On Weather and Wossy

You'd think life doesn't get any better than this. All around there's snow, and Jonathan Ross isn't on the BBC any more. It's difficult to see how anyone could view this as anything other a blessing from above. I can only view the lack of joy as further proof that Children Are Right About Everything.

The annoying thing about the whole Jonathan Ross affair is that it's being portrayed as a campaign against "edginess", a narrative firmly put in place following the initial affair. The rest of the media were gleefully complicit, balancing the condemnation of Sachsgate with vague talk about the need for comedy to push boundaries. The notion that prank calling a pensioner was 'pushing boundaries', as opposed to just being regressive and adolescent and boring, was so off the mark as to make you wince. Yet this certainly wasn't surprising; televised comedy, and the media around it, has long existed in a parallel universe. These are people who expect us to believe that The IT Crowd is funny, rather than looking like something that should have aired in 1982; that Pulling, a firmly laugh-free zone, was held up as a brilliant piece of work; and that The Catherine Tate Show is much-loved, even though millions of people simply can't stand it. The only half-decent British comedy since The Office has been Peep Show - not that Peep Show is anywhere near as funny as the commentariat would have you believe, and it clearly ran out of steam after Series 3.

In any sane organisation, you'd expect that, once the dust settled six months down the line, Ross would no longer be at the Beeb and things would otherwise be proceeding as normal. In fact, the BBC's response to the whole business was a classic example of an institution being thoroughly unaware of how it's perceived. When people were howling for Ross to go, the Beeb suspended him, and ushered in a new era of guidelines which nobody expected or wanted. Skip forward and Ross is ushered out partly because of his salary, even though none of his fans - Christ knows why, but he has some - gave a flying fuck how much he earned. Television companies are gloriously unaware of how they're perceived by the general public; Ross's pay became an issue because newspapers picked up on it and politicians stuck their nose in, not because it appalled the man on the street. Just because it's resulted in a Good Thing Happening doesn't mean it's not happened for elitist reasons.

This isn't unique to television; to large institutions, people simply don't really matter. This is why the BBC is suddenly under siege, based on Rupert Murdoch's even-more-psychotic-son publically going off on one a ew months back. The notion that one man's after-dinner speech could suddenly place an organisation as popular as the BBC "under siege" seems ridiculous, but... the after-dinner speech at important parties is effectively the level at which institutions function. Mark Thompson wanted to get shot of Ross because he was tired of journalists nagging him about it, nothing more than that. Institutions in power always become self-preserving and unaware of the ordinary person; it's in their nature.

The strange thing, then, is how accepting we are of this fact. Irish institutions are generally unpopular, generally in need of reform, and yet they're treated with a perverse form of reverence. The principle exemplar of this is just too obvious here, but it's got to be said; the church members who obstructed Garda investigations are criminals, but their seems to be no hint of a move to just arrest them for obstruction of justice. Even the most critical of newspapers, for example, would rather portray this as a battle with a huge unpoliceable foreign organisation, rather than a simple question of Irish people committing indefensible criminal acts. Attacking its own institutions isn't something that our establishment does, and deep down we know this is true and accept it.

I could trot out plenty more examples of this perverse attitude*, but I'll content myself with the obvious one. The Cork flooding was clearly due to a monstrous, incompetent cock-up, and it's far from clear as to whether the blame principally lies with the ESB or Cork City Council. Both bodies have announced that they're carrying out an "internal review", and this seems to be... accepted. Why, exactly? The goings on down in Cork have a clear smack of Criminal Negligence about them; this is a matter for legal investigation, regardless of who's to blame. This won't happen, because the notion of holding an institution to account is alien to our establishment; the only way this will ever happen is if those who've seen their houses ruined should take a class action against one or both parties.

Once you acknowledge that our institutions operate by their own rules, and that we tacitly accept the fact, the response to our terrible snowstorms** makes sense. John Gormley's been dragged over the coals for the last few days in the media, but laying this clusterfuck at Gormley's door is absurd. When the newspapers first started calling for heads, great play was made of Noel Dempsey being on holiday; in fact, Noel Dempsey's (lack of) presence didn't make a blind bit of difference, any more than Dublin Airport's runways would have been cleared quicker if the CEO had pitched in on the runway with a shovel. This isn't Noel Dempsey's or John Gormley's problem - the country being snowed in by Not Very Much Snow Or Ice At All is a collective, systemic failure at local level; it's the product of several decades where councillors didn't put any emergency plan into place, spent the money on whatever would win them more votes, and hoped the shit would fly on someone else's watch. Gormley pointed this out, but it's been met with scorn and characterised as passing the buck. Why? Because we expect Local Councils to be completely useless. They're shit, and we know they are.

(Certainly, it's true that the buck always stops at the top. It's obvious, now, that all Councils should have to produce Action Plans for various emergencies, and that these should be vetted by outside agents, that they should be available to every member of the public, that they should go through a period of public consultation in exactly the same way as development plans.)

Much as blame always stops at the top, it also stops at the bottom. The desperate incompetence of government, be it national or local, has been enabled by our world-weary cynicism, flourished in the warm glow of impotent fury. We expect uselessness, so uselessness is what we get; we rush to shout our anger at John Gormley, fully aware that he can't possibly be held to account. If you wanted to hold up an invulnerable focus of annoyance, and in so doing hide the real, banal failures from view, you couldn't have chosen a better way to do it. Meanwhile the gombeen councillors plod on their dreary paths, safe in the knowledge they don't have to take their duties seriously. Why should they? We don't.

There are so many establishment bodies that genuinely are unelected - the ESB, or financial institutions, or the NRA, or any other number of unelected bodies - and are crucially important to our lives. This, though, is different. The failings during the snow, and the floods before it, were entirely local, the seeds of us electing a series of people who, if they weren't outright corrupt, were certainly incompetent. We allowed it to happen by expecting nothing better, and maybe this is why we're laying the blame at John Gormley's door. To do otherwise would require a quiet acknowledgement; that this needless chaos is what our society expected. What it chose.

*I will not go on about bankers I will not go on about bankers I will not go on about bankers

** Which are, annoyingly, not serious enough that you don't feel amused by the hysteria, but too serious to dismiss entirely.