...in the Country
I have, as is common practice for me, spent my Christmas getting pleasantly drunk in West Cork. On Christmas Day itself I watched Into The West and The Commitments on the same day, and the idea that we once made films that looked upon Travellers and Unemployed People From Ballymun in a vaguely positive light seems as quaint as watching scenes from a 1970s thriller in which someone is desperately trying to find a working payphone*. Sandwiched between them was Once, and as moany as Glen Hansard might be, there's something genuinely shocking about watching scenes of a woman walking down Gardiner Street at night and not getting mugged or threatened. Similarly, there was something surprising about watching a sweet-natured drama about people who don't have televisions. We should take it for granted that people from disadvantaged communities / areas shouldn't be portrayed as if they're all fundamentally evil criminals in the making. Somehow, we don't.
Taking a community on its own terms is, of course, something we have a difficulty doing. I have a number of ways to enlarge on our culture of Scumbagdom at this point: I could discuss the recent Prime Time Investigates, in which Ireland's crime epidemic** was thoughtfully blamed on working-class people with nasty accents; or I could enlarge upon our general attitude towards the Travelling Community, and how we appear to blame them for behaving like they're a discriminated minority who live in poverty, for no better reason than that's exactly what they are.
Still, the current topic of choice seems to be the Urban-Rural Divide (URD for short, as I feel acronyms befit meaningless phrases), which barrels its way to the top of the agenda whenever lovable rural non-media-aware folk start bellyaching on the television about something or other. You know, planning permission, or drink-driving, or shaking the hand of a convicted sex offender en masse.
There's an awful lot said about the URD, much of it absolute cock. It's a phrase usually used by Dublin-dwellers to lay every problem at the culchies' door without actually making it sound like they're all ignorant horse-fucking savages; a convenient shrug of "ah they don't know any better", while not feeling even vaguely pressured into understanding what living in a rural environment entails. There were a few sniffy dismissals of the URD being applied to the difference between Listowel and Meen, a village four miles away. But... if you grow up in a rural village, then your background will be primarily agricultural; it's highly likely you'll have spent most of your life moving cows, saving hay, cutting turf, and other such pursuits which urbanites feel don't really happen any more. Grow up in Listowel, and your parents probably work a steady-hour job, you live within walking distance of a supermarket, and your car breaking down doesn't bring your life to a grinding halt.
So - actually, the difference between a small village and a small town is significant, thanks very much; in many ways, it's a greater divide than exists between Listowel and Limerick. However, to those brought up in Generation Urban, that distinction is meaningless. Country folk all do non-specific country things, then go and elect Michael Lowry and the Healy-Raes. Differentiating between them is like racially segregating Smurfs.
If the electoral choices do seem indefensible at first glance, then... let's imagine what it's like to be part of a Rural Community (TM). On the coast, to throw another variant into the mix. You'll have seen, in the last twenty years, the population of your townland plummet; your sons / daughters head off to live in a major city, as the only place they can find work; the indigenous industry (fishing) decimated; the foundations of your way of have been fundamentally life eroded; and all this while the central establishment whistles blithely and talks about progress. You'll probably have developed, quite quickly, the idea that the central establishment of the country doesn't really give a shit about what you do. In those circumstances, the corrupt gombeen of a TD or Councillor is pretty much the only man who professes to care about the good of your community. If he's swiped a bit of money from a builder, or the government, here or there, then you frankly couldn't care less; these are the precise people who've looked on as your environment has been eroded, so it just shows he has the same contempt for the establishment as you have. It's all very well to talk about "principles", but when your life is disappearing around you, you don't have the luxury of principles. You just want employment in your town, and a hospital within forty miles of your house.
If that's a melodramatic depiction then, when we're talking about attitudes, perception is all that really matters. Certainly, many of the difficulties afflicting rural communities are self-inflicted - however, it's worth remembering that most disadvantaged communities end up in a situation where self-oppression is the biggest obstacle they have to face. I could pick all sorts of global examples here, but I'll just say "The Wire" and let you work out the rest yourselves. It's all very well for media-saturated, middle-class urbanites (like me) to talk about the need to be positive, but this is from a position where our environment is a central concern of the powers that be. Even if we don't always agree with them, we do at least know they're aware of our existence, and we're aso used to this that we don't even view it as a privilege.
