Last year, I picked up a strange booklet at an art book fair called Sound Strategies for Contemporary Time Travel.
One part of the text, which upturned my perspective, has stayed with me: “In the Aymara language, a native language of the high Andes, the speakers call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning ‘back or behind time,’ and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning ‘front time.’ And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future, because in the present moment we can remember the past, we can ‘see’ it laid out in front of us; whereas the future is unknown, and we cannot seem to turn around to face it.”
It went on: “In the same way, time, as the consensus of how we colloquially experience it in society, can be said to be a form of brainwashing or, if you like, as a strong ‘tradition’ that cavorts as ‘common sense’ that extends into supremely unhealthy and flagrantly immoral dimensions.”
I thought about these flagrantly immoral dimensions when reading about Bertie Ahern returning to Fianna Fáil, a return long since teased, like a new series of And Just Like That, or the next pandemic.
Political parties and politicians have a specific relationship to time. It’s assessed differently. A week is a long time, for example. Time is measured in election cycles, in leadership reigns, in party eras. Versions of time and the past become very selective.
Like anyone who won’t take responsibility for their actions, Fianna Fáil paints itself as a bystander to the past when it wants – things simply occurred while they just happened to be there – and at other times, when it suits the party, it is an all-seeing, all-doing Time Lord. It is somehow responsible for every single thing deemed “good” that happened at any given time, which is a difficult thing to spin while simultaneously pretending anything “bad” was someone else’s fault.
In response to Ahern’s return to the Fianna Fáil party via his friendly local cumann, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar also revisited the past. His stinging 2008 criticism of Ahern can be seen now, as Varadkar put it, as something that happened “at a particular point in time”.
Mean things that were said then are now smoothed over, in order to maintain power in collaboration with people that, at one time, he wouldn’t touch with a Men In Black memory-wiping barge pole.
“Let’s not forget that he was one of the architects of the Good Friday Agreement,” Varadkar said.
Okay, let’s not forget. Let’s not forget literally everything else.
At the risk of warping the space-time continuum, this whole “passage of time” argument simply doesn’t stack up. The reality is, were Varadkar to repeat his past criticism of Ahern in the present it would make things uncomfortable, and disrupt the maintenance of power. Now is not the time. Fine Gael needs Fianna Fáil. They stopped lambasting them once they were of use. Both parties are in a new era, and the past is the past. Until, I suppose, it becomes present again.
Time travel would have incredible uses in contemporary Irish politics. When I saw a photo of a bunch of randomers sitting around a table at Varadkar’s recent housing summit (which I think we can all agree, has been a roaring success), I thought that unless the outcome of the meeting was to declare radical progress in the construction of a time machine to be utilised to prevent Fine Gael from ever getting its hands near housing policy, then what was the point?
It’s too late. Darragh O’Brien was curiously absent from Varadkar’s brief takeover of the housing ministry. Perhaps, that day, O’Brien had already hopped in the DeLorean, quantum leaping back to 2006, to be found on the outskirts of Dublin nodding sagely while developers barrelled around soon-to-be ghost estates screaming “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”
Like the Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes, Fianna Fáil cannot turn themselves around to assess the future, and yet the past is once again right in front of them.
But what they do have to play with is their version of events, a version where one of their most infamous characters is welcomed back into the fold.
It’s a version where the peace process is used as shield to deflect criticism about all the other things that have nothing to do with peace – but have everything to do with another national trauma called the crash – and where the public is expected to accept this turn of events as normal.
The drive for accountability in Irish society is a reaction to how entities such as Fianna Fáil, who should be held accountable, so often reject the linear events of actual history even when a reminder of that past returns.
Time may heal some wounds, but it tends to do so effectively for those with the faintest of scars. Back then, Fianna Fáil ran out of time, then gained some of Fine Gael’s, albeit – like the billions the taxpayer was shouldered with, thanks to Fianna Fáil – borrowed.