Criticism over Varadkar’s festival-going reflects increasing comfort with constructed outrage

The pandemic has been a boon for the semi-professional moral crusaders in our ranks. And the victims of this golden age of social shaming have ranged from teenagers drinking by the canal in Dublin, beachgoers across the United Kingdom, Covid-compliant party attendees, and now Leo Varadkar.

The Tánaiste was pictured at the Mighty Hoopla festival in London on Saturday, just days after he claimed that Britain’s laxer approach to large-scale events was not a good blueprint for Ireland. To rub salt in the wound, his trip also coincided with the weekend Electric Picnic was scheduled, had it not been officially cancelled at the hands of Covid restrictions. The timing was awkward. And the furore utterly predictable.

The charges levelled at Varadkar? Tone deafness, hypocrisy, callousness for all those in the Irish entertainment industry, insouciance, airheadedness. Quite the list for a politician whose festival-going was fully adherent to the rules. But of course, our indefatigable instinct to direct moral censure toward anyone enjoying themselves – even in spite of a pandemic – has asserted itself as a mainstay of coronavirus culture.

How could Varadkar be so insensitive to preside over a highly-restricted landscape for Irish entertainers, while happily jetting off to England to enjoy a festival anyway? Surely this is the height of the elitist double standard that allows lawmakers to believe they are somehow exempt from their own edicts? His leadership must be gravely undermined by the one-rule-for-them-one-rule-for-us mode of viewing the world.

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Doesn’t that feel satisfying to rattle off? It’s certainly all good fodder for whipping up an attention-grabbing social media storm. But the moment we interrogate its substance, the reasoning is revealed to be not just uncharitable but flimsy.

Golfgate redux

We do not have a Dominic Cummings drive to Durham on our hands. Whatever we might want to believe, this was not a Golfgate redux. And it could not be further from Matt Hancock’s rule-bending extramarital affair. In fact, Varadkar neither broke nor bent any rules. He was in no position of special privilege. Anyone in Ireland who wished to attend could have done so with a Ryanair flight and a vaccine passport.

But all of that is obvious. Isn’t Varadkar a member of a Government responsible for many of the hardships the entertainment industry is facing? If he enjoys these events so much, ought he not encourage their speedier reinstatement here? Sure. But he has been a far greater ally to entertainers than many of his Oireachtas colleagues, and far more hawkish on reopening than plenty in the Cabinet.

The whole affair points to something more insidious in the national psyche

But what about the charge of hypocrisy? Maybe he can’t wriggle out of that one – he did claim that the UK’s rules were not a good model for Ireland. But believing that to be true, yet enjoying the benefits of their looser restrictions anyway, is not in fact an intellectually incoherent position at all. What suits Britain of course may not suit a contextually different Ireland.

And that is thanks not just to epidemiological considerations, but political ones too. “I’m pretty sure that if we had the numbers of deaths and hospitalisations that they’re now seeing in England and Scotland, there would be reaction from the Irish people that would be different to the reaction that we’re currently seeing in Britain,” he said in relation to the UK’s festival rules. And he might be right.

Anxious climate

But as we scrabble for any reason to accuse Varadkar of a moral transgression, many have claimed his festival jaunt was symbolically and tonally wrong in this anxious climate. Maybe. But it is only tone deaf in a cultural milieu that prefers to trade in self-important indignation than good faith. Perhaps the thing that ought to change is not a politician enjoying his private life but rather our puritanical need to claim that everything we do not like amounts to some kind of moral injustice.

The concerns and anger of the entertainment industry are valid and should be heard; it has suffered severely at the hands of the pandemic. And perhaps the Government is not doing nearly enough to reinvigorate the livelihoods of the thousands it employs. But the inconvenient reality for Varadkar’s harshest critics is that his attendance at a UK festival alters none of that, nor would his absence from the festival ameliorate it. The high-minded invectives would be more effective if they criticised him for his policy, not for his weekend activity.

It is eminently understandable that the continued uncertainty plaguing live and large-scale events has led people to feel powerless, and in desperate search of a scapegoat. But it is intellectually misfiring: feeling like you have been wronged is not the same as actually having been wronged.

Perhaps the giddy witch hunt is all too irresistible, and the anger feels all too righteous. The whole affair points to something more insidious in the national psyche: an increasing comfort with confected outrage and trial by social media, masquerading as a virtuous defence of fairness and justice. We would do well to remind ourselves that we don’t have to be like this.