This, ultimately, is why the Prime Time Scapegoats programme was so offensive. It wasn't the lack of context, or the tabloid levels of insight, or the close-ups of the subjects' rotting teeth and heroin injections; it's that the people who made it felt justified in judging the subjects by their own moral criteria. Even though the subjects live in grinding, institutionalised poverty, and the filmmakers' biggest problem is when the box-set of Flash Forward is coming out.
It's within this framework that the Danny Foley handshake affair has persistently failed to be discussed. The closest anyone has come to "context" is some slightly desperate vox-pop pieces in the national newspapers, but these are desperately compromised by their nature; to most people outside of our major cities, the Indo and the Irish Times are dublin-centric mouthpieces that only show an interest in them if a newsworthy tragedy has happened.
Certainly, the dozens of people who showed up at the sentencing did something foully insensitive; show support with whomever you like, but doing it in a public forum with the victim present? It's a horrible thing to do; whether or not it was calculated to make Foley's victim feel intimidated, it certainly had that effect. At best, it's callous and inconsiderate. At worst, it's a calulated attempt to make a young woman feel ashamed for standing up for her fundamental rights.
Again, though; let's look at it from the other side of the prism, if only for a moment, and set aside the educated principles that a privileged urban existence has bought us. This isn't to justify or excuse what those people did, just to try and understand it. There's been far too much loose talk about Listowel being a town of rape-sympathisers, or Kerry being some walled-off crazy part of the country where every village if populated by the cast of Deliverance, and it has to stop. We've reached a point where our taste for cartoon villains is no longer funny.
Most of these people were probably completely unaware of the facts of the trial, and received their information through gossip and fourth-hand rumours along the lines of "yer wan went out into the car park with him, then suddenly she's calling him a rapist". Many of them, as rural people, might have an inbuilt prejudice against the establishment that neglected them, and consequently against authority. They have grown up in a background of the community appearing, en masse, for significant moments in the lives of all the inhabitants. Even if a lot of those feelings might not really make coherent sense... if you don't engage people in discussion on their own terms, there's no reason that their views have to be coherent. Until someone is engaged in an even-handed discussion, then knee-jerk prejudice and instinctive bias will do them just fine.
Much as the narrative of a misogynist or patriarchal society has a huge element of truth to it, there's a further factor to throw into the mix. Foley was a popular, churchgoing, well-known figure; the woman in question lives, apparently, in a working-class estate in Listowel. Let's not forget that we've been carefully conditioned, by our media, to believe that we know what a sex offender looks like; a sex offender is a scanger kid in a hoodie with a shitty half-beard, or a middle-aged man in a dirty raincoat.*** It's hardly surprising that people respond with a murmur of "he isn't that sort of person", because they've been told for years that criminals come from the criminal classes; and Prime Time Investigates, and its ilk, has left us in no doubt what they look like. Reverse their backgrounds, then ask yourself where the sympathies would lie.
What we're left with is the spectre of one underclass turning against another. It's nasty, and tasteless, and foul. But it isn't a weird anomaly, and it certainly isn't surprising.
Here's to 2010, everybody****.
*The other oddity is that everyone in The Commitments - which has otherwise stood the test of time far better than anyone could reasonably expect - spends their time leching over Angeline Ball, and yet barely glancing at Maria Doyle Kennedy. There's obviously a convention that the girl with the blonde hair and lipstick should be the object of male desires, but there needs to be limits. I could happily devote an entire issue to Reasons That Everyone Should Be In Love With Maria Doyle Kennedy, but that doesn't seem appropriate somehow. I once - briefly and semi-disastrously - had a conversation with Maria Doyle Kennedy, and somehow I'm not comfortable harbouring lascivious thoughts about women I've actually met. Quite what this says about me, I'm not sure.
**Yes, of course we're in the middle of a crime epidemic. The Daily Mail said so.
***You can add whichever religious vocations you wish to that list, of course, but this piece is getting too long so I don't want to list them.
