r e a l r e v i e w . i e

I’m going to start by talking about a former teacher of mine. Well all right, he wasn’t even a former teacher of mine in that I wasn’t in in his regular class; he was deputy head of my old school, but he was still a fairly important figure. He was called Mr O’Connor, and was one of your uncomfortably-close-to-stereotypical teachers who actually liked it as a job; he sometimes played the acoustic guitar at assemblies, he had heart-to-heart conversations with his pupils about what they wanted and what they should so, and played us a song called “Leaving” when we were doing our leaving (I’ve never heard it since, and now I come to think about it I’m fairly sure he actually wrote it). He fairly punished students who were sent to him because they’d done something wrong, and didn’t punish students who’d been sent to him because they’d annoyed a bullying teacher by expressing a non-orthodox opinion. In short, amongst the usual crew of teachers we had – the just-for-the-pay-cheque brigade, the generally-decent-sorts (of whom there were a few, and with hindsight they were unspeakably good to me), the basically-all-right-tyrants, and the unpleasant bigots who should never have been let near animals, let alone children – he was a decent skin, even if you did suspect he was the sort of guy who couldn’t see a campfire without breaking into a rendition of Kumbaya. We took the piss out of him – of course we did, he was an English teacher who read poems in a very sincere voice, and sincerity is well beneath teenage dignity – but in general we liked him and respected him.

Like most people I had an unremittingly miserable time in school, and a pretty miserable adolescence in general. I don’t remember many of my thoughts from that period; I was too chock-full of argumentative hormones to commit them to memory, and most of them were probably about tits anyway. However, the main thing that dominated my adolescence – and I don’t think this was particularly unusual – was a sense of being generally unwanted. The world hates teenagers in general, with the sole exception of companies who want to sell crap to them; kids are cute, but teenagers are usually pale, spotty, nowhere near as miserable or obedient as they’re supposed to be, and frustratingly unwilling to follow stupid rules just because they’re told to do so. Kids are fine, apart from when they’re on a plane or in a cinema. Adults are also fine, and no matter what the occasional newspaper article claims, old people are also seen in a pretty positive light. Only teenagers form an age group that can universally Just About Fuck Off, and they know it.

(Aside No. 1: This, incidentally, is probably why I have a soft spot for shows like Skins and Torchwood, because they aren’t afraid to pitch themselves squarely at a teenager market and provide stories that feel like they matter. Torchwood is teenage because its attitude is gloriously adolescent; it largely features a tech-savvy group of misfits saving the world through the power of sexual tension alone, and presents a nihilistic worldview in which shit doesn’t even consider failing to happen. Meanwhile, Skins is obviously teenage because it features teenagers, but beneath the shiny excess that is liberally sprinkled over the whole programme as magic street-cred seasoning, it really does portray the struggle to grow up as the grand, operatic drama that it is. The lack of willingness to provide these narratives for anyone between twelve and twenty-one is still endemic, particularly in school. The one poem that resonates with most leaving cert students is The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, but conventional teaching still pretends this is a high-minded discussion of the emasculation of the modern man, rather than the plainitive, tortured song of someone who really, really needs to get laid.)

I don’t particularly remember sitting my Leaving Cert; I got what I needed quite comfortably, and there was never any great drama about the whole experience. One thing I’m fairly sure of, however, was that it was nothing like as advertised. There was no hat-in-the-air sense of achievement, just an anticlimactic sense of relief (followed quickly by a much more climactic sense of drunkenness). The pictures of frighteningly fresh-faced kids waving their results in the air didn’t resonate in the slightest; nor, indeed, did the uniformly happy soundbites from everyone in the newspaper, when I knew for a fact that a fair chunk of people who’d got their results would be pretty fucking miserable about them. In fact, from the moment I finished doing the exams, every comment I heard about the Leaving seemed stupid. When people would ask me how I’d done, I’d tell them that I wouldn’t actually know until the results arrived; when they asked me if I’d worked hard, I shrugged; and when the occasional well-meaning type told me that it really didn’t, y’know, matter in the overall scheme of things, I had to stop myself from shouting “Well why the fuck did I bother doing it at all, then?”

In retrospect, I just didn’t realise that “exam coverage” is pretty much cyclical, with a few different numbers and names inserted into the same articles. Now that CAO points have been doled out the cycle is complete, and the usual banal questions have been dutifully floated. Mary Coughlan is talking about giving bonus points for honours maths, which is being called an “innovation” rather than “something that was abandoned fifteen years ago as being ridiculously old-fashioned and stupid”; there has been a general dose of hand-wringing about bad results in science subjects, and all the usual questions about What Must Be Done About The Youth Of Today Dear God Why Am I Even Writing About These Shits Does Anyone Have Cocaine.

The strange thing about the Leaving Cert is that it’s discussed in much the same way as drug laws; everyone knows that the current situation is pointless, but it’s taboo to say so in “serious” levels of discussion. The Leaving Cert has barely changed its structure in decades, and what’s now in place is almost entirely obsolete. Students are still being asked to memorise reams of facts, when we’ve had machines to remember facts for us for years. When I sat the exam, this was out-of-date (more than ten years ago, less than twenty, since you ask)… but now it’s an absurd structural hangover from a time when books were scarce, and the only way you could be sure of regular access to information was to remember it. The mental skills we now require are largely based on how to quickly navigate huge swathes of knowledge, how to remember generalities rather than specifics, and how to weigh up differing accounts to reach a balanced opinion. Beyond a general base of learning, what school should be doing is producing well-rounded people who know how to assimilate information, form conclusions, and act upon them; if they have a meaningful anima, then we have a winner.

Young People – yes, you know, them – are often characterised as not having an attention span. This is horseshit, at least for all the Young People I know; they’re simply much better at grasping ideas quickly. They don’t have any interest in irrelevancies, and what’s more they know how to spot them. They get bored during Wuthering Heights because it’s a pretentious load of overlong, overblown bollocks about horrible people, not because they can’t concentrate.

So if Leaving Cert results for science subjects are the ones that have performed worst, that’s hardly surprising – they’re also the ones that are most reliant on learning things off by heart, and if I resented the sheer stupidity of the format then I assume today’s students find it seven times as pathetic. The problem with the Leaving Cert used to be that I knew loads of intelligent people who did quite badly in it, and several unconscionable dullards who got 580 points. These days, it’s worse; given access to the internet, it would probably be possible for any vaguely smart person to pass Leaving Cert Chemistry without knowing anything at all about it. That’s not a test of knowledge, it’s a test of the ability to retain and regurgitate facts, and that’s the single most useless thing you can do with your brain. Every Leaving Cert student will tell you that they memorise useless data for no reason at all when they could be doing something interesting, and if it was any other demographic than Young People we’d listen. If we want people to get to grips with honours maths, it might be a start to stop asking them to memorise the Minus B Formula for no earthly reason. Read Principia Mathematica*, and Maths is a thrillingly exciting subject. Go into a Leaving Cert class, and most people will just fall asleep.

