Gangsta Rap Politics: Middle Class, Middle Aged Journalists and their Vicarious Thrills.

There is an election coming up in Dublin in two weeks time.

One of the candidates is Gerry Hutch, a man whose public fame rests overwhelmingly on his status as an organised crime figure.

Another is Malachy Steenson, a solicitor and long-time political activist who has spent years articulating the grievances and frustrations of the same inner-city communities from which Hutch draws support.

One of these men can barely move without cameras following him.

The other is struggling for oxygen.

And that tells us something ugly – not just about journalism, but about the appetites of the people producing it.

Because what is happening around Hutch increasingly resembles something very familiar from American popular culture.

Gangsta rap.

Not musically, obviously. But psychologically. Socially. Commercially.

The same instincts are at work.

Crime As Entertainment

Gangsta rap functions, at its core, as what cultural critics sometimes call a “crime pantomime”.

It stages stylised, exaggerated, theatrical versions of violence, drug dealing and criminality as entertainment. The gangster becomes a character. A myth. A form of commercial spectacle.

Even where it emerges from genuine urban dysfunction, it is never simply documentary. It is a performance – a blend of reality and fiction in which criminals become antiheroes and street violence becomes consumable culture.

Over time the genre evolved. From the old G-funk mythology of the 1990s to drill music, trap music and the modern “roadman” aesthetic, the stories became darker, more localised and more explicit. But the underlying mechanism remained the same.

Crime became pop culture.

The “gangster” became a marketable product.

And crucially, the primary consumers were often not the people living that reality themselves, but middle-class whites seeking proximity to it. Studies repeatedly showed that white suburban audiences became the commercial engine of gangsta rap – consuming violence and dysfunction as a form of vicarious thrill.

For polite society, it became a kind of tourism.

A safe excursion into a world they did not inhabit themselves.

That same instinct has existed in Ireland for decades.

We simply expressed it through newspapers, documentaries, podcasts and television rather than music.

Our Own Marvel Universe

Long before podcasts and Netflix documentaries, Irish media had already begun constructing its own mythology of criminal celebrity.

Veronica Guerin deserves special mention here, not because she invented the phenomenon but because she helped codify it. Back in the early years of this media fascination with organised crime, she grabbed her own sliver of immortality by gifting Irish criminals a lot of comic-book nicknames some of which endure to this day.

“The Monk.”

“The General.”

“The Penguin.”

“Mr Big.”

An entire Marvel/DC cinematic universe of Irish criminality.

Garda briefings became origin stories. Criminal feuds became serialised entertainment. Eventually Martin Cahill was elevated all the way to the big screen in The General.

The gangsters became cultural figures.

Not admired exactly – at least not officially – but endlessly fascinating.

And as often happens with fascination, moral clarity slowly began to erode.

When Guerin eventually annoyed one of these figures enough to get herself shot, much of the Irish media responded not simply with outrage but with something closer to vendetta. The public fury directed at John Gilligan far exceeded the available evidence linking him directly to the crime. In the end, unable to conclusively secure justice for Guerin’s murder, the State effectively settled for revenge instead: Gilligan receiving an extraordinarily severe sentence, 26 years, for cannabis offences at a time when emotions were running white hot.

Even today, amid modern campaigns to liberalise drug laws, there is an awkward silence around that period and Gilligan’s draconian sentence. No poster boy he.

Because the mythology cuts both ways.

The media glamorises the gangster – until suddenly it remembers, or is reminded, the gangster is real.

 Why Hutch Fascinates Them

Which brings us back to Gerry Hutch.

Why is so much of the media attention in this election focused on him?

Why are his every utterance, every stroll through the constituency, every vaguely quotable remark splashed across front pages and radio segments? Why have the media appointed this inarticulate, apolitical man as the representative of anti establishment feeling.

Why is Malachy Steenson, a far more articulate and politically coherent anti-establishment figure, largely excluded from serious coverage while Hutch is elevated into the main event?