****In which we're supposed to be visited by alien monoliths, but I'm not holding my breath.
Taking a community on its own terms is, of course, something we have a difficulty doing. I have a number of ways to enlarge on our culture of Scumbagdom at this point: I could discuss the recent Prime Time Investigates, in which Ireland's crime epidemic** was thoughtfully blamed on working-class people with nasty accents; or I could enlarge upon our general attitude towards the Travelling Community, and how we appear to blame them for behaving like they're a discriminated minority who live in poverty, for no better reason than that's exactly what they are.
Still, the current topic of choice seems to be the Urban-Rural Divide (URD for short, as I feel acronyms befit meaningless phrases), which barrels its way to the top of the agenda whenever lovable rural non-media-aware folk start bellyaching on the television about something or other. You know, planning permission, or drink-driving, or shaking the hand of a convicted sex offender en masse.
There's an awful lot said about the URD, much of it absolute cock. It's a phrase usually used by Dublin-dwellers to lay every problem at the culchies' door without actually making it sound like they're all ignorant horse-fucking savages; a convenient shrug of "ah they don't know any better", while not feeling even vaguely pressured into understanding what living in a rural environment entails. There were a few sniffy dismissals of the URD being applied to the difference between Listowel and Meen, a village four miles away. But... if you grow up in a rural village, then your background will be primarily agricultural; it's highly likely you'll have spent most of your life moving cows, saving hay, cutting turf, and other such pursuits which urbanites feel don't really happen any more. Grow up in Listowel, and your parents probably work a steady-hour job, you live within walking distance of a supermarket, and your car breaking down doesn't bring your life to a grinding halt.
So - actually, the difference between a small village and a small town is significant, thanks very much; in many ways, it's a greater divide than exists between Listowel and Limerick. However, to those brought up in Generation Urban, that distinction is meaningless. Country folk all do non-specific country things, then go and elect Michael Lowry and the Healy-Raes. Differentiating between them is like racially segregating Smurfs.
If the electoral choices do seem indefensible at first glance, then... let's imagine what it's like to be part of a Rural Community (TM). On the coast, to throw another variant into the mix. You'll have seen, in the last twenty years, the population of your townland plummet; your sons / daughters head off to live in a major city, as the only place they can find work; the indigenous industry (fishing) decimated; the foundations of your way of have been fundamentally life eroded; and all this while the central establishment whistles blithely and talks about progress. You'll probably have developed, quite quickly, the idea that the central establishment of the country doesn't really give a shit about what you do. In those circumstances, the corrupt gombeen of a TD or Councillor is pretty much the only man who professes to care about the good of your community. If he's swiped a bit of money from a builder, or the government, here or there, then you frankly couldn't care less; these are the precise people who've looked on as your environment has been eroded, so it just shows he has the same contempt for the establishment as you have. It's all very well to talk about "principles", but when your life is disappearing around you, you don't have the luxury of principles. You just want employment in your town, and a hospital within forty miles of your house.
If that's a melodramatic depiction then, when we're talking about attitudes, perception is all that really matters. Certainly, many of the difficulties afflicting rural communities are self-inflicted - however, it's worth remembering that most disadvantaged communities end up in a situation where self-oppression is the biggest obstacle they have to face. I could pick all sorts of global examples here, but I'll just say "The Wire" and let you work out the rest yourselves. It's all very well for media-saturated, middle-class urbanites (like me) to talk about the need to be positive, but this is from a position where our environment is a central concern of the powers that be. Even if we don't always agree with them, we do at least know they're aware of our existence, and we're aso used to this that we don't even view it as a privilege.
This, ultimately, is why the Prime Time Scapegoats programme was so offensive. It wasn't the lack of context, or the tabloid levels of insight, or the close-ups of the subjects' rotting teeth and heroin injections; it's that the people who made it felt justified in judging the subjects by their own moral criteria. Even though the subjects live in grinding, institutionalised poverty, and the filmmakers' biggest problem is when the box-set of Flash Forward is coming out.
It's within this framework that the Danny Foley handshake affair has persistently failed to be discussed. The closest anyone has come to "context" is some slightly desperate vox-pop pieces in the national newspapers, but these are desperately compromised by their nature; to most people outside of our major cities, the Indo and the Irish Times are dublin-centric mouthpieces that only show an interest in them if a newsworthy tragedy has happened.
