Watching the events of this week, I can’t help but be struck by the performative nature of it all. Everything is gesture, everything is theatre. Everyone hits their mark, delivers their line, waits for their side of the audience to cheer. The set changes. The script never does.
Like any right‑thinking person, I find the genocide in Gaza utterly abhorrent. I understand why people want to show solidarity. I get the instinct to shout, march, protest, wave flags, demand something better from the world. None of that is the problem.
My problem is Belfast City Council can’t keep our streets free of dogshit, so forgive me if I’m not optimistic about their chances of solving the Israeli‑Palestinian conflict. This isn’t cynicism for sport. It’s basic expectations management.
It all comes down to controlling what you can control. I may have strong views on Trump, for example, but I don’t think he’s going to listen. At least he hasn’t replied to any of my letters yet. If global power structures were moved by strongly‑worded local council motions, the world would look very different by now.
My core problem with our endless culture wars is that they are an admission by our political system that it is incapable of doing anything useful. Not struggling. Not delayed. Incapable.
Stick a bunch of politicians in a room and say, right lads, any ideas on how to fix the health service? What about schools? The economy? Housing? Infrastructure? You’ll be met with a fog of vagueness, a few buzzwords, some throat‑clearing, and not much else.
But give them a flag to argue over, a bonfire to denounce, a migrant to fear, a trans person to litigate, a parade to inflame, a remembrance row to reheat, and suddenly everyone is energised. The media love it. The punters love it. The platforms algorithmically mainline it into our eyeballs. We all sit around in a toxic circular economy of outrage and righteousness.
It feels like politics now operates on the same model as reality TV. Conflict is the product. Heat is the metric. Nothing is meant to be resolved because resolution kills engagement.
And when it’s all over and we’re all exhausted, the patients will still be on trolleys in hospital corridors. One third of our population will still be economically inactive. We will still have a giant toxic lough potentially poisoning the water of half the country. The housing list will still stretch into the horizon. The classrooms will still be overcrowded. The roads will still be falling apart.
The culture war doesn’t replace real politics by accident. It replaces it because real politics is hard, slow, and unglamorous. It requires trade‑offs. It creates losers as well as winners. It doesn’t fit neatly into a viral clip.
So instead, we get pantomime politics. Boo the villain. Cheer the hero. Throw something at the stage. Go home feeling like you participated.
Meanwhile, nothing that actually matters gets fixed.
The old line about politics being show business for ugly people takes on a darker turn when the line between performance and reality starts to blur. This stuff doesn’t stay on the stage. Politicians whip up the crowd; the crowd spills into the street; someone gets lifted; someone gets hurt; someone ends up in court; and occasionally, someone doesn’t make it home at all. The peelers get wedged between theatre and consequence. The cycle tightens. The volume goes up. And the people running the show still get to shrug and insist it was all just words.
At some point, we are going to have to decide whether we actually want to be governed or just permanently badly entertained. Because the bills are real. The waiting lists are real. The poisoned water, the broken schools, the stalled economy, the exhausted public services, all of it is real. The pantomime is optional. We keep choosing it. And until we stop, we will keep getting exactly what we deserve: noise instead of outcomes, heat instead of light, and politics that never risks the dangerous business of fixing anything.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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