The Right Looks For Converts; The Left Looks For Heretics.

About the Social Democrats, Eoin Hayes and how to not be a cute hoor.

Newly elected TD for the Social Democrats, Eoin Hayes, has placed his party’s foot straight onto a rake. As the Social Democrats seek to capitalise on the momentum provided by a strong performance in the general election, they are instead mired in a story about the new TD’s shares in Palantir and when exactly he sold them off.

In what quickly descended into a farce over the course of a few hours, Hayes went from being robustly defended by his erstwhile comrades to being suspended from the parliamentary party.

A Social Democrats press conference on December 10th, which should have been a triumphant lap of honour with hints of playing a role in the assembling coalition government, instead turned into a sad and tired sight. The assembled top brass of the parliamentary party repeatedly declined to answer a straightforward question. So it goes in the political game, says you. Indeed, and in fact, this quintessential scene from the world of “politics as usual” is a very bad look for the Social Democrats.

As a competitor in the busy soft left quadrant of the Irish political spectrum, the Social Democrats are still solidifying the tenets of its core brand in the minds of the public. However, it’s safe to say that the evasive slipperiness befitting your average gombeen man on show at this presser will not sit well with either their base or the voters who just gave the party a decently ranked preference for the first time on November 29^th.

The claim to be able to move beyond the era of the cute hoor, restoring credibility and accountability to politics is a vital aspect of the appeal of newer soft left parties to younger progressive voters. The Social Democrats may have just blown a toe off that foot.

Insofar as the gaggle of assembled journalists could get anything resembling a meaningful answer from the Social Democrats frontline of Cian O’Callaghan and Garry Gannon, assertions were made repeatedly that Mr Hayes had sold off his shares before entering politics. Asked for a specific date, they just kept saying it was before he entered politics. Hayes stood like a demure meerkat for over 25 minutes as, by Sarah McGuinness of Irish Daily Mail’s count, he told journalists no less than 23 times that the Palantir shares were divested before he entered politics.

Then, just a few hours later, in the humiliating political equivalent of a Notes app apology by a C-list celebrity seeking to avoid cancellation, Hayes admitted to “providing incorrect information.” Turns out that he sold the shares a month after he took a seat on Dublin City Council. This would be bad enough, given how utterly foolish he made O’Callaghan and Gannon look, given their stringent and repeated defence of their erstwhile party colleague. But then it seems that his declaration of interests for the Council contains what we are led to believe is a typo of “June 26” rather than “July 26.” Questions to be answered, lessons to be learned.

The Social Democrats leadership took swift action, suspending Hayes from the parliamentary party. Whatever the merits of the shares and declaration etc, any party with a hint of meaningful discipline must exert the full force of the whip on a member responsible for causing such a credibility-sapping exercise as that brutal press conference.

Opponents on the centre will delight at the cliched display of a leftist party descending into the circular firing squad on a matter of supposed “purity politics” before the Dáil even meets following the election. Begrudgers also on the left will also be sure to stock up on the finest pink Himalayan rock salt to shove directly into the wound exposed by both the hypocrisy and media mismanagement of l’affair Hayes.

Palantir is the brainchild of the cartoonishly super-villainous billionaire Peter Thiel, an early and powerful member of what passes for the intellectual underpinning of Trump’s MAGA movement. Best known for PayPal, Thiel is a one-time libertarian turned national conservative and enthusiastic funder of a litany of ultra-right-wing ghouls across the American political system.

Palantir emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, capitalising on the mania unleashed by the War on Terror with juicy contracts to mine the treasure trove of government data and use network analysis to supposedly find terrorists.

Always notorious from a civil liberties perspective, Palantir has recently further exploded in both value and controversy since the IDF has used it extensively as part of its campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. Having worked for the company as a data analyst years ago and is partially compensated in shares, Hayes directly profiting to the tune of €199,000 from this increase in share value at the same time as his party takes a hardline line on Israel is, of course, enormously hypocritical.

It's also worth asking what the hell someone claiming the values professed by the Social Democrats would ever be doing working for a company like Palantir, run by someone like Peter Thiel. It’d be like Leo Varadkar joining Sinn Féin.

For the Social Democrats, a hard but necessary lesson for a growing party has been learned in the embarrassing light of the camera’s glare; red flags signalling huge potential liabilities were obviously insufficiently vetted.

The party had no choice but to turf Hayes – short term at the very least – and now must lift heaven and earth to turn to page tout de suite. With party leader Holly Cairns on maternity leave, the party’s greatest communications asset is unavailable to bear a good portion of that load.

The best option immediately at hand is for Eoin Hayes to recede into the bushes like Homer Simpson and hope that the horse-trading of coalition formation between Fianna & Fine Gael overshadows this embarrassing fiasco.

After all, even the Social Democrats, no matter how strict their social conscience, live in glass houses as big as they can afford to pay for.