Certainly, the dozens of people who showed up at the sentencing did something foully insensitive; show support with whomever you like, but doing it in a public forum with the victim present? It's a horrible thing to do; whether or not it was calculated to make Foley's victim feel intimidated, it certainly had that effect. At best, it's callous and inconsiderate. At worst, it's a calulated attempt to make a young woman feel ashamed for standing up for her fundamental rights.
Again, though; let's look at it from the other side of the prism, if only for a moment, and set aside the educated principles that a privileged urban existence has bought us. This isn't to justify or excuse what those people did, just to try and understand it. There's been far too much loose talk about Listowel being a town of rape-sympathisers, or Kerry being some walled-off crazy part of the country where every village if populated by the cast of Deliverance, and it has to stop. We've reached a point where our taste for cartoon villains is no longer funny.
Most of these people were probably completely unaware of the facts of the trial, and received their information through gossip and fourth-hand rumours along the lines of "yer wan went out into the car park with him, then suddenly she's calling him a rapist". Many of them, as rural people, might have an inbuilt prejudice against the establishment that neglected them, and consequently against authority. They have grown up in a background of the community appearing, en masse, for significant moments in the lives of all the inhabitants. Even if a lot of those feelings might not really make coherent sense... if you don't engage people in discussion on their own terms, there's no reason that their views have to be coherent. Until someone is engaged in an even-handed discussion, then knee-jerk prejudice and instinctive bias will do them just fine.
Much as the narrative of a misogynist or patriarchal society has a huge element of truth to it, there's a further factor to throw into the mix. Foley was a popular, churchgoing, well-known figure; the woman in question lives, apparently, in a working-class estate in Listowel. Let's not forget that we've been carefully conditioned, by our media, to believe that we know what a sex offender looks like; a sex offender is a scanger kid in a hoodie with a shitty half-beard, or a middle-aged man in a dirty raincoat.*** It's hardly surprising that people respond with a murmur of "he isn't that sort of person", because they've been told for years that criminals come from the criminal classes; and Prime Time Investigates, and its ilk, has left us in no doubt what they look like. Reverse their backgrounds, then ask yourself where the sympathies would lie.
What we're left with is the spectre of one underclass turning against another. It's nasty, and tasteless, and foul. But it isn't a weird anomaly, and it certainly isn't surprising.
Here's to 2010, everybody****.
*The other oddity is that everyone in The Commitments - which has otherwise stood the test of time far better than anyone could reasonably expect - spends their time leching over Angeline Ball, and yet barely glancing at Maria Doyle Kennedy. There's obviously a convention that the girl with the blonde hair and lipstick should be the object of male desires, but there needs to be limits. I could happily devote an entire issue to Reasons That Everyone Should Be In Love With Maria Doyle Kennedy, but that doesn't seem appropriate somehow. I once - briefly and semi-disastrously - had a conversation with Maria Doyle Kennedy, and somehow I'm not comfortable harbouring lascivious thoughts about women I've actually met. Quite what this says about me, I'm not sure.
**Yes, of course we're in the middle of a crime epidemic. The Daily Mail said so.
***You can add whichever religious vocations you wish to that list, of course, but this piece is getting too long so I don't want to list them.
****In which we're supposed to be visited by alien monoliths, but I'm not holding my breath.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
09:25
2 Comments:
I guess it must be impossible to write one of these society bits without (a) errors of omission, or (b) running to tens of thousands of words. And I'm not talking here about leaving the controversial priest of Listowel out of it (which was inspired, by the way), so much as the presentation of rural Ireland as anti-authoritarian or anti-establishment when the church, the GAA, RTE and a strong republican nationalism make up a pretty strong authorty in the countryside. Anti- tax, cops or judiciary maybe; anti-planners definitely, but pro-authority/establishment in other repects.
I love the committments. I love Jimmy Rabbitte defining Ireland in 1992 as a third world country. Alan Parker rocks.
A fair point. I think I was using establishment as a shorthand for "central government" - large organisations which break up into "community units", if you like, or very dominant - hence the strength of Fianna Fáil, based on the model of the local Cumann.
I was genuinely amazed how good The Commitments was. Hadn't seen it since the mid-90s & expected it to have dated badly, but it stood up really well.
Into The West, on the other hand, was pure shite.
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