O'Gorman makes very bad choice

Vincent Browne

Colm O'Gorman has been one of the most articulate, coherent, impressive people in public life here in a long time. His clarity of mind and language forced the Ferns inquiry into clerical child abuse and focused responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by clerics on children on the institutional Catholic Church and the State.

He has been a commanding advocate of individual victims of child abuse, as he was to Peter McCloskey, who was abused by a Limerick priest and who was given the run-around by the Catholic Church authorities over the years before his suicide.

Colm O'Gorman had authority, influence and presence. In one master stroke he has thrown all this away.

Interviewed on RT? television's The Week in Politics on Sunday night, he offered an explanation for going into politics and his choice of the Progressive Democrats. You might think someone like him, especially given his clear-mindedness and articulacy, would outline his political views, say what he wanted to achieve in politics, and then explain how the Progressive Democrats fitted in with those.

Instead, this is what he said: "In deciding how and if I would do this, it was really important to me that I both challenge my own preconceptions politically and about political parties and inform the decision I was going to make.

"I wanted to talk very widely to people, to get a sense of what purpose people might see in me engaging in politics. So I talked to people who were interested in talking to me, and I talked to others. And the focus was always where can I engage, where can I be productive, where can I enter politics if I am going to do it - and there was an it to that - with conviction and with a propose. So there were the conversations I had, and as a result of these conversations, what was absolutely clear to me was that it was the Progressive Democrats was the party I could do that with, and thankfully they also wanted that."

There is a word for such balderdash that has to do with the excretions of the male members of the bovine species. But there are some significances to it.

First, not a word about what he believes in politically himself. Secondly, and perhaps more revealingly, there is a depressing vain (as in vanity) self-centredness about it. He spoke to people "to get a sense of what purpose people might see in me engaging in politics". Why did he need to get a sense of what purpose others saw for him, wasn't his own purpose sufficient, or perhaps he didn't have a purpose and was hoping someone would articulate one for him?

Many of the people who have worked closely with Colm O'Gorman were literally shocked both by his decision to enter politics and more so by his choice of the Progressive Democrats.

Here was the most articulate spokesman for a vulnerable group in Irish society, joining forces with the very party that has targeted vulnerable groups over the last decade, as though a matter of deliberate strategy. During the 1997 general election campaign Mary Harney targeted single mothers, remember that? Since then the Progressive Democrats targeted Travellers - finance was withdrawn for a campaign advocating Traveller rights and Michael McDowell instigated a change in equality legislation to remove from the jurisdiction of the Equality Authority complaints by Travellers that they were being denied service in public houses and hotels (this is one of the most degrading experiences Travellers have to suffer and McDowell has weakened the protection for them).

Then there was the citizenship referendum, which made no change at all in the rights of immigrants coming here - the Supreme Court had already done that piece of business - it affected only an entitlement to protection perhaps at some time in the future, of children born on the island.

In effect, the previously constitutional "protection" did not even entitle these infants to remain here, for the Supreme Court envisaged they could be removed from the State along with their parents. The only point of that referendum was to play the "race card" in the context of the local and European elections.

It was one of the most disreputable strokes pulled here in a long time, perhaps ever since Independence.

Then there was Mary Harney trying to legalise retrospectively the theft of money from old people in nursing homes. Another tawdry stroke, happily this time prevented by the Supreme Court. And along the way sneering at the "poverty lobby" - those concerned by the rising inequalities and the disadvantage left behind by the Celtic Tiger.

A few dinners even with Liz O'Donnell should not obliterate this record.

One would have thought that anyone who cares about respect for equality and particularly for the rights of vulnerable people would want to oppose the PDs at every hands turn. That one of the foremost advocates on behalf of one of the most vulnerable groups should align himself with these people is incomprehensible.

? The Irish Times