Peadar Tóibín says he’s ‘bursting the woke bubble’. Does anyone care?

On Monday morning, the eve of the US midterm elections, the world braced for Americans’ judgment on Donald Trump’s retribution tour. That was the scorched earth campaign made possible, remember, by his war on “woke”.

It was that mandate that enabled him to pursue the untrammelled, ideologically-crazed, far-right Project 2025, while exporting his brand of “anti-woke” hatred, violent division and infantile vulgarity to susceptible groups across the world.

Trump’s followers regarded themselves as the victims, their muscularity shackled by squishy, low testosterone weaklings who were also, improbably, capable of locking them in “woke” superjails. Recall the touching words of the top banker quoted in the Financial Times after Trump’s 2024 election: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... it’s a new dawn”.

It was all that. The same people who accused the “woke” of “virtue-signalling” were sick of virtue itself. And Trump – who has portrayed himself as Jesus Christ – was their liberator.

All these people happily pitched themselves under Maga’s endlessly pliable anti-woke label. The fallout has brought the United States to the brink of destruction.

Yet through the weekend, as the world prayed for the emergence of unifying leaders, it was extraordinary to see one of our own choose this precise moment to reach for that raddled old code word for division. “We are bursting the woke political bubble,” declared Peadar Tóibín, basking in an Aontú boost from a Sunday Independent opinion poll.

With two Dáil seats, Tóibín is contemptuous towards what he calls a “centrist Government that’s really just been attacked by the left” and he is well pleased with Aontú’s “outsized impact in terms of our vote ... around issues like migration, gender ideology, carbon tax and hate speech”. These may be what he sees as the main components of “the woke political bubble”. Yet the same poll that he cleaves to for validation places migration a distant second to the cost of living among people’s main concerns. Woke rarely features in everyday conversation.

Still, it’s hard to let go of a strategy encoded in a bone lazy word that stands for everything you don’t like. In the 2024 US presidential campaign, it was ostensibly the price of eggs that sank the Biden Harris campaign, yet the Republicans’ advertising dollars were showered on Trump’s repeated lies that little Jimmy could be lovingly waved off to school and come back with “a brutal operation”. They did it again this October, hosing $183 million on transgender-related ads, according to AP News. Despite the tiny numbers of people involved, transgender was their go-to pivot when awkward questions were asked about the cost of living, a topic which concerned eight times as many voters. That’s how the anti-woke strategy works.

Tóibín knows precisely where his support lies. He credits the fuel protests with the party’s popularity boost, despite many people’s deep reservations about the methods and track record of the leadership.

Yet there is something notable about the timing of his latest bounce of the woke ball and the fresh ideological stirrings within Fine Gael. It was possible to briefly admire the south Dublin FG activists who proposed an open “battle of ideas” – only to watch the initiative sink into a social media cesspit because it came attached to the “woke” word.

Yet both sides clearly see value in dragging it up, despite the fact that it drowns everything in range in needless division.

In a post on X.com, economist David Higgins writes in favour of “marking an end to the woke era in Fine Gael”. Among the listed “woke era” items, he lumps in fiscal over-spending and non-EU workers “now accounting for the majority of job additions”. They appear alongside in a hodgepodge of “hallmarks” of the “progressive era” with gender quotas, the family and care referendums, “transgender rights to the detriment of biological sex” and the “Don’t hug your granny” campaign.

Context matters. These initiatives came into being with a decent purpose. In the fiercely fought attention economy, we seem to have forgotten that it’s possible, say, to have a sensible debate on the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s ad about children’s bodily autonomy without reducing it to a silly “don’t hug your granny” meme and permutations of the “woke” word. Just call it “valid idea, terrible execution” – or will that not grab the required likes?

The Family and Care referendums are dead – gone, in the past – because they were poorly conceived and disastrously rushed. Gender quotas were/are an attempt to right historic wrongs. Transgender people are as entitled as Fine Gael activists to fight their corner. Equally there are intelligent counter arguments to all public policies and ideas that don’t include the vacuous “woke” word. And there is a reason why the attempted import of ignorant, Trumpian anti-woke hackery never caught on in Ireland.

The loathed centrism might have something to do with it. Our experience of an oppressive theistic culture is too recent. Too many of us know too much to place our faith in other people’s suspect notions of “common sense”. When Michael O’Leary used the word “rape” inappropriately, he was forced to apologise, not by a “woke” Irish cancellation culture but by decent family members and friends.

The respectful (is that too woke?) adult approach would be to assume that no individual is entirely woke or anti-woke mainly because no one knows what the word means any more. Those who continue to use it deserve close scrutiny.