The level of denial about the uselessness of the Leaving Cert is difficult to explain, but if we accept that it’s similar to the denial about a War On Drugs, then we might as well notice what else the two have in common; in both cases the people most affected are portrayed as cartoons, and the sheer inefficiency of the mechanism is blithely ignored. Just as any drug user is automatically an addict-in-waiting, every newspaper-friendly teenager a photogenic scholar-to-be. And, just as the enormous amounts of money habitually poured into policing drugs (and the complete lack of success of the campaign) is politely overlooked by most of our commentariat, it’s never really been mentioned that most of a student’s time spent in school is killingly useless. If I err towards the generous, maybe-I’ve-forgotten-what-I-learned, maybe-differentiation-will-turn-out-to-be-important-one-day side of the argument, no more than a fifth of the Leaving Cert syllabus has turned out to be any use to me  in life (that includes passive background information, like being able to vaguely grasp economic reporting because a tiny fraction of Economics was about national finance). In fact, a fair chunk of what I was taught was either hopelessly shallow or factually wrong. Certainly, the stack of things you learn from the school syllabus is dwarfed by the stack of social lessons school teaches you, such as how to get on with people with whom you share nothing but the same few square metres of floor, or how to cope with stupid, malicious, and/or lazy authority-figures. If we really do want to take the utilitarian way of seeing Young People as nothing more than prospective economic units, then school is desperately inefficient.

(Aside No. 2: this is why I don’t find the ooh-faith-schools-teach-intelligent-design debate at all interesting or threatening, even if it’s something about which atheist-types like to get incredibly het-up. I was taught all sorts of bollocks at school, but I knew it was bollocks at the time, and it didn’t indoctrinate me in the slightest. The school I attended was perfectly fine and – I suspect – run of the mill, but off the top of my head I was told that there was no such thing as evolution, divorce would lead to the collapse of society, the Soviet Union wasn’t in Europe, the centre of a bunsen flame was the hottest part, the main cause of famine in Africa was drought, most cannabis users become addicted to heroin, and that the word “liaison” was spelled “liasion.” Maybe I’m wrong to have more faith in your average teenager than I do in your average Christian Nutcase, but I still think that if kids are being taught Intelligent Design, that just makes them more likely to realise that huge swathes of the world are fucking idiots.)

Most politicians in charge would object to the statement that school is there to provide a workforce and nothing more. However, it’s worth remembering that the historical purpose of school was to give a basic low-level education, and to sort the Scholars from Everyone Else; this is still the case, it’s just not as overtly stated. The two-tier system of classifying schoolgoers neatly corresponds to media coverage of teenagers in general, which switches between the caricatures of “young hopefuls brimming with learning, their faces like shining morn” and “the ones in hoodies who kick grannies for fun.” It’s generally accepted that you learn the majority of useful things in life after you’ve left school, and that school itself is mainly a prolonged exercise in sorting one group from the other; the hoodie-types leave and face a choice between working in a warehouse or petty crime, while the identikit scholars head off to college and learn something that’s actually useful. Appropriate lip-service is paid to the notion that school should try to turn out well-rounded citizens, but in all my years in school I didn’t learn a damn thing about how the world works. In a world where meaningless statistics are quoted in every newspaper to support a claim that cardboard and/or illegal immigrants give you cancer, why is statistics not a core part of the Maths syllabus? Since Ireland is becoming a nation where everyone likes to think they understand economics, why are the basics of monetary / fiscal policies not properly taught? Why is there no teaching of logic, or argument, or critical analysis, all of which are actually fun? Why are kids still writing about Silas fucking Marner, when they’d get more out of being asked to watch both versions of Planet of the Apes and then explain why one is half-decent and the other one is a waste of celluloid?

The answer is simple, if only we’d admit it; secondary school’s not primarily there to impart knowledge, or inspire, or teach everyone about things that are important; it’s there to divide the kids who can remember things from those who can’t. This has always been the case, but it’s only recently that the latter camp have become implicitly portrayed as failures; RTÉ post-results vox-pops don’t focus on someone who’s delighted to have passed everything and wants an apprenticeship with a plumber. There’s an ongoing pretence that these people are abberations, and most commentary and policy on education is based on a reluctance to engage with the notion that we might have to tell the nation’s little darlings apart – indeed, there’s a certain discomfort discussing exams for precisely that reason. Which is a shame, because that’s exactly what a huge swathe of time spent in school is designed to do. As a result most of my time in school was wasted, and that’s even more the case today. So when the usual results-reporting time comes around, I experience exactly the same feeling that dogged me through my schooldays; a frustrated, impotent boredom and anger at how stupid it was, and is, and will remain.

More than that, though, I get reminded of Mr O’Connor singing his Leaving song. It featured the lyrics about “an honours paper chase”, had a verse about emigration, and another about death. He never said so but it was obvious that he knew the points regime was bollocks, that it squeezed the joy out of learning rather than encouraging a love for it, and that the system didn’t even serve the needs of the few who succeeded within it. So he read poetry like it mattered, read passages from Shakespeare like he wanted his students to do more than memorise them, and treated all his students as important whether they were going to go to college or not. Most of all, though, he never, ever spoke to his students like they were Young People. They were people.

I can only imagine the complete lack of interest that bonus points for honours maths would inspire in him. Still, he did (still does) more for the kidz than the CAO, or bonus points for honours maths, or the Young Scientist competition, or any number of government measures to “inspire” the youth of today and boost academic achievement; he just treated everyone with courtesy, helped them to get where they needed to go, and tried to show what was beautiful about the things he loved. The lens through which education is viewed might distort those things to unimportance, but they aren’t. They aren’t unimportant at all.

Recently, it was annouced that from October a levy would be applied on ESB bills. This was because-

Oh, whatever. It’s becoming hard enough to take in the details of all this; it doesn’t really hold the attention like, say, getting annoyed by the fact that people are going apeshit about Inception and don’t even remember Dreamscape, and then listing all the things that are wrong with Inception even though you haven’t actually seen the fucking thing. That’s unless, of course, you’re one of the very few hundreds of thousands of people who will find a €30 levy to be a genuine problem.

The one thing it confirms is that Fianna Fáil must love the Green Party. More by luck than judgement, they’ve wound up with coalition partners who will publically say that we need more taxes. There’s been a noticeable silence from the Greens about the leccy levy, but it’s been generally attached to them anyway; it’s about energy, see, so it’s obviously their idea.

There’s been an awful lot of arse written about the Green Party since they went into government, much of it based on the idea that they’ve abandoned all their principles to pick up some ministerial salaries. This is bollocks, and it misses the real point – the problem isn’t with the Greens, it’s with the Green movement as a whole, which is desperately struggling for any sort of central narrative that is convincing and yet palatable to its acolytes.

Not all that long ago, Greens summoned up ideas of the sort of people who grow their own vegetables, drink organic wine, and visit homoeopaths when they develop a snuffle; they might not have been the type that knots pieces of string in their hair and sells shit sculptures out of bog oak at festivals, but they certainly knew people that did. The Green Lifestyle (because what differentiates “Green” from “Environmental”, in terms of how I see the terms anyway, is almost entirely based on their respective attitudes to the concept of “lifestyle”) was alternative, in the “alternative therapy” sense of the word.

