"I don't care about politics!"

Over the summer, a friend of mine asked me probably one of the most complicated questionsyou can ask: "I';ve tried, but I don't understand Irish politics at all. Can you explain it?"It's easy, if you're into politics and discourse, to forget quite how many people don't think aboutthose things, especially if you surround yourself with similarly minded-people. Let's be clear, I'mnot dismissing the intellect of anybody who doesn't keep up with politics; it's similarly easy toforget that I didn't know anything about politics once, and getting familiar enough with the Dáil tounderstand approximately what goes on in there is a herculean task if you haven't done itbefore. (Even if you continually read up on things it's bloody hard to keep up. It's like guessingthe plot of Game of Thrones by only watching spoiler-free YouTube reviews.) If you were raisedby apolitical parents, haven't joined a society and don't follow the right people on Twitter, yourgateways into learning how to keep up with current affairs are to hope you know somebody whodoes.As for my friend, they were raised in a non-Irish family, and had tried researching to bolster theirknowledge only to become completely overwhelmed by what they found. I can't really blamethem. The further you get into the world of current affairs, the blinder you become to the fact thatit's a mess. A necessary, profoundly important mess, but still. Even putting aside Trump andBrexit, politics is messy, slow, and really quite dry to follow if you're not feeling particularly angryabout whatever's topical. It helps to be passionate, I suppose. Politics are also notoriously badfor your nerves.Which makes it all the easier to understand why people throw up their hands and say, "I don'tcare about politics. It doesn't affect me." It's a position often dismissed as being passivelyconservative— that people are happy with things the way they are. They're generally not;they're one of two things.1. They're hopeless about things the way they are.2. They're uninformed about things the way they are.Sadly, the more complicated and controversial the political sphere gets, the more important itbecomes for people to have a clear, nuanced understanding of it. It's too easy to fall onto simpleexplanations and easy scapegoats, or to give up thinking about it altogether. (I wrote a smallsummary of Boris Johnson's UK parliament this issue and believe me, I understand why peoplelook for a simple explanation.)Perhaps we need more people like my friend, who wanted to combat that problem in their ownsmall way. If you're looking to start, why don't you try reading my news section?