'Men need to stop beating the bejesus out of their partners'

That was Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s contribution, this week, to the debate about the epidemic of domestic violence currently gripping the country. Eight women have been murdered in the Republic so far this year – more than the total figure for 2025 – with intimate partners being the suspects in most of those killings. There’s also been a 33% rise in the number of women seeking domestic violence supports in the past couple of years.

It is, clearly, a situation that demands a strong, considered and effective political response. Was that really what the minister hoped to signal with a crude, glib and populist – but hey, catchy and headline-friendly – remark?

Or was it just that, a catchy and headline-friendly comment to guarantee the minister a front-page quote in the dog days of the silly season, with no greater purpose than to get her name in the papers and maybe even trending on X?

It certainly wasn’t likely to achieve anything much else. At a time when we have never been more in need of serious political heft, it seems we’re being governed by deeply unserious people whose only measure of political success is the number of ‘likes’ they get on social media, and whose only ambition for their careers is prominence, publicity and power for its own sake.

And when they get it, as one commentator observed about another bit of high-profile grandstanding this week, they’re like the dogs that finally catch the car – they haven’t a clue what to do with it.

I don’t agree with Sinn Féin’s Lynn Boylan on much, but she has always struck me as a clever, competent and eloquent politician.

I was pretty disgusted at her sharing that ‘terf cutter’ tweet a couple of years ago, but then trans rights, with the attendant threats of violence against ‘terfs’ or women who insist that biological sex is a reality and not an identity, is just another trendy cause for the keffiyeh classes.

But I was astonished that she walked herself into an excruciating moment of international humiliation, this week, before an EU foreign affairs committee, by failing to check a simple fact. Sporting her keffiyeh lanyard, Ms Boylan prefaced her address to the committee with a ‘cúpla focal’ and remarked, in a studied aside, that ‘it’s unfortunate that we can’t use our own language in this committee but I will continue now in English…’

And when the chair interrupted to say, ‘You can, yes’, there was a world of stomach-sinking, reality-biting terror in Ms Boylan’s wobbly, ‘…pardon?’ She didn’t know that, she said, but since she’d prepared her speech in English, she’d continue.

Perhaps Ms Boylan hoped that moment of performative victimhood, of being forced to use the language of the hated oppressor, might have gone viral. Well, it did – in fact it’s become a meme, set to the mordant tuba thud of the signature tune from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

It was a gaffe that launched a thousand gleeful posts, but the deeper subtext of such episodes is no laughing matter at all. Both Lynn Boylan and Jennifer Carroll MacNeill are smart, able, and formidable women – they can both do better than trite ‘gesture politics’, trotting out slick soundbites or staging superficial social media clips for clicks and headlines.

It’d be a misnomer to describe the dilemma, for middle-ground Irish voters right now, as between a rock and a hard place. Rocks and hard places are firm, constant and steadfast. They don’t wobble or yield at a touch of pressure. They don’t crumble or bend with the wind.

Our choice, on the other hand, is between two bunches of vacuous, virtue-signalling, purity-spiralling wet-wipes, lobbing spit-balls at each other across the House with no objective other than to score a hit that’ll play well on Instagram.

We have no strong, passionate or envisioned leadership, no plan, no inspiration, no initiative. On the other side, we have no opposition, no imagination, no realistic, credible or coherent alternative to the current lot.

The political tendency to pander to those attention-deficient smartphone scrollers who rely on the socials for a pre-chewed diet of politics and current affairs slop is degrading the intelligence and competence of our best and brightest.

It is selling us short in terms of political rigour – I can’t remember the last time I heard a debate worth the name in Dáil Éireann – when it’s never been more urgently needed.

Sadly, it’s not just the under-16s who need to be banned from social media and have their smartphones confiscated during the working day.