of us who cover the affairs of Dáil Éireann are blessed with the luxury of never really thinking our workplace is a hostile environment. Sometimes the attitudes of politicians, and their exchanges with us (and each other) might lead us to think the place is tense, but in truth it’s a much more genteel place. Even political rivals are convivial in the canteen - some TDs tell stories of sharing a cab from Leinster House to RTÉ, tearing strips off each other on a show like Late Debate, then sharing a cab back to their city-centre hotels and a potential nightcap.

This might seem jarring to some readers - like the wool has been pulled over their eyes and that politico is a stitched-up panto. But pause for a moment. Would you rather they grimace at the sight of each other, that their political differences make them unable even to be civil? If that were the case, politics wouldn’t get very far. Most Oireachtas committees would cease to function if people couldn’t collaborate in a civil way across party lines - and other constituency issues, like the future of a hospital, would get nowhere if there wasn’t some scope for hands-across-the-divide.

The worst we get on Kildare Street is the occasional group of protestors outside the gates who see the mainstream media as part of this cosy cabal and who will barrack you on the way through the gates, or at worst (as has happened) coordinating their heckles to try and disrupt your concentration during a live TV spot.

That’s not to say those protestors are totally harmless. Allegations of being part of an establishment stitch-up are at the lower end of their problems. Some better-known malcontents will show up on landmark days and spend hours roaring at the top of their voices that all TDs are traitors and should be killed. Literally.

To this person and to a hardcore group of others, everything is a conspiracy. The vaccine is a Bill Gates ruse to get us all using Microsoft products. (This explains why so many older people, having received their first jab, have now become avid Xbox gamers.) There is no coronavirus. Lockdown is unnecessary. Masks are a dictatorship. The man convicted of murdering Garda Adrian Donohoe was framed. Water charges were a precursor to Denis O’Brien owning your taps, which Denis O’Brien’s media would encourage you to pay for, while slowly poisoning you so that you could then need treatment at Denis O’Brien’s private hospitals. The banks didn’t actually need a bailout but Brian Cowen wrote them a €64 billion cheque as a bargain because he was personally broke, or something like that. And on it goes.

There is no objective logic for these people. They spend their days communicating only with each other, trapped in an echo chamber with others who only reinforce the most conspiratorial fringe beliefs. It’s easier for them that way: the world only makes sense to them when they’re the ones who decide the truth.

These people are simultaneously very vulnerable and very dangerous. Vulnerable because they’re the victim of the biggest con of all; the one that suggests everyone is out to fleece them and pull a fast one. It’s a notion they cannot scrutinise because they have never been empowered to. They have been encouraged to question everything they hear from official or respected channels, but are incapable of querying the conspiracy put to them. They’ve never been taught, or given the skills, to put the same level of rigour into demolishing @randompaddy1234 on Twitter as they do to Tony Holohan at NPHET.

They’re also dangerous because their worldview means there are no real problems (other than every politician being corrupt, obviously) and therefore no consequences to their own actions. In their minds there’s no harm in a protest for thousands (if they could attract thousands) because there’s no virus to begin with.

Nor does it matter that some of the same nutjobs contested general elections against these TDs, seeking a mandate to enter Dáil Éireann: Dáil Éireann is a corrupt institution and nobody would want to be in it. Sure why wouldn’t you want to gather at the gates and storm the place and install a real republic? It doesn’t matter that the Constitution says all fundamental rights are subject to practicable limits: in their world the Constitution grants freedom to practice religion and so therefore they’re allowed to go to Mass and pray that God strikes death upon these corrupt TDs.

Thankfully, despite the huge impacts of austerity, and now the social, financial and emotional stress of lockdown, there’s still only a small pocket of people in Ireland who adhere to this worldview - one which can only be described as ‘batshit crazy’. But people are generally less petrified of the virus now; when it first arrived we thought it would kill 5% of all people who contracted it, and that most of us couldn’t avoid it. Now we know that many patients simply don’t display symptoms when they have it, that we are better at treating it, that we are physically better equipped (there’s no shortages of PPE or ventilators any more) and that the virus ‘only’ kills 1 in 40 people who are confirmed to have it. All of this means the conditions are ripe for those frustrated with lockdown to become more radicalised and to assume the world is out to screw them.

We only need to look at last week’s scenes in Washington to see the end result of a culture where people are led to believe that The Establishment seems the ordinary man only as a pliable plaything, or an obstacle in the way of total control. Of the thousands who marched on Capitol Hill last week at the implied behest of Donald Trump, allegations of election rigging at are the innocent end of the scale.

A large number, including a military veteran who was shot dead in the Capitol, are committed adherents to ‘QAnon’. You may not have heard of it, but QAnon claims that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and a billionaire hedge fund manager called George Soros are part of a cabal of Satan worshippers who are running a global child sex trafficking ring. It claims that many Hollywood figures are also part of this cabal, abusing children for their own pleasure before literally eating the remains. Donald Trump is fighting to break up this global ring of paedophile cannibals, and even faked Russian collusion so that Robert Mueller could join him in helping to expose it.

The ‘source’ for this claim is someone on an anonymous internet message board, who calls himself Q (a high level of security clearance), and who wrote the stuff online. That’s it.

That’s all! That’s the full extent of the evidence - and yet it now has adherents all over the world, including a former not-to-be-named Irish presidential candidate.

I don’t know what the ‘solution’ is. But we all have to make sure there’s no tolerance for this lunatic fringe, and no chance for its deranged understanding of the world to gain a bigger foothold.

Otherwise, eventually, the nutjobs outside the gates demanding death for all TDs won’t be kept outside the gates.

*Gavan's column was taken from this week's paper which came out on Tuesday