Gangsta rap again provides the answer.

The research around gangsta rap consumption repeatedly arrives at the same conclusion: middle-class audiences are fascinated by criminal spectacle precisely because it offers them a safe, commodified encounter with danger, dysfunction and transgression.

While the genre originates from Black urban experiences, its massive profitability has historically relied on “crossover” appeal to whites seeking vicarious thrills.

Cultural critics describe it as “vicarious pleasure” or “imaginative release”.

For “polite society” or the segregated suburbs, the gangster becomes a vessel through which forbidden traits can be experienced indirectly – aggression, ruthlessness, rebellion, freedom from rules. Gangsta rap offers a safe, commodified view into a world they do not experience firsthand.

Sociologists note a phenomenon where middle-class consumers “objectify” symbols of lower-class status – like the “gangster” persona – as a way to rebel against their own privileged status

The same dynamic is visible in Irish journalism.

For the residents of Donnybrook, Ranelagh or Terenure, the inner-city gangster becomes a kind of exotic spectacle.

Crimeworld podcasts.

Fawning interviews.

Breathless profiles.

The barely concealed excitement whenever Hutch’s name appears in a headline.

This is radical chic for middle-aged journalists.

The inner-city criminal as entertainment product.

The Choice Facing the Inner City

And that is what makes the contrast with Steenson so important.

Between Hutch and Steenson lies the real choice facing sections of Dublin’s inner city.

A vote for one is essentially a shout – a roar of alienation and anti-establishment anger embodied in a famous criminal figure.

A vote for the other is an attempt, however imperfect, to politically articulate the grievances of the same neglected communities.

For voters in those areas, this is not simply a choice between two candidates.

It is a choice between having a political voice or becoming the chorus in somebody else’s crime pantomime.

The harm being done by media organisations putting their thumb on the scales and denying Steenson coverage while lavishing attention on Hutch is not principally harm to Steenson himself.

He is merely the representative.

The damage is being done to the community he represents.

The Spectacle

Again, the parallels with gangsta rap are striking.

Critics of gangsta rap have long argued that part of its appeal to white middle-class audiences lies in “otherness” – the consumption of Black dysfunction, violence and criminality as spectacle.

At the same time, those stereotypes reinforce existing prejudices and “justify” the continuing social dysfunction of those communities.

The spectacle becomes self-sustaining.

It also provides white people, particularly white men, with a vehicle through which they can vicariously embody traits that they desire but that would be socially unacceptable to possess themselves and therefore have ascribed to Blackness.

Exactly the same dynamic exists in Irish coverage of organised crime.

Enter the “howya”.

The “scrote”.

The larger-than-life criminal from Sheriff Street or the North Inner City.

Gangsta rap is attractive to white people who use it as a vessel through which they can scratch their itch to gain proximity to Blackness, or rather, the distorted image of Blackness they have constructed. Is this any different to the Crimeworld podcast and its presenters fawning over Gerry Hutch while viewers smirk along?

At one level condemned.

At another level monetised by publishers and broadcasters.

Editors know Hutch sells papers.

Podcasters know his name drives clicks.

RTÉ producers know audiences lean forward when organised crime enters the conversation.

The front pages of our newspapers become minstrel shows.

And so the cycle continues.

The inner city becomes trapped in a double bind.

On the one hand, young men see the gangster elevated into celebrity. Wealth. Fear. Respect. Attention. (And eventually a Criminal Record)

On the other, anyone rejecting that model often appears weak, poor and invisible by comparison.

Children growing up in those communities are not stupid. They can see who gets glamourised and who gets ignored.

The Steenson–Ennis Contrast

There is a particularly striking contrast in this campaign.

Daniel Ennis, the Social Democrats candidate and currently the bookmakers’ favourite, grew up across the road from Malachy Steenson.