It’s shifted. Green thinking now centres around technofetishism and a relentlessly performance-based attitude towards carbon emissions.While environmental concerns are big and important (without being particularly interesting), The Green Lifestyle is its fashionable, ad-man of a cousin; more about tone and mood, politely interested in middle-class acquisition, concerned with ambience rather than achievement. It’s named after a colour, for god’s sake. This is what’s really shifted, from being all about nature to being all about a carbon-based equivalent of keeping up with the eco-Joneses. Greenstyle (see, I’ve stuck “Green” and “Lifestyle” together, oh sometimes I amaze myself with my own fucking witlessness) is characterised by a dull insistence that nothing is any use unless it incorporates something shiny and technological that reduces carbon emissions, and shows an almost pathological lack of willingness to relate these ideas to mass behaviour. The result is a school of “thought” that just imports various technological / behavioural tropes and labels them as good or bad, without bothering to apply them to society.

(The extreme end of this scale is the sort of colossal arsepiece who frowns on anyone who flys anywhere, even though someone who – say – visits sub-Saharan Africa is far more likely to understand the effects of climate change than someone who hasn’t, and their flight emissions are a miniscule part of the picture. I’ve actually seen somone sniffily shouting FAIL at a net journalist who flew from America to cover some conference or other in London. But… if someone genuinely feels the conference is important, then getting on a plane that was going to fly anyway is obviously worth doing.)

Back on-topic… the Green Party are often accused of hypocrisy, but this genuinely isn’t the case. Their problem is that they’re too giddily excited about electric cars (which is actually a pollution-shifting technology, not a pollution-cutting one, and there’s some opinion that suggests it could result in increased emissions) to really engage in the nitty-gritty of government, and they’re too obsessed with introducing a Carbon Levy to genuinely query the effect that levy will have. From the point of view of the Green Party, the new electricity levy only makes sense in those terms. It won’t actually affect electricity consumption, as it’s just a flat-rate tax. Even if it was incremental, the people who are in a position to cut their electricity consumption are those who have a high enough income not to be troubled by the levy anyhow. So why introduce it, given that the money it will raise will be a fairly negligible amount?

The answer, to anyone who believes in Greenstyle, is simple; you put levies on energy because that’s what’s you’re supposed to do. Carbon Levies, Cap and Trade, and Electric Cars aren’t ideas to be discussed, they’re just Good Things to be introduced, and whether or not they’re effective isn’t really the point. It’s the principle of the thing.

How else do you explain the frequency with which Greens mention passive housing? Ever since BERs were introduced, and fucked-up so horribly, passive and zero-carbon building has been constantly mentioned as the holy grail. You can find Eamon Ryan talking about it here, and John Gormley bringing it up here (just before the notion of new houses being built in Ireland became one of those stories we’ll tell our grandchildren). “Passive”, like “Smart”, is one of those words that are deemed to be good.

Passive housing is perfectly fine as an idea. The theory is pretty simple; clad your walls with as much insulation as you can, make them as airtight as possible, mechanically ventilate the building and run all the air through a heat recovery unit, and you’ll end up with a house that doesn’t need a central heat source at all. There’s around 20,000 of these on the continent, and if we’re still not at the point in Ireland where our build quality is sufficiently good to make it completely viable, let’s set that aside.

The problem is that it’s a form of housing developed in central Europe and Scandinavia, and it’s based on their vernacular and climate. Sweden / Denmark / Germany / One Of Those Kind Of Places are countries with extremely cold winters, relatively dry weather, and a tradition of small timber-framed houses with lightweight walls. Ireland, on the other hand, is a wet and mild, with the result that passive houses require alien patterns of behaviour – when you’re very likely to be walking into your house covered in rain, you might not be that bothered about the whole house being warm, but you’ll certainly want to be able to turn something on and warm yourself up for ten minutes. Passive housing means spending a fair chunk of money, manufacturing enormous amounts of insulation, and then expecting the users to be disciplined enough not to open windows when they aren’t supposed to. What’s more, running a mechanical ventilation system, when the actual heating requirements for Irish houses is comparatively low, isn’t actually all that efficient an idea (some passive houses aren’t even A-rated*).

In short; passive houses are fine for people who Like That Sort Of Thing, but talking about them as a mass-housing scheme is absurd. They’re still a minority pursuit in the countries that invented them, for god’s sake. This isn’t to say that we should’t look at ways of reducing energy consumption in Irish housing, but just copying foreign methods and expecting everyone to jump on board isn’t the way to do it. It’s as bananas as using triple-glazing in our never-that-cold weather, when double-glazing is now so efficient that most of the heat escaping through a window goes through the frame, and is only going to get better.**

The botching of Building Energy Ratings is a sorry story, but it fundamentally relates to the way its role was overstated in the first place to sell the idea. BERs are fine for what they are; they’re designed to give you a thumbnail picture of how a building will perform in terms of energy, by giving you a rate of energy usage per square metre. However, it tends to be portrayed as an infallible indication of how much money it will save you per year, and this is something BERs were never designed to be. There are plenty of inaccuracies in the system; larger houses tend to score far better than smaller (for the same reason that a large glass of water takes longer to cool down than a small one), and people living in F- or G-rated houses will tend to use only a fraction of the energy BER predicts, since they don’t even try to heat their entire house.

This is exacerbated by the fact that many BER assessors are either unqualified, or they’re builders who won’t give disinterested advice, or both. Making an energy-efficient home is complicated, and it depends on individual behaviour as much as it does on Energy Ratings. To pick an example, heat-pumps combined with underfloor heating are great… if a house tends to be occupied during the day, or at least every evening. If not – say, with a childless couple who are both working – it doesn’t make sense and might never pay off the initial investment. Other technologies, such as photovoltaics, are just plain pointless.

The result is that this system, pioneered by the Greens as part of a drive towards low-energy homes, means that anyone wanting to make their house more energy-efficient will find it pretty difficult to know how do so without wasting a swathe of money. There’s not even been an attempt to create a list of proper, fully-qualified professionals who you know will advise you properly. That would have required engaging with how the construction industry works, and that isn’t the sort of boring detail that heroic visionaries do; in much the same way, the Greens have upped Ireland’s standards for energy efficiency, but have made no attempt to improve building standards or building control, which is still the main problem with our house-building. It’s all very well to bring in insulation grant schemes, but when the builder fitting it doesn’t need to have any training at all, then how much good does it actually do?

This doesn’t matter to Greenstylers. Heat pumps and wood pellets and photovoltaics are renewables, and renewables are good, and that’s all there is to it. If some people have spent a few thousand on the wrong kind of renewable, well that’s not the point. It’s about sustainability, y’see.

I’ve said before that politicians are governed by aesthetics rather than results. The Green party, and the broader movement behind them, are very much the apotheosis of this. Carbon and energy levies may be regressive, but they’re appropriate; mantras to be repeated, self-justifying statements that become an end in themselves. At the bottom end of the scale, those on the dole can dig in their pockets for a new levy they can’t afford. They can console themselves that what they’re doing might not make any difference to anyone, that their hardship serves no purpose, but it’s good nonetheless. It’s for a smarter, sustainable future. That’s what everyone says, after all.

Oh, Ivor. Ivor, Ivor, poor old Ivor. Of all the things that Ivor would appear to have done – you know, claimed expenses by saying he lived in his holiday home, claimed nearly three grand on four mobile phones he got from a company which didn’t actually exist at the time, and just generally acted like a Grade A dickhead – perhaps the most impressive of all  is his belief that people should feel sorry for him. He is, he claims, the victim of a “witch-hunt”. His sulky-teenager wail for sympathy is jaw-dropping.

