We are the world champions of whataboutery here. There’s nothing we do better.
Northern Irish social media in particular is jam-packed with whataboutery professionals – whatabouterers – who take this very seriously. There are a fair few knocking around who have PhDs in whataboutery, they are so proficient in the art.
Whataboutery, as we know, is a well-honed tactic that deflects criticism by responding with a counter-accusation or an unrelated issue, which tries to distract from addressing the original point.
Should whataboutery be introduced to the next Olympics (and why shouldn’t it, if break dancing is in there), skilled and experienced Northern Irish individuals would bring home gold every time, no doubt about it.
Our default setting when something awful happens is to find some other awful thing that happened, that someone else did, and point to it as a means to cancel out the first awful thing.
The elite whatabouterers will also criticise the people who highlighted the wrongdoing in the first place, telling everyone they are awful because they, firstly, highlighted the wrongdoing and secondly, didn’t mention every other wrong thing other people have done that they deem worse than this new thing.
We have become so adept at this, we struggle to find any other way to deal with issues that come up. Whataboutery is our go-to setting.
Thirty years of the Troubles gave us great practice. When members of one community murdered members of another community, there would be much justification and pointing to what someone else did which was just as bad, to deflect or justify it.
Outrage over one awful incident would be met by a wall of whataboutery on other equally awful things and a weird and sordid dance would ensue that saw people engage in some manner of competitive screaming event, until it all died down and nothing was ever resolved.
When people sing IRA songs, we do the whatabout dance over loyalist songs and vice versa. We do it with murals, flags, violence, bonfires, marches, songs, signs – nothing is out of bounds for the whatabouterer. With the result that issues never really go away.
We have seen much whataboutery this past week as the case surrounding Sinn Féin’s former press officer Michael McMonagle – who has admitted child sex offences – played out in the media.
Even the Minister for the Economy whataboutered on the BBC when questioned about Sinn Féin members supplying McMonagle with job references, asking reporter Enda McClafferty about the BBC in one response. Someone somewhere stuck 50p in the whataboutery machine and it cranked into life.
Social media was awash with folks shouting about things that were worse than what was currently playing out. People got to their feet and demanded loudly that the focus be shifted away to the Education Minister holding a meeting with the Loyalist Communities Council and discussing a proposal for an Irish language school in east Belfast.
Any reasonable person would argue that both issues demand attention but perhaps we are incapable of dealing with things head-on here.
The thing about whataboutery is that it provides temporary moral cover for those being criticised, but it ultimately harms our society further by undermining productive dialogue and preventing accountability. When whataboutery is used, instead of grappling with the matter at hand, the conversation is completely derailed by comparing grievances.
In a society like ours, this strategy only perpetuates a cycle of blame and counter-blame. Things are allowed to fester and no-one moves forward.
Whataboutery dances around the problem – another thing we could win Olympic gold for – and thereby delays meaningful progress.
But worse than that, it sends a clear message that responsibility can be avoided, as long as someone else’s mistakes can be pointed at as being worse.
We are far from a healthy society here, and our whataboutery problem is one of our ills. Without confronting wrongs directly we’ll never get to the root of our issues and we’ll continue on this spinning cycle of blame and counter-blame.
But then, maybe that’s where we feel most comfortable.
Without confronting wrongs directly we’ll never get to the root of our issues and we’ll continue on this spinning cycle of blame and counter-blame