Dean Buckley Irish Politics

Mattie McGrath’s Incoherence on Housing

South Tipp TD Mattie McGrath made a curious contribution during a Dáíl housing debate last week, video of which he shared on his Facebook page. Here’s the relevant portion, quoted from the Dáíl record:

“It is a mammoth task. We have to get real. The idea of the left here is that we cannot have private contractors or developers. If we do not have private developers involved, we will not build the houses, full stop. I would love to be back in the 1940s and 1950s when the county council had manpower and built the houses, but those days are gone. We have to get over these ideologies, stop objecting to housing being built and encourage the voluntary sector. I am a member of Caislean Nua Voluntary Housing Association. It is the proudest thing I was ever involved in. We built 17 houses. That is not many but it was a voluntary committee. If every village and hamlet built ten, we would halve the housing crisis.”

What’s curious about it is that I was under the impression that Mattie McGrath regarded the gutting of local authorities, their resources and manpower, as a bad thing that should be reversed. Once upon a time, he joined a High Court action to challenge the constitutionality of the abolition and merger of various local authorities under the Fine Gael / Labour austerity coalition, and hardly a day goes by he does not bemoan the abolition of Clonmel Borough Council in particular. That the loss of that council has been disastrous for services and development in Clonmel is something on which Deputy McGrath and I agree.

But apparently, the idea that councils should be resourced, staffed and empowered to build public housing at scale is a suggestion to be dismissed out of hand as unrealistic, and more than that, ideological. Deputy McGrath starts by attacking the strawman idea that “the left” want to abolish all private housing development, but what he actually attacks is the notion of public housing itself. This is at odds not only with his professed views on councils, but his professed views on housing.

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Dean Buckley The Conspiracist Papers

Notes on Staring into the Abyss

I could never explain how or why I became fascinated with conspiracy theories. It started at such a young age I can’t even work out a decent timeline of when I first encountered some of the books, films and TV shows I now regard as formative. I know I bought six books on a 2 for 3 deal when I was in primary school – four Dan Brown novels, a book about Atlantis I never actually read and The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories – and if I was interested before that purchase, I was obsessed soon after. It’s been a greater or lesser focus of mine at different times in my life, but it’s also been a gateway to other interests: cults, con artists, the occult, misinformation, pseudoscience, radicalisation, extremism. I am not an expert in anything, but I am a connoisseur of fringe, fanatical and false belief. I have spent thousands of hours across my entire life reading books, articles and documents, watching films, TV shows and YouTube videos, and especially in the last few years, listening to podcasts, because learning about strange beliefs and why people believe them is just one of the best ways I can imagine spending my time.

It is traditionally around this point I would stop to reassure you, in case it wasn’t clear, that I may be interested in conspiracy theories, but I am not myself a conspiracy theorist. And it is true that, whatever you imagine in your head when you think “conspiracy theorist”, I am not that. I am not a paranoid person who detects the hidden hand of some mysterious “Them” in current events. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, or anything that breaks the laws of physics, denies the general historical record, defies sense or can’t be substantiated with credible evidence. I do not believe in the supernatural or paranormal and I despise all pseudoscience and medical quackery. I’m Catholic, and obviously believe in things beyond the material world, but they don’t affect how I view physical reality, because they are beyond the material world.

But I am, strictly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. I just don’t like to call myself one because it carries so much cultural baggage beyond its literal meaning. I want to disavow it because it’s radioactive, not because it’s unfair. Most people don’t use “conspiracy theorist” as a neutral descriptor for anyone who theorises conspiracy. If you call a cop or journalist investigating a criminal conspiracy a conspiracy theorist, you’re impugning their credibility and implying their allegations are fantasy. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, but I do believe that conspiracy – people making secret plans to achieve goals through underhanded means – is a normal feature of human society. I also believe that conspiracy has played – and continues to play – a larger role in shaping the course of history than is commonly or officially acknowledged. The problem is that the concept of conspiracy itself has been tainted by the concept of conspiracy theories, to the extent the two terms are often used interchangeably (e.g. “that’s not true, that’s just a conspiracy!”). It turns the whole topic of conspiracy into a minefield and it doesn’t even help to reassure people you’re not crazy, because that’s exactly what crazy people say.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve lived my entire life within a historically unprecedented explosion of conspiratorial belief that has itself shaped the course of history more than we yet realise. Before the nineties, conspiracy theorists weren’t really part of the public zeitgeist outside pop culture, at least in the English-speaking world, but then 9/11 happened and now conspiracist belief is a fixture of global politics. Donald Trump alone is both the most famous, influential conspiracy theorist ever and possibly the subject of more conspiracy theories than anyone else in history. His most fanatical followers tried to overthrow the US government when he lost the 2020 election, and now he’s staffed his second, more openly fascist administration with multiple open conspiracy theorists.

It feels like reality is cracking apart from the inside, all of us stuck on one planet, but trapped in parallel worlds. Trying to find accurate information about a recent news event on the Internet is like wading through a hall of mirrors flooded with raw sewage. The danger of conspiratorial belief has never been more obvious and people’s wariness of it never more justified. I want to write about conspiracism in large part because I believe it is an immediate, growing threat to society and we must stop its spread or humanity is fucked. After all, there may be no conspiracy theory more widespread than denial of the climate crisis.

But we can’t accept the stigmatisation of belief in conspiracy as the cost of stopping its most destructive forms. We live in a profoundly corrupt world where a tiny elite hoard wealth and power for themselves and it only serves their interests to make claims of conspiracy taboo. It’s not just what they’ll do, either, it’s what they’ve already done. Every unacknowledged conspiracy is an unadmitted crime, every cover-up is a conspiracy itself. Countless people alive today are still fighting for the basic truth about atrocities committed before TVs had remote controls. Countless more are dead. They all deserve justice and they can’t get it when those who conspire against them can just slander them as conspiracy theorists. But it’s not just wrong, it wouldn’t even work. It hasn’t worked. It’s how we got here. Conspiracy theorists have only become more and more stigmatised in my lifetime and they’ve never been more numerous or influential. It’s the punchline at the end of history.

When you make conspiracy unspeakable, you make conspiracism inevitable.

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