When a Vietnamese property tycoon was sentenced to death last week for one of the biggest corruption cases in history, Paddy Cosgrave – currently appealing via Twitter/X to that great moral exemplar Elon Musk to speak at his web conference – tweeted that “in Ireland she would have been appointed by FFG to the board of RTÉ or some other state board. And that’s the truth”. It’s not even a version of the truth in 2024. He has 97,000 followers, apparently. What message does that send to any aspiring young politician?

An early 2013 interview I did with three young politicians lingers in the memory, mainly because of what it told us about those who try. The three had arrived into national politics in 2011 radiating youth and energy in the great post-crash wave of new blood. But only two years in, Labour TD John Lyons, a soft-spoken teacher from Ballymun, was shocked at the suddenness of the descent into abuse, “at how difficult [it was] to go out in your own community and actually be seen as a human being ...”

He noted the “horrendous things” said on Facebook, a topic which had consumed political discourse since the tragic death of the junior minister Shane McEntee shortly before, and he recalled one of his first public meetings where he had tried “to be balanced and fair and to say the truth – which was that the issue was very complex” but was torn to shreds. His........

© The Irish Times