Justine McCarthy: Wallace’s sympathy for Iranian regime strips bare his faux radicalism

Even Spain’s vanquished footballers must have a better chance of winning the World Cup this month than Mick Wallace has of getting re-elected to the European Parliament in 2024. After his scurrilous remarks about the deadly anti-government protests in Iran, the MEP for Ireland South can kiss goodbye to the remnants of Ireland’s infatuation with his faux radicalism.

Since the death on September 16th of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after being arrested for not properly covering her head and being violently assaulted in a morality police van by jeering officers, as witnessed by other detainees, more than 488 people have been killed by security forces during protests in her memory. The protests are being led by women. According to Iran Human Rights, 29 women had died by November 29th, along with 60 children.

Last month, Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, reported that more than 14,000 people had been arrested, a number now believed to stand at 18,000. He said 21 people were facing charges that carried the death penalty, six others had already been executed, and that victims’ families were being forced to make false statements under duress that their children had died by suicide.

The protesters have demonstrated awesome courage, both at home in Iran, where women and girls make public shows of defiantly shearing off their hair, as well as abroad. Elnaz Rekabi, Iran’s climbing champion, is reported to be under house arrest since returning from South Korea where she competed in the Asian games devoid of a headscarf in October. It surely has not escaped the notice of soccer super-fan Wallace that the Iranian team in Qatar pointedly refrained from singing their country’s national anthem before their first match in the tournament in a gesture widely interpreted as symbolic support for their compatriots.

Four years ago, we were clapping health workers in the street. Now we’re reducing their benefits

---

Politicians demonising NGOs is fodder for extremists

---

Sudden stampede to the right by our politicians can only benefit democracy

---

We know what’s going on in Gaza, and won’t be able to say we didn’t

---

Countries, alliances and organisations throughout the world that have a whit of concern about human rights have deplored the brutal repression of the protests. The EU has imposed asset freezes and travel bans on 98 Iranian individuals and eight entities, including the country’s minister for information as well as some of the top brass in the morality police.

The Wallace vote-getting magic always had a sell-by-date. Sooner or later, the bundle of contradictions he manifested was bound to catch up on him

Iran’s ambassador to Ireland fetched up on RTÉ’s Prime Time on November 23rd, spouting the regime’s propaganda that Amini’s death was from natural causes due to a pre-existing health condition, which has been denied by her family and discredited by scans and photographs taken of her in the hospital, showing violent bruises on her face. “That’s a lie, ambassador,” Miriam O’Callaghan told the diplomat, to her everlasting credit.

[ Sally Hayden: Women’s revolution in Iran is about freedom, not hijabs ]

But there’s always one. In the European Parliament, Wallace, whose own unrestrained locks are his trademark, accused some of the demonstrators of violence, murder and destruction and declared that no country would tolerate such civil unrest. Iran, he claimed, was under attack.

Victim-blaming is the lowest form of defence. Women know it only too well. Wallace’s assertion that the protest movement in Iran “would not be tolerated anywhere” is redolent of dangerous old tropes used in other circumstances – What did she expect, going out dressed like that? She was asking for it, your honour.

Scant credibility

Wallace is not a bad man, just a misguided one. I doubt that he recognised the perilous import of his parliamentary comments before he unleashed them. If that is so, he should apologise and withdraw them. Otherwise, he will have scant credibility any time he speaks about human rights, which he has chosen as his mastermind subject in Europe’s political arena. How can his recent denunciations of the Taliban’s oppression of women in Afghanistan be taken seriously when, in the next breath, he defends a regime that kills a woman for loosening her headscarf?

[ How Clare Daly and Mick Wallace became stars of authoritarian state media ]

The trickle-down effect of his apologia for the Islamic state of Iran is that other causes he has adopted will be blighted by his pick ‘n’ mix attitude to tyranny. A world gripped by fear after the Russian invasion of Ukraine needs to hear persuasive voices speaking out about Nato’s creeping expansion and the surrender to it by countries that once cherished their neutrality. With his defence of Iran, Wallace has disqualified himself from the ranks of the persuaders.

Ireland has had its Donald Trump moment. Life – and, for some people, death – demand that radicalism be more than skin deep.

Contrarianism has taken the former property developer a long way in his political career. Flouting dress codes is integral to his cachet, and more power to his oft-seen elbow, but he cannot be blind to his own good fortune that, instead of 70 lashes of a whip, all he got were snide remarks for wearing pink T-shirts and dangling earrings in the Dáil. As early as 2011, he displayed ambivalence about gender equality in the wardrobe department when he was overheard in the chamber pronouncing that a female TD he called “Miss Piggy” had “toned it down a bit today”.

Wallace’s resistance to being stereotyped has stood to him. Like fellow property developer Donald Trump, he parachuted an aura of radicalism into politics from the construction sector and the ashes of an economic crash partly, caused by builders’ avaricious bank borrowings. Personally likeable, he built an electoral appeal with his anti-establishment persona – trespassing in protest against US military use at Shannon Airport and making explosive revelations about Nama, the State’s bad bank for developers. The publicity he reaped could be measured in newspaper column inches stretching all the way from Leinster House to Wexford and back again.

[ Analysis: Crackdown fails to silence Iranian protesters ]

The Wallace vote-getting magic always had a sell-by-date, though. Sooner or later, the bundle of contradictions he manifested was bound to catch up on him. While championing the cause of Julian Assange and a free press and while demanding accountability from others, he developed a custom of not responding to journalists’ questions about his own behaviour. He decries financial inequality but withheld pension contributions from his own workers’ pension fund.

Some voters may have regarded these contradictions as mere foibles – endearing ones, even – but Wallace’s comments on Iran are too grave to be dismissed. They stand in contrast with the inspiring bravery of Badri Hosseini Kamenei, the sister of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has sympathised with mothers mourning the crimes of her brother’s “despotic caliphate”.

Ireland has had its Donald Trump moment. Life – and, for some people, death – demand that radicalism be more than skin deep.