Queer View Mirror

#RepealThe8th #IQA

HARD GRAFT

Democratic politics don’t come cheap. Everywhere people try to persuade citizens to elect their party or to change a fundamental part of a constitution, money has to change hands. We expect our politicians to accept funding from all sorts of dodgy business interests, ideologically motivated organisations, and even the national purse. There are, of course, rules and regulations about who can fund political activity and by how much, to prevent for example, a billionaire who hates gays from skewing a liberalisation of the law. We are usually unsurprised when politicians bend or break these funding rules.

Here in Ireland, we have a special source of funding for political activity in rich Irish-Americans, or the diaspora, as they have been more romantically labelled in recent decades. They are migrants who’ve made good in a few years in the US, as well as descendants of Famine-era survivors of coffin ships and Ellis Island. Some want to help the forces in the homeland outraged by the persistence of Victorian-era laws, while others are attached to visions of a green and peasant land that only ever existed in Hollywood or postcards.

They might fund liberal activities (such as the publication of a 30 year-old gay mag for instance), but it’s the conservative or religious groups funding forces against social change that get the most attention.

These sources of political funding are especially active during a referendum, paying for groups of private citizens who might not otherwise have the means to add to the litter of ripped posters or to hire a van to take them to stand around with placards at churches or on Saturday shopping streets.

This sort of funding from abroad has happened in most of the referenda intending to make the Irish Constitution fit for purpose in a modern state. By and large, we accept it as part of our political process and aren’t too worried about it being a foreign interference in the national destiny.

Now, however, the digital age has created the chance for a more insidious and pervasive influence. Rather than paying for placards and press conferences, people with cash to spend on political influence can pay to more directly target voters who they know share their ideas. Huge lists of people whose online history reveals more than just their shoe-buying habits are available from the same companies – Facebook and Google – who will sell political advertisers space in their feeds for perfectly targeted messages. No propaganda need be wasted on the deaf ears of your political enemies again.

This sort of voter information was apparently sold during the Trump election as well as the Brexit referendum, and just weeks before the Repeal the Eighth referendum, Google recalled its corporate messaging to do no evil and said it wouldn’t show its Irish users ads paid for from outside the State.

This is probably a meaningless gesture, akin to the virtue signalling most corporations now include in their marketing budgets. How easy is it to get around such restrictions by transferring cash from the US to the bank account of an Irish lobby group?

The whole messy and rotten area of buying political influence isn’t likely to go away, despite such measures. As voters become more atomised and less likely to take part in traditional activities like joining political parties or voting for the party their parents voted for, then politicians will keep on trying to buy their votes in whatever way they can.

This sort of funding from abroad has happened in most of the referenda intending to make the Irish Constitution t for purpose in a modern state.

WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

When you’re living through times of huge change, it’s easy to forget that things like the 2015 marriage equality referendum or the first gay Taoiseach will one day be seen as signposts in an inevitable history of progress or enlightenment. Of course, they aren’t really, but that’s just the way history tends to work.

It presents itself as a narrative, easier to absorb by a storytelling species, so it seems inevitable, for example, that millions of young men should die in trenches because some archduke in a funny hat was shot in faraway Sarajevo.

Historical materials such as pamphlets, videotapes of debates or newspaper cuttings are used by historians to avoid the trap of narrative that they so easily fall into. These sources show that underneath the neat stories of cause and effect, history is just another expression of chaos.

Preserving historical documents is essential, especially for groups in society whose voices have been largely ignored or suppressed. The story of Ireland’s LGBT+ community is in the holdings of the Irish Queer Archive (IQA), which for decades has been barely saved from disappearing by a few committed people. They’ve had some funding from the state, here and there, but there’s been no long-term vision to make this resource into something more active and useful than a lot of boxes in storage in the National Library and elsewhere. Perhaps it might be a project our next president could take an interest in?