THE GREAT Irish writer Flann O’Brien used to write about ‘the plain people of Ireland’, and the phrase became such a success that years later certain TDs have used it.
The difference was that Flann O’Brien used it mockingly, albeit affectionately, whilst the TDs used it seriously.
Even odder than that was the fact that the Kerry TDs who used it were some of the richest people sitting in the Dáil. They aren’t themselves that ordinary at all, you see.
In my own constituency, one of the TDs most likely to use that phrase and most likely to lean into talking about the ordinary Irish people is again one of the richest people in the Dáil. What strange times we live in. Flann O’Brien, an artist of the absurd, must be smiling wherever he is.
It’s an upside-down world, isn’t it? Donald Trump is the billionaire son of a millionaire who is apparently fighting against the establishment.
Reform UK and their even further right-wing cousins in Restore Britain are always railing against the establishment and shouting about how much they represent the voices of ordinary people.
Both parties are very much one-man shows, and yet both are led by men who went to very expensive fee-paying schools and who come from very privileged backgrounds.
It’s an upside-down world.
Even Leo Varadkar, he of the expensive fee-paying secondary school, spoke of being for those ‘people who get up early in the morning’, which presumably Micheál Martin’s bus-driver father knew plenty about.
Keir Starmer was much mocked for stating again and again that his father was a toolmaker. This was despite the fact that his father was a toolmaker.
Andy Burnham’s father was an engineer and his mother was a receptionist at a GP's surgery, while Kemi Badenoch’s father was an actual GP and her mother a professor. Yet somehow he’s the establishment.
In the upside-down world, the millionaires and billionaires and the privately, expensively educated are the plain people, and the sons of bus drivers and toolmakers and GPs’ receptionists are the establishment
It’s a little like the upside-down world of unionism and loyalism. In this world, the big landowners and the clergymen and the grandees would march their followers to the barricades and then go back to their estates and their chapels and their offices, whilst the followers from the tight terraced streets and the shipyards would be left holding the guns and sitting in a prison cell.
Indeed, this year could end with two of the most active street activists on the far right of British politics, one of whose legal fees were apparently being paid by the richest man on the planet, sitting in jail whilst their anti-establishment backers sit at well-stocked tables in well-stocked houses.
It must be one of the greatest achievements of the establishment. Convince everyone that those with the most are the ‘plain people’ and those with the least the establishment.
In this upside-down world, the stresses and strains, the pressures on resources and services, are not because some have so, so much but because some have so, so little. It is not the billionaire that is draining you but the lost person on a boat.
Flann O’Brien produced great works of Irish humour and darkness and strangeness and innocence and knowingness. In the end, his life was somewhat tragic.
I saw an interview with him many years ago that was filmed, I think, sometime in the 1960s. As the interview progresses, O’Brien is increasingly drunk. It’s not an easy thing to watch. It has none of the wild hedonism and desperate joy of similar footage with Brendan Behan but is like watching a man clearly in deep pain.
Flann O’Brien is paying a price for the brilliance he managed to conjure up. He’d tackled the absurdity and the pomposity and the self-regarding notions of Irish life, and laid them bare.
None of the absurdities he dreamt of come close to our reality now, though. If the establishment aren’t the establishment, but those with the least are — or those, anyway, who want things to be simply fairer and kinder and more equal are — then how does anything make sense?
Perhaps we’re now at the stage where, having plumbed the depths of absurdity, we find painful intoxication is the only answer.
We’re having a pint of plain, but it doesn’t taste the way it used to. It tastes so, so bitter.
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