And yet… I do have a certain level of sympathy for Ivor, albeit not the kind he’d like. There’s been a lot of commentary on the Callely affair, largely comprised of the usual blend of fury and disgust, but no-one seems to have focused on his extraordinary levels of ineptitude. It’s hard not to feel sorry for someone who’s so staggeringly shit at what he’s chosen to do – Callely might not be the worst criminal since recorded time began, but he’s in the bottom three. He managed to get caught fiddling his expenses in Ireland, for crying out loud. To give an example, Oireachtas members can claim around €20,000 expenses unvouched – that’s unvouched, just on trust alone, because all our politicians are such stand-up guys and all – and Ivor somehow contrives to be caught with his hand in the till? It’s like getting arrested for stealing someone else’s tap water. Not that there’s owt wrong with everyone pointing out that the guy’s a crook, mind you, but it’s also worth remembering that he’s a fucking idiot.

If anything, it’s his general conduct, his  delusional protestations of innocence, that have turned him into the poster-child for Everything That’s Wrong With Dis Country. It’s one thing to claim three grand on non-existent mobile phones, it’s quite another to release a statement that essentially relies on “the dog must have done it” as an excuse, and then act like a terribly-wronged victim. Greed, banal corruption, insulting everyone’s intelligence and a bizarre sense of entitlement; impressive. His public image now lies somewhere between John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing, and a six year-old screaming that he hasn’t eaten the Petit Filous when there’s strawberry yoghurt smeared all over his face.

And yet, Callely’s insistence that he’s being made a “scapegoat” is the most telling thing of all, and maybe his public humiliation is sort of missing the point. Said scapegoat line has been greeted with laughter, unsurprisingly, but that’s at least partly because no-one wants to consider the possiblity that Ivor might be right.

For example – while the papers have been loud in condemnation, Brian Cowen has offered not a word. Zip. Nada. It’w worth remembering that, when Britland was embroiled in its expenses scandal**, Brown and Cameron couldn’t castigate their MPs fast enough. They understood that heads had to roll if they wanted to maintain the vaguest semblance of popularity. Cowen may be a prat, and he may be so firmly ensconced in the mentality of the Golden Circle that he barely notices “the public” exists, but surely even he understands that?

Course, Cowen’s position in Fianna Fáil is so precarious that he doesn’t dare criticise anyone for fear of causing a revolt, but that’s only a relevant concern for him if Callely has supporters. Perhaps he does. There has been a certain amount of stage-shock from other politicians but, more than anything else, the Dáil / Seanad is a social place. Senators and TDs talk to each other. If Ivor had been claiming to live in Cork for all these years, either he kept superhumanly quiet about it or – drum roll – nobody thought it was that big a deal. This wouldn’t exactly be a surprise. We’re talking about an institution where John O’BloodyDonoghue, the world’s crassest man, more or less got taken by government jet from his kitchen to his bedroom.* Indeed, it’s a place where someone like – oh, Ivor Callely, say – is found to have let a building contractor paint his house for free, is forced to resign from the cabinet, loses his seat… and then gets appointed to the Seanad by the Taoiseach.

Now, it’s right to vilify Callely – the starting point of fighting a greasy-till mentality is to tackle individuals; to make no allowance for an institutional mentality and insist people take personal responsibility for their transgressions, just like the individuals in the Catholic Church… um… haven’t. However it’s also important to remember that this form of corruption is an institutional affliction rather than an individual one. The reaction of every single politician to the Callely affair – be it silence from the upper échelons even as he’s tactfully ejected from his party, an ineffectual suspension from the Seanad or Callely’s own whinging – suggest that Ivor didn’t actually do anything particularly unusual. Perhaps he went a touch further than others, but the fatal part of his corruption was just that he wasn’t very good at it.

So while the newspapers happily and fairly lambast the individual, they neglect the smirkingly double-chinned, self-serving background that produced him. That background is happy to see Ivor being cast as a NAMA of blame into which its collective corruption can be decanted.

Ivor’s wrong, he’s not a scapegoat; he’s an example, and by crowing over his demise we’re only playing into the hands of his colleagues. Callely is just the most conveniently stupid face of a banal villainy, one that’s been kipping in Leinster House for so long that it’s been granted squatter’s rights. Ivor might be amusingly crap and caught bang to right, but he isn’t important in the overall scheme of Irish political corruption. Maybe it’s time to take him off the front pages – he doesn’t matter enough to be on them.

This week, Hodder Children’s Books announced that they would be releasing ten Famous Five books in contemporary language. These aren’t updates insofar as the Five will talk to each other on Facebook, but some of the more awkward turns of phrase have been tweaked. No more lashings of ginger beer, then, or housemistresses standing in for teachers.

So bloody what, I imagine most people in the world will respond, and in a sense they’re right. This is The Famous Five we’re talking about, not Moonfleet or I, Claudius, and it’s hardly the case that we’re tampering with the greatest prose ever written. Far better books have been released in a thousand-and-one abridged or updated versions – I’m pretty sure most people have read some shortened version of Frankenstein, or retellings of Theseus and the Minotaur – and it’s more or less the same process that had characters in Deadwood referring to each other as cocksuckers. Language changes, new contemporary audience, blah-de-blah you know how it goes.

Besides all that, Famous Five books aren’t all that well-regarded by a large swathe of people, and not without reason. By today’s standards they’re certainly sexist, possibly racist, and feature four priggish kids who aren’t all that likeable (even fans of the books generally accept that Anne’s a weed and Julian’s a pompous tosser). Plus naff-all happens in the first three quarters of most of the books anyway.

Well, yes. And yet this might well be the most fetidly offensive thing I’ve read about all week. Not because I’m a Blyton fan, but because it’s an entirely regressive thing to do.

It’s hard to talk about this without getting autobiographical, so here goes. The Famous Five books were published in the forties, and have been knocking around ever since. They’ve always been weirdly anachronistic – certainly it’s difficult to identify that they’re set in World War II, and it never occurred to me when I read them even though there was the odd mention of spies – and even when I was a reader, much of the content was just strange. They didn’t wear uniforms, they wore school tunics. They drank something called ginger beer, which I’d never heard of but had “beer” in the title. They ate something called “tongue” and they referred to their parents in oddly formal ways. In short, the world in which they lived was plain weird, and the way they behaved was nothing like anyone I knew.

With hindsight, though, that was almost exactly what I liked about them. I didn’t know what a “school tunic” was, but it didn’t take much to work out the meaning from context, and I was pretty certain that ginger beer wasn’t the same thing as grown-up beer. I knew I was being presented with a take on reality set some non-specific time in the past, and most things were slightly different while some things were pretty much the same. I should really be careful about talking of the educational impact on this, but… working out the rules of something that wasn’t immediately familiar to me was a useful skill to learn, even if “educational” is a bit of a stretch when used in connection with Enid sodding Blyton.

