Do you know what a Swifty is? I'll tell you. A Swifty is a fanatical devotee and follower of the singer Taylor Swift. Miss Swift is a good looking American girl in her twenties with a surprisingly middle-aged looking head on her. (See below.) A Swifty is the kind of person who would go through you for a shortcut if they heard you saying something like that but I'm probably all right because Swifties don't pay much attention to the likes of me or you. Swifties are very inward looking. It's a self-contained world, a world in which you promote yourself, you get ahead, you rise up in other people's estimation based on how much you know about Taylor, how much you're into her songs, what you know about the Bridges she's famous for. Bridge as in verse-chorus-bridge in her songs. You need to be able to talk about the Heartbreaks she's had, the boyfriends she's had and the awful things they've done, the concerts you've been to, the things you know about her, the way she's affected you personally. The more you know about all of these things, the more you're the girl that other Swifties want to be - and the more successful you are in the eyes of other Swifties.
As far as we know those who govern us don't care that much about Taylor Swift but they care an awful lot and in the same way and with the same level of obsession about the green agenda, trans stuff and flooding the country with immigrants. With side journeys into putting warning labels on drinks and covering the country with cycle paths. And also just like the Swifties, if you're in the governing class and you want to get ahead you need to advertise how much more cued in and on board with these enthusiasms you are than the people you work beside and who you compete with. Swifties who play the game benefit in terms of the esteem of their peers but in government or permanent government or NGO world you get to make a reasonably good to very good living out of it. You can have a house, a family, a respectable desirable lifestyle paid for by how well you're able to you serve these ideas and serve yourself. (As to which is the greater success: a middle class lifestyle and a good home for your kids or to have been queen bee among a bunch of teenage girls? Probably depends on who you ask.)
If an outsider of a girl, a girl they used to know - and a girl the Swifties will probably end up working for some day - was to ask a Swifty to explain why Taylor was so good and what the point of being a Swifty was she might be received with a blank look but more than that she'd probably be viewed with genuine pity. Pity because by asking the question you advertise that you don't even understand what the rules are that every one else is playing by. Everyone is competing to show their allegiance and commitment to Taylor, trying their damnedest to get ahead of others in this economy of devotion and you show up advertising the fact you're not even in the game. You've shown up to an All Ireland with a bag of golf clubs.
So if you're someone on our side and you want to point out that 80% of people are against the Hate Speech Bill and Twitter doesn't like it and so on, it's not just futile to think you're going to make an impression on the people who matter, you're actually highlighting to them just how irrelevant you are - what a sad case you are, how far away from the levers of power and out of the loop you are, how little chance you have of ever getting your hands on the things that matter; the money, the opportunities for career advancement and clout, the doors to success.
The same goes, but worse, if you somehow ended up employed in the civil service or the NGO sector or in politics and were still the kind of person who wanted to question the merit of some new European Green funding initiative say or even if you had questions about our friend the Hate Speech Bill. Pipe up with questions about any of those and all you'll be doing is advertising the fact that you don't get the game that everyone else around you is involved in. Sadly, tragically for you and for coworkers who genuinely like you, you're showing that you don't have what it takes to move up in the organization, grab any funding that may be going, or end up with people under you. That makes people sad. Don't make people sad.
Inside organisations like these, in a context like this, how do you even get to formulate an objection to the agenda. What shared ideas, what agreed notions will be available to you to frame your objection. And so we end up with an unopposed Hate Speech Law and no opposition to ending the restrictions on abortion because, in the terms in which everybody operates, once someone comes up with the idea how could you even present an objection to it. The reality is there is no big goal being pursued within these organisations; things are being driven by the inability of anyone to say stop. It's not government in the old fashioned sense, it's everyone being swept along like a Twitter mob. Your only role, your only hope for recognition, is to add your bit to the enthusiasm. Saying anything off message is just wasting your own time and everyone elses.
Swifties come from comfortable backgrounds. They're buffered from the World by their families. They're safe and protected, free to indulge themselves during the best years of their lives before the world intrudes on them. It's a glory of our civilisation, a measure of how successful we've been, that teenage girls are able to find a safe space where they can create a world for themselves in which nothing else matters but their own giddy enthusiasms.
The question is how a governing class in a western democracy with elections every five years is able to manage it.
The answer as usual is to follow the money. Money matters here in two ways. The first is the money from Europe that everyone is after. In a way though this source of money is only of secondary importance. The reality of Taylor Swift is that she is really only fodder for the neighborhood chapter of the Swifties. She supplies them with something to discuss, something to get their teeth into and compete with one another over.
In the same way the European money and projects and incentives and initiatives are just things departmental colleagues use to compete with one another over and as a vehicle for showing off. In earlier times the same privileged and powerful people would have done so by writing songs about chivalry and courtly love.
No, that European money is only the sideshow, the money that really matters is the money that has allowed the creation of this safe space in the first place, cut off from the rest of the country and any reality. It is Ireland's Corporate Tax Revenue that has made this splendid isolation possible.
The NGO sector is just as buffered from reality as the Swifties, they enjoy just as much comfort, just as much protection, allowing them to look inward and indulge themselves in the pursuit of the green agenda, the woke agenda, the immigration agenda. The buffer, the moat, the high wall protecting all of this is the enormous amount of Corporate Tax that we have available in this country.
It provides funding for all this extravagance obviously but it also allows any opposition to be bought off. Is there a problem, is there a backlash, should they be worried about public opinion? No, they have a fire hose of money, more money than they know what to do with and easily enough money to buy silence and "educate" and enlighten any voices raised against them. East Wall Says No? Here's 50 million in funding for EastWall4All and a few more 4Alls besides. Farming family for generations? Nevermind here's lotto levels of money to justly transition you out of that - whether you want to or not. And peat workers can shut up too.
It's extraordinary for a government in a Western democracy to be able to conduct itself with as little regard for what the voters want as ours does.
The Corporate Tax is not only huge and highly effective it's also - politically speaking - cost free. It doesn't come out of the pockets of voters. There's no responsibility for how it's handled because it comes from a magic money tree. It's a Christmas present that gets opened up in early December every year without any idea of what's going to be in it. For the last few years we've been pleasantly surprised. (Was about 4 Billion a year for years, went to 10 Billion three years ago, 22 Billion last year, even more expected this year.)
That Corporate Tax money is the reason why the government is as cut off from the world around it as the most devoted of the Swifties. Which turns everything said above in to a testable hypothesis; when the Corporate Tax dries up, suddenly and unexpectedly, as suddenly and unexpected as it arrived, the effect on Ireland; society, politics, NGOs, the relation between the government and the governed, the whole lot - should be revolutionary.
It will make the political upheaval that followed the housing crash look like a hiccough.
We just have to hang on 'til then.