Gavan Reilly: Is it worth the flak defending politicians from undue ire?

Your columnist was struck by a thread posted on Monday by the Fianna Fáil TD for Clare, Cathal Crowe, who found himself facing unexpected ire over an innocuous tweet from Shannon Airport. Crowe is a vocal supporter of relocating services from struggling Dublin to serene Shannon, in his constituency.

An anodyne tweet about the quick check-in and security purportedly set off a series of demands from people demanding to know where he was going, and whether the public was paying for a bank holiday jolly. Seemingly one had even promised to lodge a Freedom of Information request to uncover the costs of the journey. As it happened, it was a private trip to take part in a stag weekend (from which he did a few media obligations anyway).

Park the fact that you can’t FOI a TD anyway – TDs don’t work ‘for’ the Oireachtas so the Oireachtas doesn’t have oversight of their correspondence – and focus on the substantive. What it crystallised for me was the increasing toxicity of public life, especially on Twitter, where cynicism is the order of the day.

Having now spent 16 years of my life as a Twitter user, and having created a reputation for being an influential political journalist on the platform, that concern is a worry for me. There seems to be a belief now – hardened, I’m sure inadvertently, by the work of The Ditch - that politics and politicians are irredeemably corrupted. This is genuinely not the case, but such is the environment there that I’m not sure there’s an appetite for level-headed truthtelling.

Sadly there’s a tone now that sees everything as adversarial and zero-sum: that any story which lauds/criticises any named politician is nothing more than an audition for a press job (also untrue, by the way). It’s now at the point where the reaction is so presumptively hostile that you’d question the value of tweeting about literally anything… which hardly speaks well of the site overall.