I’m channelling a blog post by Lawrence Miles here – now no longer online, sadly – in which he talked about how contestants on University Challenge stopped “reading” English and were suddenly “studying” English. Miles’ take on it was that, while it wasn’t massively important, the world had just got fractionally less unusual and interesting, and that was a bad thing. I’m sure Hodder researched this decision meticulously, insofar as they asked a bunch of kids whether they thought the language was odd, and then ticked a box when they said “yes”. But in removing the oddness from The Famous Five, they’ve removed more or less the only thing the books have going for them, and (probably) the only thing about them which is good.

This extends to the politics of The Famous Five, incidentally. Certainly Blyton’s worldview is sexist, insofar as Julian and Dick often tell Anne she’s “only a girl”. But again – I knew this was weird when I read the books, and applied a hefty discount to anything the characters said about sexual politics. An awful lot of censorship is predicated on the belief that children are stupid, and they aren’t. Criticising Blyton for not having a contemporary view of gender is as stupid as criticising HG Wells for not having a post-war view of eugenics; people’s views are a product of their culture, and cultures change slowly. What the Famous Five’s portrayal of women taught me – again, in hindsight – was that people may hold views I find wholly appalling, and still not be bad people; that people can say something racist without actually being one; that different cultures have different priorities, basically. Blyton could do gosh-golly dialogue well, and as a result drew me into a world which – ideologically – I knew was not one I recognised or agreed with. But if my parents wanted to equip me to deal with other cultures on their own terms, they couldn’t really give me anything better to read. Apart from Doctor Who novelisations, natch.

It’s a bit of a leap from Blyton to burqas, but the republishing of Blyton is just the latest instalment in the story of how we have progressively knocked any awkward, unfamiliar corners off our stories in case they alienate a target demographic. The result of removing the odd and unusual is the creation of a culture that doesn’t know how to deal with the Other, and there’s no better summary of what we have done in the last fifteen years. The paradox is that, while globalisation has lead to a more open planet than ever before – and travel has become a norm rather than a luxury – we have increasingly seen other cultures as theme-parks to be pointed at. The first time I ever saw a full-on burqa (as opposed to a hijab) was in a Tintin book – a series not exactly brilliant with racial politics itself, of course – and I just accepted it as something a certain type of foreign woman wore. The debate currently being had in Western Europe is the unconscious product of a society that thinks “third world” and “somewhere without a branch of Starbucks” are interchangeable terms; a woman in a burqa can’t just be a woman from an alien culture with its own frame of reference, it’s a woman who’s yet to discover the joys of McDonald’s.

Just for the record, and I can’t believe I have to iterate what should be stinkingly obvious to anyone; the burqa is symptomatic (and a tool) of misogynist thinking; it’s an unpleasant convention which many of its wearers are forced to wear, and I find it unpalatable. However, people calling for veils to be banned (and the countries who have already banned it) are fundamentally wrong-headed. It really isn’t acceptable for a state to legislate about what people should or shouldn’t wear; social behaviour is something that evolves through societal approval (or disapproval), while legislation just entrenches views rather than softening them. There has been some talk that burqas are indicative of a culture that oppresses women, and should be banned to combat that oppression, but this is like combatting domestic violence by banning bandages. We already have laws that prevent women from being forced to wear something they have no wish to wear. Many of those who wear burqas have been conditioned or brainwashed into doing so, but you don’t change that mindset by forcing them to give up what they believe to be important, any more than we’ve created a love of democracy in the Middle East by forcing countries to have it. And those who genuinely want to wear one… well, I think they’re plain wrong, but if we criminalised everyone I thought was wrong then the jails would be full of fans of Mad Men.

What’s telling isn’t the rights and wrongs of the face-veil debate, it’s the seeming inability to have the discussion without resorting to “why can’t I walk down the street in a balaclava?”. Certainly, society is more permissive now than it was at any time in the last century, but it’s also a society that’s not being confronted by difference. Foreigners can wear things that are as odd as they like if they live in Faraway and it’s all ethnic-like, but we don’t expect or want that strangeness to turn up on our doorstep. The burqa “debate” strikes me as the conversation of a society that instinctively wants things to be the same; that’s threatened by something that once have simply been curious, that parrots the doctrine of “freedom” but only if it’s a form of freedom that doesn’t look too different.

We should really have left that behind by now. We should be better than this. But hey, we’re all a product of our culture. This might be tedious, and thoroughly depressing, but it’s also exactly what you’d expect from a society that castigates sixty year-old books for having different values to its own. A society that rewrites those books and removes anything awkward and unfamiliar. A society that takes out all the strange words.

Dark Night Of The Soul – Dangermouse and Sparklehorse
featuring The Flaming Lips, David Lynch, Vic Chesnutt, and many more

Behind this release is the crafty producer Danger Mouse, and rather than tell you how good it is (better than alright…*pause*…but…*sigh*), let me ask you this: What the france do producers actually do? In the old days, producers got praise only when live acts sounded a bit shit without them, or when pop divas spent millions to work with them on oversung R’n'B rubbish. However, the last decade has been dominated (thankfully) by multi-instrumentalists, and that includes production. Neither super sound engineers like Rudy Van Gelder nor evil svengalis like Pete Waterman, the new breed – Timbaland,  Dilla, Madlib – are  a species of very talented knob twiddlers, loop-diggers and beat conductors. But how much of the sound – and what parts of it – are they actually responsible for?

Danger Mouse is on my radar for finally getting Beck to record a proper coherent album, but Beck is an experienced producer in his own right and the soundscapes on Modern Guilt are recognisably his progressions from The Information and Sea Change… except it’s a bit choppy. And there’s a few more drums. Um, is that it?

Conversely, Broken Bells, his collaboration with James Mercer is a logical if achingly unfortunate step further away from the rocking glory of Oh Inverted World, towards vocals-driven pop with a bit of a nice background. Except it’s very smooth.

Of course DM (as Penfold might call him) will always be best known as one half of Gnarls Barkley and all that that entails, both in terms of – ahem – talent, and commercial success. Interestingly, while a lot of it sounds like Diana Ross on steroids, there are songs like Who’s Gonna Save My Soul? that could lift directly onto Dark Night – angst, beats, Hammond organ and, as with Modern Guilt, acoustic guitars lifted effortlessly to the front of the mix. This is the meat and potatoes of Dark Night, the undercurrent that holds so many artists coherently in one album, and it’s none too shabby a sound. It’s possible to see its limits in the context of MF Doom, whose collaborations with Madlib and Clutchy Hopkins are just so rich and joyous that they make Danger Doom, good as it is, sound flat and unadventurous by comparison.

*pause*…but…*sigh*

I’m going to weasel out of reviewing the individual contributions by saying this bit is about producers, but ultimately this is likely to be one of those albums that the cool people force down our ears for the rest of the year in studenty places, wanky bars and clothes shops. So rather than go out and buy the thing, one might have to hole up and actively hide from it. If it does break, it won’t necessarily be on the radio like Mumford and Sons or Norah bleedin’ Jones. No, this one is set to go off like Dummy or White Blood Cells, in your cool friends’ flats, presumably after they heard it in the shops buying yet another pair of multi-coloured trainers. I’m going to be cynical for this paragraph at least and say it’s commercial stuff (any producers greatest trick) and the dial is set at ‘a little bit wuuh!’. Studenty types looking for something a bit more edgy than, say, Keane, are going to be fodder for this record. Others are going to have to ride out the storm, thankful at least that it will drown out the XX for as long as it plays.

