Ireland, the land of saints, scholars and grandmothers who will force-feed you a third slice of soda bread whether you want it or not, has finally found its true public enemy: Granny's arms.
This week a consent campaign called We-Consent, run by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and supported by Ireland's Department of Justice and its Department of Children, Disability and Equality, got caught pushing a 25-second video telling the nation that grandparents should maybe think twice before hugging the grandkids. In the ad, Grandma and Grandpa show up at the front door, one kid hugs them like a normal human child, and a teenage girl behind him looks at the incoming embrace like it's a tax audit. Then the caption drops the hammer: "Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them." Followed by the immortal line, "Awkward? Maybe. Important? Absolutely."
Absolutely. Nothing says "important" like treating a 78-year-old woman in a cardigan as a boundary violation with a bus pass.
The backlash hit faster than a pint at closing time. Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan, whose own department helped fund the campaign, came out and called the video "both inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents," said it "does not represent the views of the Government," and announced it had been pulled after his officials had a word. He also added, with a straight face, that loving grandparents are "an incredibly positive thing to be cherished and not something to be campaigned against." Which is a sentence no government in human history should have needed to say out loud. That's like the fire department issuing a statement clarifying it is not, in fact, pro-fire.
The DRCC says the video was cheap, made with volunteers and staff, based on more than 20 workshops, and posted on social media back in mid-September. It then removed all three videos in the series because of the "negative attention" in the last 24 hours. Translation: nobody noticed for a month, and then the whole planet noticed at once. Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill rushed to tell the Dáil it "was not a government campaign" and nobody in government sanctioned it. Great. So the government paid for it, its logo-adjacent departments supported it, but nobody actually looked at it. That's not a scandal, that's just how every Western government works now.
Aontú TD Paul Lawless asked how much taxpayer money went into it. The minister wouldn't say. Somewhere a grandmother in Mayo is doing the math on how many Christmas jumpers that money could have knitted.
Here's the thing. Irish grandparents survived the Troubles, the Celtic Tiger, the crash that followed it, and Eurovision losses that would break a lesser people. And now the NGO class wants them to fill out a permission slip before they squeeze little Ciarán at the door.
We reached a spokesperson for the imaginary Department of Hug Compliance, who told us the new process is simple: "Grandparents submit Form 27-B in triplicate, wait six to eight weeks for processing, and then receive a laminated card authorizing one side-hug of no more than two seconds. Cheek pinching requires a separate license."
Meanwhile, the actual teenage girl in the ad presumably just wanted her phone back.
The lesson, as always: when the government funds an NGO, the NGO funds a "campaign," and the campaign tells your nan she's the problem, it's not the nan who needs a workshop.
The Demorat is a satire and parody publication. This article is a comedic roast based on real news reports; invented quotes are fictional and not attributed to any real person.
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