It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment Kellie Harrington’s tweet-gate reached the nadir of its madness this week, but it might have been when her defenders started trawling through the tweets of the Off the Ball man who had interviewed her, finding one in particular that was, well, unpleasant, and declaring it to be a ‘Gotcha!’ moment.
His tweet, incidentally, was 13 years old, sent when he was 15 or 16.
No, seriously.
Or the nadir might have come when one of our esteemed senators joined the pile-on by tweeting Spar Ireland, asking them to clarify that it had very different opinions on immigration and diversity than those of their ambassador, Harrington.
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By then, there was already enough vitriol pinging about the place from all angles – from those who wouldn’t be content until Harrington was burned at the stake, to those who decided she was now their darling anti-immigrant poster girl.
Adding fuel to a fire that was already out of control wasn’t smart.
The response to the senator’s request was roughly split between people saying they would boycott Spar if they dropped Harrington as an ambassador and those who said they’d shop there even more if they made such a decision, eating their breakfast rolls until they burst.
By now, you can only imagine, the company’s PR people were hiding under a tree, and never intended emerging again. You’d have been tempted to join them.
It was, though, easy enough to see a storm brewing after Harrington’s interview with Off the Ball’s Shane Hannon on Monday.
“I know you’ve had a number of interactions on social media that have suggested you have strongly held views on immigration,” he began, at which point you could only grab a cushion and prepare to hide behind it.
It was a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry from Hannon. Harrington had, after all, used the public platform of Twitter, where she has 30,000 followers, to express her opinions on the issue of immigration, so he was more than entitled to ask her to expand on them.
The real pity is that she didn’t, because Harrington is considerably more thoughtful, smart and measured than those 280 Twitter characters allowed her demonstrate.
As it was, her retweeting of and comment on Dutch journalist Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s take on news that the main suspect in the murder of a 12-year-old Parisian girl was an Algerian woman allowed her, too easily, to be inserted into the cartoon racist category. That was her own fault too, though, retweeting someone like Vlaardingerbroek, without checking the veracity of her claims, is never wise.
But, yeah, it would have been good if Harrington engaged with Hannon, rather than spikily accusing him of having an agenda. She didn’t, need it be said, come out of it well.
Then again, she got such pushback on her October tweet that she ended up deleting it, saying she didn’t “need the hate”, so she already knew the consequences of getting involved in such a discussion.
The thing is, she’s been patted on the head so often, since becoming a national figure, for being a positive representation of inner city Dublin folk – in a kind of a ‘ah bless, they’re not all scumbags’ way. But once her chat was less cosy and positive and made a chunk of us feel uncomfortable, we wanted her shut down. Instead of saying, go on then, talk about your own experience in this, one that not all that many of those denouncing her know anything about.
The pity, then, was that she wasn’t up for doing that. Hearing her responding to being challenged on whatever views she holds on these issues would have been absorbing, because Kellie Harrington is never less than that.
She dragged herself up by her fingernails to get a chance of competing at an elite level in her sport, few of us paying any attention to her until she presented us with an Olympic gold medal, an open-top bus parade and an opportunity to olé olé olé our way through the night.
So maybe we owe her the good grace to desist from demonising her and calling for Spar to run a mile and insert themselves under a tree. Instead, why not have a chat about it, encourage her to speak her mind and accept being challenged on her views?
And, God almighty, enough with the ‘role model’ chat. She won us a gold medal, she owes us nothing more.