All in all, though? Hats off to DM for fashioning such a strong sound – maybe having a midas touch isn’t a crime after all.

You have to love it when Britain goes a bit mental. This week it’s transpired that a head teacher in England has an annual salary in the region of €180,000, and lo there was much affrontery. Tory Education minister Michael Gove rushed to clarify that he would ensure this would never happen again (while strategically ignoring the fact that the school was free to spend its budget however it damn well wanted, and this “freedom” is exactly what his big plan promises more of), while most of the parents, students and teachers from the school in question rather spoiled things by not being in the least bit bothered and taking pains to stress how wondifulous Mark Elms was at his job. That’s not the point, countered some; that’s a ludicrous salary to pay anyone, and that’s not why we pay our taxes. Nobody has yet had the temerity to reply “Well, apparently it is.”

Of the people sticking up for Mark Elms, a curious number have used the line that “Well, it’s a lot of money and probably a bit much, but I’d rather see it go to a good Head Teacher than to an Assistant Head of Compliance in the local council.” There’s certainly a logic to this – teachers are pretty important, let’s face it, and nobody likes or gives a shit about administrators. Still, what’s most interesting about this line is that, in the same week, the ConDem Government have released a Government White Paper about how they want to dismantle the NHS. Sorry, “liberate” the NHS. Of the many slices of what-they’re-calling-reform, the most instructive is the plans is to get rid of the Primary Care Trusts and make GPs directly responsible for commissioning. Or, in short, “getting rid of the bureaucracy and protecting front line staff,” as Francis Maude described it on Question Time.

Bureaucracy is a great word. Nobody likes bureaucracy. And yet, the administration hasn’t been cut; it’s just that the doctors will now have to do it instead of PCTs. The end result will be that companies will be hired to do the admin for the doctors, and the PCTs will wind up being replaced by private healthcare companies instead. It may save a small amount of money, but it will replace bodies motivated by fairness with companies motivated by profit. That isn’t to criticise these companies, whom I’m sure are run by fine human beings that feed puppies and visit their grandmothers et cetera et cetera, it’s just a statement of fact.

So what’s the motivation?

It’s easy to say “individualist ideology”, or “doing favours for their rich business friends”, or “knee-jerk belief that the private sector always does things better and state services are always shit”, but I’d say it’s a slightly more slippery anxiety. Government decisions have to be carefully documented and desperately accountable, whereas private companies don’t. What was characterised by Francis Maude as “bureaucracy” was described by Andy Burnham on the same Question Time as “accountability”, and accountability costs oodles of money*. Just to be razorblade-clear, I’ll say that the money we spend on accountability is well worth it; I could say more about the importance of transparency in public provisions at this point, but I’ll just say “Golden Circle” and let you work out the rest yourselves. Can private companies do things more efficiently? Yes, of course, because we don’t expect their standards of neutrality and fairness to be so high, and we’re not bothered if a private healthcare company employ dozens of people earning more than any of the Mark Elmses or Assistant Heads of Compliance of this world.

The annoying thing about the prurient fad for cost-cutting is how self-contradictory it is. The Tories criticise Labour’s waste, and bin schools-building projects because they represent bad value for money; but, in bringing “private sector enterprise” funded by the state, they’re embracing exactly the same Public-Private Partnership models that made the schools projects so ruinously expensive in the first place. David Cameron trumpets loudly about freeing up schools from central control, but when a school choose to go to the market and spend a chunk of cash getting the man they need, they’re censured for doing so. The Tories talk about the need for a Big Society, but clearly believe that anyone who serves that society should operate under more stringent limitations than someone who decides Society Can Get Fucked and sets out to make as much money as they possibly can.

This isn’t to defend huge pay-packets for public servants; the sooner we get to a point where people do what they do without being motivated by enormous swathes of money, the better. However, that doesn’t explain why public bodies decisions on pay have to operate by different rules to everyone else, or why we demand “fair” salaries for any state servant but don’t give a toss what someone working for Microsoft earns. Ultimately, my reaction to Paul Elms is exactly the same as to the oh-so-moral rubbernecking about what a FÁS administrator earns, or breathless stories about someone on the dole going on holiday to Thailand; I don’t really know what these people do, or understand their job, so what they earn or do isn’t really any of my fucking business. I’m sure there are some people  exploiting the system, but I’m also sure those people will always exist. Pay an individual half-a-million if you want, then we can tax the shit out of them; but nitpicking the actions of individuals is a boring, conservative and self-righteous thing to do, and reforming a system isn’t the same as pointing at the nearest banker and shouting “arsehole”.

Whereas we, in Ireland, have no idea how to handle systemic reform – to the extent that politicians use the word to describe blanket cuts to the pay of all public servants, and nobody just laughs in their stupid ugly faces – our neighbours are embracing it, even if what’s being proposed amounts to cultural vandalism. In terms of money saved or wasted, and/or patient welfare, my suspicion is that this will make very little overall difference to the bottom line in either direction – even if it leads one to expect the NHS to slowly become little more than a brand-name, concealing private companies who will inevitably behave in ever more inequitable ways, simply because “equitability” isn’t part of their mission statement.

From an onlooker’s perspective, my reaction is more one of… social aesthetics, if that’s not too pretentious a term. The National Health Service is a collective statement of which UK people of all persuasions can be hugely, unequivocally, justifiably proud. The notion that people from all walks of life can expect exactly the same level of care, that anyone is entitled to excellence, makes it an instititution that bespeaks… well, just a fundamental decency. Living in Ireland, with its unapologetically two-tier system, the NHS has always struck me as the subtle watermark of a civilised society. Watching the relish with which these reforms have been flagged – by the party of Daniel Hannan**, who went on to US television to describe the NHS as “a sixty-year mistake” – as private companies spread their napkins over their laps and start to salivate, is far more grotesque and sickening than any one individual’s pay-packet. Many people described Paul Elms’ salary as “obscene”, but the White Paper is so culturally ugly that it shows up the Elms business as the shop-gossip it is. This is a what an obscenity looks like; suited and coiffured, staring glassily at one of the few great things about Britain from official stationery. Smiling. Taking aim.

Ah, NAMA. Just when you think it’s out of the picture, the latest news report comes along and takes the thing apart yet again. Recently, it’s transpired that NAMA isn’t actually going to make the country loads and loads of money, as originally thought (well, I say “thought”, what I actually mean is “sort-of-vaguely-hoped-and-told-to-a-public-who-didn’t-believe-it-anyway”); in fact, we stand to lose hundreds of millions. Cue much anger from those who still have the energy to be outraged by more tales of fiscal incompetence, even if it’s increasingly like getting angry about the rain -  yeah, it’s a bit rubbish, but we get a lot of it in Ireland and you just have to accept it.

Fact of the matter is, if NAMA does end up costing us – say – five hundred million, it’s really not that much in the overall scheme of things – particularly for a project as long-term as NAMA. €300 million, for example, is what the confiscation of pensioners’ medical cards was expected to cost, and one of the points made at the time was that you can recoup that much money anywhere. It was a question of 300 million versus something that looked unseemly, and the government decided that appearances mattered. The victimised people were voters, after all.

