For anyone unfamiliar with John McGuirk, here’s a potted biography. A former office holder in Ogra Fianna Fail, he became the spin doctor for Declan Ganley’s Libertas Institute and its anti-Lisbon treaty campaign in 2008. He has been known to write for The Irish Catholic newspaper and is the editor of Gript, a self-described “news, opinion and analysis” website. He failed to get elected to the Dail in 2011 as a New Vision candidate in Cavan-Monaghan, and was the spokesman for the unsuccessful Save the 8th campaign against repeal of the constitutional ban on abortion. All said, he has had a rather unlucky streak in politics.
Night owls may have seen McGuirk on TV3’s The Tonight Show a couple of years ago. He was seated beside Kate O’Connell, then a Fine Gael TD for Dublin Bay South, who had compiled a dossier of coarse, abusive tweets about women by Barry Walsh, the vice-chairman of her party’s national executive. O’Connell presented the Fine Gael parliamentary party with the dossier. In it, the word “bitch” starred as Walsh’s insult of choice in his criticisms of women. Walsh resigned after Leo Varadkar, Fine Gael’s leader, said the tweets were unacceptable.
On The Tonight Show, McGuirk prefaced his valiant defence of Walsh with the disclaimer that he himself would never use that word. “But you did,” replied Matt Cooper, the presenter. He reminded McGuirk that, following Libertas’s failure to take a seat in the 2009 European elections, he had denounced its Dublin candidate Caroline Simons as a “psychotic bitch”. Simons, an articulate and seasoned debater, is a prominent anti-abortion campaigner.
Last week McGuirk drove a stake through O’Connell’s political corpse in a polemic he wrote on Gript, gloating over her failure to retain her Dail seat and, subsequently, to obtain a Fine Gael nomination for the Seanad elections. It was a cleverly executed assassination, using a cocktail of proven facts, while omitting certain other facts, and seasoned with a generous sprinkling of hearsay and rumour.
“With the possible exception of Simon Harris,” McGuirk began, “it’s difficult to think of anybody who has personified the domestic agenda of Fine Gael over the past several years more than Kate O’Connell.” What about a certain Leo Eric Varadkar, you might ask, the gay, mixed-raced taoiseach who championed marriage equality and abortion choice and took his boyfriend to lunch with Mike Pence, the US vice-president who is rabidly anti-homosexuality?
Undeterred by these inconvenient facts, McGuirk soldiered on, contrasting O’Connell — whom he called “a brash and abrasive liberal” — with Lucinda Creighton, her predecessor in Dublin Bay South, described as “a pro-European, centre-right conservative best known for resigning her ministerial position on a matter of principle due to her opposition to abortion”. He said Fine Gael had “assiduously cultivated” O’Connell — “feminist, ferocious and fearless” — to hold the seat vacated by Creighton, who, while a junior minister, had counted Walsh among her advisers.
What thanks did Fine Gael HQ get from O’Connell? She sided with Simon Coveney, the losing contender in the 2017 party leadership contest, and jeered that Varadkar’s supporters were “choirboys singing for their supper”. Clearly, some of the choirboys have not stopped smarting since.
McGuirk has written that O’Connell and her sister Theresa Newman, her parliamentary assistant, “orchestrated a very public assassination” of Walsh for tweets which “criticised female opposition politicians”. For the record these criticisms included calling Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald “a stupid bitch” and Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall a “bitch”. After the actor Tara Flynn disclosed she had an abortion, Walsh tweeted: “From what Tara Flynn says, she was pregnant and just couldn’t be bothered having a baby. So she had it killed. Why is she a feminist hero?” After Sabina Higgins, the president’s wife, said it was an outrage to force a woman to continue her pregnancy after receiving a diagnosis of fatal foetal abnormality, Walsh falsely tweeted: “Sabina Higgins describes children with foetal abnormalities as ‘outrages against nature’. Wow. Just wow.”
O’Connell was not to everyone’s liking in Leinster House. Who is? Her fatal attraction was being a well-heeled, good-looking, stylish, professional woman who had no intention of sitting prettily pliant in the Dail and being used as voting fodder. She didn’t save delicate lads’ blushes. When a group of anti-choice TDs proposed an amendment to the abortion legislation that would have required women to bury or cremate their aborted foetal remains, O’Connell said she did not wish to be told what to do with “my maternity pads and soiled bed sheets”. Her utterance of the words “my uterus” discomfited some of her colleagues more deeply than Walsh’s “bitch” remarks.
The patriarchal culture of Leinster House proved a cold place for women such as O’Connell and Ruth Coppinger, who once pulled a thong from up her sleeve and brandished it in the Dail to make a point about a rape trial where the victim’s underwear was referred to by a lawyer for the accused. Coppinger is now contesting a Seanad seat. When she posted a photograph on social media of some supporters participating in a 5km fundraising cycle for her campaign, the first comment to appear below it went: “She’s an ugly f****** bitch.”
McGuirk quoted an anonymous source claiming O’Connell had “done a number” on her running mate Eoghan Murphy, the housing minister, though he admitted the “brutal tactics [were not] elaborated on”. The source said: “Eoghan’s a nice fella. You might hate his policies and be angry at him but he connects with people and [he’s] genuine.” O’Connell, we must presume, isn’t considered nice.
Smart, bold, opinionated, well-heeled independent women are still something of an acquired taste in our progressive-with-bells-on Ireland. The backlash was inevitable. It has happened every time women, either internationally or domestically, have made some headway. Women such as the fragrant and fetching O’Connell pose a special challenge for the knee-jerk caricaturists of women’s libbers as hairy-feminist man-haters.
McGuirk argues that O’Connell lost her Dail seat because voters rejected her “kind of domineering ‘daddy knows best’ liberalism combined with absolute cluelessness about real poverty”. So how does he explain blue-stockinged Murphy’s re-election? Or Varadkar’s for that matter?
O’Connell’s political career may be dead. Long live O’Connell. For there will be more like her. What too many conservatives don’t un derstand is that many women do not hold niceness in the same female hierarchy of esteem they do. These women would rather change the world. Ladies and gentlemen, adjust your taste buds.
