Oh dear? Not this time

First of all, if you haven't been watching Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, then what have you been doing with your life? Go, go, they're on YouTube. Stop wasting my time. Still, the segment I'm concerned with today is here.

Adam Curtis. Is there anyone who doesn't think Adam Curtis is a genius? And if so, could you get off my website?

Curtis' take on this seems relevant as ourselves and our neighbours stew over the respective revelations that have shaken our little worlds. The Brits have discovered that their MPs claimed rather a lot of expenses, and they're hopping mad about it; so hopping mad that MPs are getting spat on in the streets, and sensible political commentators are talking about the collapse of British democracy. In what seems like one of those outbreaks of mass hysteria to which the English are so loveably prone (I give you Jill Dando, Jade Goody, and of course The People's Princess), nobody seems to be able to stop talking about it.

And yes - from this country, right now, it seems laughable. If all we had to worry about was our TDs going to town on their expenses, then we'd be delighted. We've got the systemic torture, abuse, and rape of the vulnerable and the helpless to worry about. We all imagined how bad the Ryan Commission report was going to be, and it's actually worse. Go here, and hell, just open a page at random.

If only we had Britland's problems.

Divorcing the two for the moment, though - Brits first. Our reaction to problems is uniqely related to the scale of them; in general, anger is inversely proportional to size. As Adam Curtis says, the larger the scale of suffering, the more inclined we are to shrug our shoulders. It's fashionable amongst those of us who are cynical about politics (i.e. everyone) to be derisive about the Expenses scandal, to say that this is a government who committed war-crimes on the back of a lie, who - as a result of that lie - have countless deaths on their conscience, so many tens of thousands that they can't even be guessed at. People burned to death with phosphorous clinging to their skin, blown to pieces by bombs raining from the sky, entire families wiped out in an instant. Not to forget that, with Shannon, we actively facilitated this mass slaughter; most of the activists were seen as ludicrous hippy arsewits, largely because the scale of the atrocity made "direct action" seem inherently ridiculous, small and laughable and pointles. (And, of course, because a lot of them were hippy arsewits.)

And now, the Brits are getting annoyed about expenses? Jesus Christ.

And yet, the objections miss the point. The expenses row is important because it's small, and grubby, and venal. Lying to take a country to war has, in its own way, some twisted form of statesmanlike nobility; an "I-did-what-I-did-for-the-good-of-the-nation" narrative. Tony Blair may be a sickening war criminal who deserves to rot behind bars for the lives he stole, but his crimes are too important to be grubby. Why is a war criminal less vile than an unrepentant, petty fraudster? Because, if put in a position where the US were marching to war with Iraq, not many of us would know what to do either. We'd like to think that we wouldn't tag along after them, but fuck it, it's not like any of us would ever be in that position.

Most of the people sticking up for the British MPs now are doing it with a "well, I'd probably do the same if I could get away with it." The point was made most obnoxiously by St*p**n F*ck*ng F*y, as usual; here's another link. The response from most people - actually, I wouldn't do the same if I had the opportunity, Fry, you fuckbag. And more importantly - most of us don't have the opportunity, don't have expense accounts, can't build up a real-estate portfolio and charge it to expenses, and if we do try and fiddle things - Social Welfare, say, which in the UK is scandalously low - we do it out of desperation, and in the knowledge that getting caught will result in us being condemned to poverty. The people who are angry don't give a fuck about wars and parliamentary lies, they give a fuck because they've spent their life being made to feel like common, grasping low-lifes; and now the people who caricatured them that way have been exposed as common, grasping low-lifes.

And as for us; on the Thursday after the report appeared, the Irish government initially refused to put anyone on Morning Ireland to discuss it... shortly after Morning Ireland mentioned this, of course, Mícheál Martin was thrown in on short order to give us five minutes of his precious time.

(Martin - to be fair - is one of the few Fianna Fáilers who doesn't make me want to vomit in a glass and then pour it down his smug throat, even if his desperate shuffling on Morning Ireland was far from dignified).

We aren't short of anger, but you wonder if we've earned it. The report finally makes the horror sensible; these aren't numbers and statistics, they are stories of countless children who went into the institutions alone, and emerged broken. Oh dear-ism isn't applicable, because the reasons are laid out in a document so dry and factual that it almost counts as a warped, joyless pornography. This, you can't help but think, is how the document was designed; it's not set up as a starting point to redress this wrong, to disband the institutions that perpetrated these crimes, and to prosecute the people involved. The Irish government, and the church, seemed to hope that this would act as some sort of purging, a point at which we can declare the whole ordeal over and move on. To use religious imagery, it's a huge, grotesque confessional; one so diligently put together, that it becomes an absolution in itself.

Were it not for the fact that the victims are so angry yet so dignified, and so impossibly eloquent, it might have worked; it might have been sighed over and forgotten, the most vile and unforgivable a crime ever committed on Irish soil turned into a dusty ethnic narrative. Those few heroic people haven't allowed that to happen, yet.

To restate; we, the bystanders, don't have the right to be angry about this. It's too easy to point at the Church and the state, blame them, and in so doing remove any blame from ourselves. It's as disingenuous as the locals saying they didn't know what was going in Belsen and Auschwitz. The Ryan Commission has, as so many people have said, shown the abuse to worse than we thought. But... the reason we already thought it was bad was because we already knew all about it. People use the word shocking, but is anyone really shocked to find that abuse was widespread in these places? Do the stories of beatings and straps and oral rape actually surprise you? The extent of these crimes, perhaps. But we could have guessed at this ten years ago. As the victims continued to shout for justice, we nodded our heads and we got on with it, damn the lot stinking of us. We turned over when it came on the telly. We watched the Magdalene Laundries, nodded sadly, then went to the pub and forgot about it. Some people worried where we'd find the money to pay these people off.

In short; we simply said, "Oh dear." And it's taken this document - this sordid catalogue of pain - to force us to accountability, and now we're trying to blame others without blaming ourselves.

Or this.



We laugh at the Brits, but we're wrong. The British MPs have, in their own small way, collectively betrayed the trust of the nation, and the nation is as angry as it should be. But us? We're complicit in what happened and complicit in how long it took for the truth to come to light.

People refer to the shame of a nation all to easily, as if our only guilt is by association. In fact, we're all guilty, in a simple direct way that we can never excuse. Shame on all of us.