The retort’s obvious; it isn’t about the money, it’s about the principle. We were told one thing to justify the NAMA mechanism, the reality looks like being quite another. The NAMA thing hurts, partially because of the lack of transparency and the non-stop fudging of the figures, but mostly because of the narrative it presents; the law changed to bail out a financial system, it also happens to bail out the people primarily responsible for all the trouble in the first place, and meanwhile social welfare gets cut and the rest of us are plunged into austerity-

Ah, “austerity”. There’s a loaded word. It might – particularly for those from the UK – conjur up images of post-war poverty endured by a willing populace, but it’s interesting to note that austerity is an aesthetic word rather than a quantative one. “Frugal” means making most of meagre resources; “austerity” is making something look unapologetically frugal. It’s the glamourisation of scarcity, if you like. This is why it’s a gloriously appropriate word to describe the sudden fashion for severity that’s swept through Europe since Greece came within a ball-hair of going tits-up, and it’s become firmly embedded in the mentality of both sides of the argument; those in favour of cuts retreat to the belt-tightening meme, while those who loudly oppose NAMA make noise about spotting bankrupt property-developers going on holiday and travelling first class.

When those who oppose the relentless cutting of public provisions mention – say – Keynesian economics, they miss the point of what government does. Governments don’t deal in economics, they deal in aesthetics, and the aesthetic of austerity has taken firm root in our culture. It’s hardly surprising, given the story of the last few years. A bunch of ultra-competitive quasi-masonic posh male gits gambled colossal amounts of money they didn’t have, paid profliglate salaries that bounced around the domestic economy, and the government started spending based on tax-receipts that didn’t have any basis in reality. The moral is obvious; profligacy is bad, saving is good, and debt is evil. A few years ago, it was generally accepted that debt was a healthy, virtuous way of making your money work. Now it’s the height of irresponsibility, particularly collective debt, hence it’s all right to cut the salaries of a low-paid while talking about how ooh it’s tough for everyone.

In a sense, this isn’t entirely unwelcome. One of the most noxious trends of the last few years was that of the collector – the thinking that one of the average human’s raison d’etre was to acquire stuff, that a trip to HMV to buy the latest box-set of a TV series you’d never actually scene was natural and normal behaviour, that you could measure the depth of your cultural knowledge by the amount of shelf-space taken up by your DVD collection, that anyone with less than a hundred CDs was living more or less the same life as St Augustine of Hippo. Selfridges once had a campaign that went “See it, want it, buy it, forget it,” for fuck’s sake. That isn’t to say that this isn’t still the case – one of the most celebrated ad campaigns of late shows a woman going living a life that’s indistinguishable from her taste for consumer hardware – but any sort of acceptance that it’s not actually necessary to own the entire Planet of the Apes series on DVD is arguably a good thing. This is happening, which is why the latest Sex and the City film seemed so grotesquely out of step, even to fans of the series; I’d argue that it isn’t that the writing is appreciably worse, it’s that the cultural background against which we understand the story is massively changed.

(Having said that, I’d rather drink my own feet dissolved in peroxide than actually go and watch the SatC films, so there’s a very real possibility here that I don’t actually know what the hell I’m talking about.)

The problem, then, isn’t so much the sudden preaching of austerity; it’s the brand of austerity that’s being pushed. For all the lip-service paid to “we’re all in this together,” it’s implied to everyone that the real money is being haemorhagged by Someone Else.  Before the UK Budget (which they thought was severe, bless them), David Cameron stated that “There is no way of dealing with an 11% budget deficit just by hitting either the rich or the welfare scrounger.” Well then, why go to the trouble of naming them? The implication, just by mentioning welfare scroungers, is that the financial crisis is their fault – convenient, as almost nobody in the country actually classes themselves as a welfare scrounger (or as rich, for that matter). Ergo, it’s down to someone else. In Ireland, almost everybody knows who should be ahead of them in the cuts queue. It’s public servants, or civil servant, or welfare cheats, or bankers, or developers, or single mothers, or dem bastards in Leinster House. That isn’t to say there isn’t a dollop of truth in some of the above; it’s just that, if you have a string of besuited dickheads in secure incomes singling out sectors who still have pots of money, then you end up with a bitter society that’s preoccupied with scapegoating.

Meanwhile, “austerity” continues to embraced as if it’s a question of manners, a rhetoric double-dipped in words like “appropriate”. In fact, if you want to see a perfect example of what austerity means in its current context, the best possible example appeared on the Late Late Show a couple of years ago (skip to 4m25s or so):

This is someone who’s suggesting that people should be paid (the minimum wage, presumably, unless of course you subscribe to the theory of “workfare”) to clear weeds from the roads, while at the same time saying that it’s no longer appropriate to travel by helicopter. Well, we all have to make sacrifices, don’t we? Now, if Jackie Lavin can give up helicopters, surely those on the dole can give up a tenner a week?

The interesting thing isn’t that what Lavin said was unforgivably warped, it’s that it was – economically – plain wrong; it would be far better for a stagnant economy if the Cullens flew by helicopter as much as they possibly could. However, Lavin is governed by a vaguely-formed sense of manners. That’s ultimately not such a terrible thing, really – “rich idiots have a bizarre sense of entitlement and warped priorities” isn’t exactly a shock headline.

That’s all very well, but governments shouldn’t operate on the same basis. Even leaving aside the question of public sector pay, we have a situation where welfare has been cut… even though all social welfare is spent by its recipients, and so ends up heading back to the exchequer in VAT and tax receipts anyway; we’ve seen capital expenditure on education and health slashed, even though the net cost to the exchequer of capital expenditure at this time is practically zero. We may have cut expenditure, but the deficit hasn’t even wobbled. We aren’t doing this for deficit reasons, really; we’re doing it because it’s “appropriate”. Welfare and wages are cut, not because of economics or even ideology, but because of decorum – the skewed, privileged cousin of politeness.

Well, a polite society isn’t one where people can froth at the money spent on its least fortunate, even if the complainant makes ten times as much. That, ultimately, is why the NAMA news rankles. NAMA is a purely economic measure – it isn’t about society, it’s about numbers so big that they’re barely comprehensible, and a few hundred million really isn’t that much. But while the wealthy and the privileged get the economic theory, and four billion’s worth of projected shortfall is shrugged off as part of the accounts, the poor and the vulnerable are crushed by an aesthetic decision that was taken by the wealthy on their behalf. That’s what’s needed. That’s what’s appropriate.

Ah, just when you thought it had gone away, suddenly we’re talking about the Civil Partnership Bill again. I’m fairly sure that merits of the Civil Partnership Bill had already been discussed to death, and frankly I wasn’t particularly interested the first time round-

…okay, that needs elaboration. Obviously, the Bill is important, and obviously it doesn’t go far enough. However, I don’t / didn’t really feel the need to say anything beyond “great, pass it, then drive on for full equality*.” People who argue that it should be opposed because it doesn’t recognise the rights of gay families vis-a-vis their children – well this is obviously a fair position, but it does smack of refusing half a cake because you want the whole thing.

