THE FUNNY THING about Jim O’Callaghan is that the more that seems to go wrong during his tenure as minister for justice, the more inevitable it seems that he’ll be the next leader of his party. 

He was caught flat-footed by the fuel protests at Easter and exacerbated matters by threatening to send in the army. He’s also been at war with solicitors for months now in a tug-of-war that is damaging trust in the Irish justice system.

But at the end of the day, what’s more Fianna Fáil than limping from one preventable crisis to the next without ever once thinking “Do you know what? Maybe somebody else could do a better job of this.”

This week — in addition to getting on Twitter to brag about deporting a few dozen Romanians — O’Callaghan reminded us yet again what a big tough guy he is when he intervened to instruct the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) to remove a controversial ad that gently tried to open a difficult conversation around consent when it comes to children being hugged or touched by older relatives. 

Having read about the ad before I watched it, I assumed it was some kind of horror show, designed to drum up paranoia that anyone’s kindly old grandparents might actually be child molesters deep down. When, upon watching, I discovered that it was a 26-second clip in which a child looks mildly uncomfortable and confused about what to say as her grandparents approach her for a hug, I thought — “Yeah, I bet there are a lot of kids who feel that way, and those kids and their parents, and indeed their grandparents, should have the space to discuss such an uncomfortable eventuality”. 

O’Callaghan took it differently,........

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