Ennis’s father was the getaway driver for the Hutch gang in four of the biggest bank robberies in the history of the State. He pushed one accomplice from a getaway vehicle and left him to bleed to death. Locals remember the stories vividly – the reckless practice driving around the neighbourhood with the lights off, the CAB settlements, the unexplained wealth, the Florida holiday home.

Everyone knew.

Except, apparently, Daniel Ennis himself, who claims he only discovered the truth at the age of eighteen – a detail so implausibly innocent it belongs more to fairy tales than political biography.

But even here, the media instinct remains the same.

The criminality itself becomes texture. Colour. Atmosphere.

Never quite disqualifying.

Always somehow fascinating.

The Ambassador Theatre

Nothing captured the bizarre moral drift of this campaign better than the staging of a play about Hutch in the Ambassador Theatre before the election itself.

Some things are just so genius, so exquisitely brilliant, that you know no one actually came up with them, they just happened by accident.

For four nights respectable Dublin society packed the theatre. The audiences were full of seekers after radical chic – middle-class spectators eager for proximity to the outlaw mystique.

And something important happened there.

Each night when those audiences walked out onto O’Connell Street afterwards, a final psychological barrier had been crossed.

For them Hutch was no longer untouchable. They were complicit.

He had become culturally acceptable.

For the non theatre goers the process happened more incrementally.

One novelty interview.

One admiring profile.

One “fascinating character”.

One article treating his candidacy as quirky rather than grotesque.

Bit by bit the hive mind of Irish media and political commentary drifted into complicity.

Until eventually you arrive at scenes that would once have seemed unthinkable:

Last Wednesday, at a meeting in the constituency about SNAs, we had Mary Lou McDonald and the Lord Mayor of Dublin and the son of Hutch’s driver, all yukking it up with OCG boss Gerry Hutch.

Laughing.

Joking.

Absorbed seamlessly into respectable political society.

Truly we’re all peering through the window, looking from pig to man, and from man to pig, and realising it’s “impossible to say which is which”.

How Far Has This Gone?

To understand how distorted this has become, ask a simple question.

What would happen if Daniel Kinahan arrived on the North Strand tomorrow and announced he intended to run for the Dáil?

One hopes that would finally snap everyone awake.

One hopes journalists and politicians alike would suddenly realise how far they had wandered down the fairy path – how abnormal the new normal has become.

And if Jonathan Dowdall, looking at this, can make any sense of why he’s still a pariah he’s a better man than me.

Meanwhile, Steenson Disappears

At the last general election Hutch received roughly 10% of first preferences in Dublin Central.

Steenson received roughly 5%.

Both are fishing in broadly the same waters: anti-establishment voters, disaffected working-class communities, people alienated from mainstream politics.

Had Hutch not run in the GE, it is entirely plausible that half of his vote – perhaps more – would have drifted toward Steenson. Enough to have made him genuinely competitive for a seat. The same is true now. Without Hutch there Steenson would be confident enough of 10% – setting him up for the next GE and sending a signal. Add to that a coming constituency review that could potentially grow Dublin Central to a five-seater. Hutch is blocking that progress.

But the greater damage done by Hutch and his cheerleaders is not numerical.

It is atmospheric.

Hutch absorbs all the oxygen.

Steenson receives almost no mainstream coverage. He is excluded from major debates, granted token appearances alongside multiple candidates, barely covered in newspapers.

It is Hutch all the time.

Partly this exclusion is ideological.

Partly it is commercial.

And partly it is the same middle-class fascination described earlier – the vicarious thrill of proximity to criminal mythology.

But whatever the motivation, the effect is the same.

The media class feels little responsibility toward the actual people of Dublin’s inner city.

For a national broadcaster to effectively silence a candidate it dislikes while elevating a criminal celebrity is not merely bias.

It is a dereliction of responsibility.

A national broadcaster receiving €250 million a year while behaving this way seriously undermines the public-service argument for its own existence.

BUT IT WORKS.

And that is the truly worrying part.