Woman throws paint at woman, stupidity ensues.

Are you sitting comfortably? If so, we can’t begin. Because this is no time for comfort, this is a time for anger. And not just any old anger. Oh no. At a time like this, with the country bankrupt and the same old thieves fleecing us at every turn, we need a different type of anger. A pointless, self-destructive, attention seeking anger.

Because normal anger doesn’t change anything. It takes a special brand of rage to turn a minister responsible for ruining the health service and turn her into a victim deserving our sympathy. For this you need Eirígí anger.

For the benefit of those outside Ireland, I’ll give a quick recap of the story. Mary Harney, our minister for Health, was turning the sod on a new mental healthcare facility in Ballyfermot. Louise Minihan, an Eirígí councillor, decided to protest by throwing red paint at her. Now I know some of you will be thinking that this makes sense, that increased mental health services would undermine Eirígí’s vote base. But you should be ashamed of yourself for making such a crass joke.

The first thing to point out here is that there’s a terrifying lack of services in Ireland for the mentally ill. So when a new service is provided then that is absolutely the wrong time to protest. Giving out about politicians is not a game of whack-a-mole. You don’t hit them every time their heads appear. You hit them when, and only when, they do something stupid.

Minihan claims she was protesting against the cuts in services to dementia patients in Cherry Orchard. Nothing wrong with that. But protesting at the creation of a new service muddles the message completely.

This isn’t the dumbest example of throwing things at politicians in Irish history. That happened in in 2002 during the general election campaign. A woman threw a pie at the then Fine Gael leader Michael Noonan, and then ran away. Later she claimed that she was  doing this in order to find out what Noonan was planning to do about unemployment. Leaving aside the fact that we had more or less full employment at that time, it takes a rare breed of fool to think that the way to find out a politicians plans during an election campaign is to cover them in custard and run away without asking any questions.

So if that’s the baseline of stupidity when it comes to flinging things, why is Minihan’s act worthy of mention? Because there’s no way anybody could be daft enough to think that paint has some kind of magic mind-changing effect on ministers. The only reason you do it is to get attention. And yet Councillor Minihan seems to think that it was ok for her to give Harney a new coat because the sod-turning event was “a publicity stunt.”

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