TYPICALLY, THIS COLUMN tends to begin, proceed and finish with the strangest stories of the week in an Irish context. Sometimes we’ll devote a little time to certain behaviours across the water because, let’s face it, that crowd can be hard to ignore.

This week, however, we will begin by looking in the other direction, across the Atlantic. We will brace ourselves, adopt our best Superintendent Chalmers posture and ask: Good Lord, what is happening in there?

I don’t know if you guys have checked in on the state of the US presidential election but, uh, it’s not going great! Since last month’s calamitous debate in Atlanta that saw President Joe Biden virtually unable to articulate or indeed finish a thought throughout, the sitting American president has faced a barrage of calls to step aside and hand his candidacy over to someone who is capable at working to their full capacity outside of the hours of 10am to 4pm (a criterion which immediately rules me out of the running). 

Despite scheduling several rallies and interviews designed to assuage fears about both his competency and cognitive acuity, the 81-year-old has failed abysmally to give the impression that he is capable of defeating the comparatively sharp and energetic Donald Trump for a second time this November.

Things reached a new low this week when during a speech to Nato, Biden introduced President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin’ and followed it up with a press conference hours later where he referred to Kamala Harris as ‘Vice President Trump’. Suboptimal, you will surely agree, but in his defence: it was nighttime. 

Biden’s enfeebled attempts at reassuring his voters, donors and fellow party members that he is capable of doing a job that he is self-evidently incapable of doing are reminiscent of reading about 15th-century French monarchs who were known by names like ‘Charles the Idiot’ and ‘Montcler the Arrogant Jackass’ and realising that we actually are, on a global level, still pretty much in the same position as the serfs and peasants were back then. 

In a further sign of societal decay, perhaps the most important intervention to date has come from Hollywood superstar and Democratic mega-donor George Clooney, who published an editorial in The New York Times calling on his “friend” Joe Biden to step aside. Joe Biden did not directly address Clooney’s article during yesterday’s press conference, but it’s entirely plausible that’s because he thinks it was written by Frank Sinatra. 

In the last week, we have read somewhere in the region of one thousand editorials patting Biden on the back for his achievements while begging, literally begging, the man to face up to reality and spend his remaining years relaxing, but to date Biden has shown that he’s not for turning, except around in bewilderment.

Who is Fine Gael?

Closer to home, the erosion of Fine Gael’s parliamentary party continued apace with Simon Coveney perhaps the most high-profile TD yet to announce that he would not be standing for reelection. The former Tánaiste – who over the years has served as Minister for Housing, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Enterprise – is the 12th sitting Fine Gael TD to announce his departure from electoral politics. 

This wave of abdication has oddly been met with improved polling for Fine Gael, suggesting that the public might like Fine Gael a little more when they have less of an idea what Fine Gael entails. The party, which is losing over one-third of its TDs, faces a challenge in restocking candidates in the wake of this exodus, but based on the current evidence they may be better off running mystery candidates, complete with posters that simply bear a silhouette and a big question mark. 

Violence against women

Continuing a trend that has remained sickeningly present over the last few weeks and months, there were several stories this week to serve as painful reminders of the dangers faced by women in modern society. 

The story of Tori Towey – an Irish woman who was detained in Dubai and prevented from travelling home for the crimes of alcohol consumption and attempted suicide following abuse at the hands of her partner – came to prominence this week after it was raised by Sinn Féin leader Mary McDonald in Dáil Éireann. The Irish diplomatic service appeared to spring into action and quickly secured the return of Ms. Towey, but the story was a stark reminder of the danger facing women not only at the hands of their partners, but at the hands of the law as well.

This was followed by a deeply harrowing story from the United Kingdom in which a mother and her two daughters were murdered with a crossbow. The suspect in the case, Kyle Clifford, is an ex-partner of one of the victims, reaffirming a lesson that we have been taught over and over again but stubbornly, as a society, refuse to learn. One particular half of society, to be more precise. 

A third story was the scandal that has broken around accusations of historical abuse allegedly perpetrated by some FAI coaches in the 1990s. As a result, three coaches have been “stood down” from footballing operations and a Garda investigation is underway.

Interim FAI CEO David Courell confessed himself “deeply shocked” by the revelations, a well-meaning but poorly phrased sentiment that betrays a certain naivety that exists among many men. In the year of 2024, the idea that men in power might perpetrate harm against women in their so-called care should shock absolutely no man who has ever had a conversation with a woman. 

More than ever, men must face up to the reality that the climate of violence against women knows no borders and pervades just about every element of society at large, not only now but down through the years. This should come as a surprise to nobody at all, though our failure to do anything at all about it on a structural level suggests that there are still plenty of blind eyes that need opening. The time for shock is long past, the time for real action is now.