This year let’s banish ‘following your gut’, ‘centrist dads’ and entertaining politics

You will find no new year resolutions here. Make plans and God laughs. But 2024 will be an election year in many places including Ireland so, in some parallel universe, it would be good to be the queen – for a limited term, of course – but with extensive executive powers.

The 10-part wishlist is oven ready.

1. Subjects will be empowered to hold two conflicting thoughts in their heads without incurring pejorative labels such as “centrist dad”. Due to prior disastrous global outcomes, people must ask at least 50 questions before rooting unquestioningly for one side. With the obvious exception of team sports.
2. Facts will be great again. As will nuance. And context.
3. Feelings will retain their importance. However, “following your gut” and “bringing your authentic self” to anything will require a lengthy, rigorous, official examination on a case-by-case basis. The monarch’s rationale is clear. When Donald Trump lost the election and said “I did not lose the election”, tens of millions followed their gut. The guts regurgitated the message that he won the election, mainly on the basis that he always brought his authentic self, etc. It’s not the first example of huge numbers following a madman with no regard for fact, truth, law and fascistic propensities, but everyone is now welded to a tool packed with infinite information about candidates. Or listen to Robert de Niro: Biden on a gurney would still be better than another four years of Trump.
4. Populism will be designated a laughable, idiotic feature of any political party or candidate, due to its underlying presumption that a lot of voters are laughable idiots. A short definition of populism – ie “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite” (per Cas Mudde) – will be flashed on all devices 12 times an hour, along with a reminder that the 70-odd per cent who don’t vote for the populists will be deemed out-of-touch elites by the pure people.
5. Civil language will be mandatory. Speeches substantiated with footnotes and zero anecdotes about lads met on the road will be incentivised under this regime. A TD’s use of the f**k word in the Dáil chamber will not be a candidate for a tittery Diss of the Year award on the national broadcaster.
6. Slogans will be rigorously checked for accuracy and basic sense. Efforts using the word “change” will come under special scrutiny. Examples such as An Ireland for All, A Future to Look Forward To and Invest in Better will be slapworthy. These are real and recent but so forgettable there’s a risk their begetters might forget and try them again.
7. Left and right-wing labels will be deleted as useless. A national conversation will be initiated on suitable replacements. This will take 70 years if a climate apocalypse doesn’t incinerate us first. It will kick off with a consensus that the old party voting system has been upended and the old language no longer works. The mishmash of new-age politicians such as Le Pen, Wilders, Trump and Meloni may share immigration as a manifesto headline but the point is that some want a bigger state while others want to tear it down, as David McWilliams notes. With our home-baked variety in mind, let the eye of vigilance never be closed.
8. The word fascist will be used sparingly, always bearing in mind that if there were actual fascists running this country, no one would be running around calling anyone a fascist. Mandatory discussions on the subject would include souls who have challenged the Putin regime, such as Alexei Navalny or Yekaterina Duntsova, a former TV journalist who has registered her intention to stand for president against Putin in the March election.
9. Political candidates who claim that times were never worse in this country or elsewhere will be required to take an examination about events in living memory. This would include: the 30 million dead in the man-made Chinese famine; the brutal Soviet repression of eastern Europe; the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis; the Vietnam War and US meddling in South America; the middle eastern wars and oil crises (several of them); the assassinations of a US president, a US attorney general, and a civil rights leader – John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King – in a five-year span in the 1960s; the killing of a million of their own people by the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in the 1970s; South African apartheid; the bloody 1989 Romanian uprising against the tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu; the Bosnian war in the 1990s with its rape camps, 100,000 dead and more than 2 million displaced people; the Kosovo war later that decade with nearly 10,000 dead. It would also include the 30-year Troubles on this island – the bombings, torture, mass murder of civilians, state collusion, lost opportunities and economic destruction. Not to mention the tragic waves of emigration; more than 400,000 (15 per cent of the population) in the 1950s, more than 200,000 in the 1980s.
10. Politicians will be thoughtful, truthful, diligent and boring under this regime. Candidates will not be interchangeable with entertainers. RTÉ political coverage will be monitored for excessive excitement. To compensate, Slow Horses will be mandatory viewing with interlude music from Colm Mac Con Iomaire. The monarch will dub him and Gary Oldman honorary consuls of somewhere balmy, then abdicate with a queenly pension.

Go 2024. A future to look forward to.