As for those who claim that gay couples shouldn’t get the same rights afforded to heterosexual couples… bluntly, the only way I see anyone making a consistent argument on this basis is if it’s based on: -

a: the belief that homosexuality is wrong or evil, and

b: the belief that an individual’s idea of private morality can or should be imposed on the entire population.

So I’m not sure I even have to go to the bother of stating the obvious here, but anyone who can accept those two axioms can just Fuck Right Off.

The only reason to linger on this, then, is that there are attempts to paint these arguments as non-judgemental and empirical. The Frontline had a programme about “the family” on Monday night, which quickly became about the Civil Partnership Bill and, even more quickly, about a gay couple’s right to adopt. ‘Course, the Frontline has “discussions” on all sorts of blindingly obvious questions, if you can class “unrepresentative groups of extremists shouting slogans at each other” as “discussion”; this, however, was different. David Quinn was on it.

Quinn… bothers me. He’s able to coat his obnoxious rhetoric in a varnish of spurious reason; last night, his arguments were full of words like “evidence-based”, giving the notion that his views are neutral rather than desperately prejudiced. The Frontline is generally full of ignorant backbenchers spouting gibberish, of which there was a top-notch example last night – stand up Jim Walsh, the new poster-child for Stupidity In A Suit – but Quinn is different. Bluntly, he’s a slick operator, and that makes him… well, dangerous is too melodramatic a word, but he’s certainly worrying. Ivana Bacik failed to land a serious punch on him, and that’s not a good thing*. Particularly since Quinn’s techniques are, uniformly, nonsensical.

Here’s a smattering of his quotes. Have fun.

“One in four kids is not being raised by their true married parents. The logic of the family diversity point of view is that it doesn’t really matter if that number climbs to fifty percent or sixty or seventy percent, that we shouldn’t really mind if ever more children don’t have the benefit of their own two married parents.”

“Are you indifferent to whether kids get raised by their mother or father? …The implication of your position is that it doesn’t matter if you’re raised by your own mother and father… that it doesn’t matter if a child is raised by the two people who bring them into the world.”

“Some people want to nullify and write out of the social script the idea that it is ideal to have a mother and father… and to condemn the notion that a child should have a mother and father as bigotry, so basically everybody watching this programme tonight who believes in traditional morality and a child’s right to a mother and father is a bigot, and increasingly the law is going to be brought against them… that was just what was said.”

“You must recognise [a] child’s right to be raised by a mother and father who are going to love them. If you have a lesbian couple and a heterosexual couple, both there to adopt the child, I would have thought that if you were looking at it from the child’s point of view, you must give the child to the loving mother and father… otherwise what you’re saying is that the child doesn’t have a right to be raised by a mother and father.”

All those statements are utter horseshit for a variety of reasons, but what’s most interesting is what they have in common. All the above are based on extrapolation – taking an argument and extending it to breaking point, then using the extremes to discredit the argument in the first place. So, if your reasoned opinion is that a gay couple should have equal rights to a same-sex couple, then by extension you think that anyone who believes a child should be entitled to stay with their birth parents is a bigot. It’s a brand of reductio ad absurdum, if you like. Note the words used above – “the logic of this point of view,” “the implication of your position.”

There’s a vague sheen of rigour here (reduction ad absurdum is how the drafting of legislation is tested, and it does require a form of logical thinking) that might seem persuasive to stupid people. Subtly, it also implies that every move towards equality is part of a creeping, wider agenda – this equality thing might start with Civil Partnership, but it ends with mothers and fathers have no rights over their children. Incrementally, if you accept that every move made is part of an agenda to fashion the world in anothers’ image (and, if you’re David Quinn, you might genuinely think this way), each step is quite logical. Marriage is important, and it’s between a woman and a man. Therefore, recognising other forms of relationship in any way makes marriage less important; therefore, it’s an attack on marriage; therefore it’s an attack on the relationship of a woman and a man; and so on, until Dem Gays are stealing kids away from their mother and father, and straight kids are being tortured on pink crosses.

This argument-by-twelve-step-syllogism is a particularly adolescent form of discussion. When we’re young, and trying to figure out a system of ethics while full of contradictory hormones, we tend to do this – leastways, I know I did, god help me. Take as few basic principles as possible, systematically apply them to all ethical questions, and then smile smugly at how intellectual you are. Sooner or later, most of us realise that this doesn’t work – perfect solutions require perfect societies, and we don’t live in one of those. So we legislate differently in different circumstances, we apply whatever principles seems fairest for the case in question.

(What’s remarkable about Quinn’s tirades, in this instance, is that they’re based on an entirely false premise – what all LGBT groups are after is equality, and “denying the child a right to their mother and father” is nothing to do with equality. Equality is the endgame, not a stepping stone to some totalitarian gay state. If you entirely accept that a child is always best off with its birth parents it makes no difference at all, since children being put up for adoption either don’t have living parents, or have been given up for a variety reasons.  “Mother” and “father” don’t come into it; there is no “mother” and “father” in the only cases that matter. Accepting that a random gay couple can do as good a job with those children as a random straight couple is the conclusion of the process. Not that I’ve ever met David Quinn in my life, but I can’t but it feels like we’re looking at a man who doesn’t realise how skewed his views are – he wants to be tolerant, but finds gay people a bit wuuuh, and has post-rationalised some spurious reason around his knee-jerk reaction.)

Dogmatists are essentially people who never leave the one-size fits all mindset behind, and that’s why they’re so uniformly boring. A mature person recognises that the big social questions – individualism v collectivism, say – are an ongoing debate, a balancing act, and tries to mediate between the two. A dogmatist decides they’re on one side or the other, and then systematically applies the logic of their position everywhere; interestingly, they also assume that everyone else shares their thought processes – therefore it’s natural to a dogmatist to conduct argument by extrapolation. To borrow from Alan Bleasdale, they’re people who’ve only read one book.

(There’s a clear if trivial example here, from one of Ireland’s right-wing bores bloggers, John McGuirk, where he claims that asking the HSE to avoid gender stereotyping is the same as** vilifying parents who let their daugher wear pink or that noting the unhealthy consequences of advertising is actually identifying a “sinister plot.”)

This is just… fucking moronic. It’s the same technique as saying that anyone who supports the NHS is a Marxist, or that anyone who claims to love their country is a Nazi, and it’s only marginally more sophisticated. What it is, in fact, is a variation on the “where do you draw the line?” argument, and the answer is cock-obvious to anyone who doesn’t come from a dogmatic mindset; you draw the line at the appropriate point. That’s why we have laws, and judges, and even politicians. Line-drawing is what our body of legislature is set up to do.

The outcomes are important, but I tend to find the tone of discussion more interesting than whether legislation gets passed or not, and I suspect I have a reason for this; there’s always another argument coming up about some other new law or budget or public lynching, and the most important new development is always the next one. The problem isn’t that people come up with Quinn’s brand of tripe – there are always going to be arseholes in the world – it’s that they’re allowed to say it without a serious challenge. Quinn is a grubby little man, a smooth-talking mass of nonsense glistening with false logic and irrelevant facts. He managed to look vaguely reasonable on Monday night, and for all the crapness of The Frontline’s format, it isn’t Fox News – it is ultimately a programme that at least pretends to be balanced, even if its the same form of “balance” you get when two equally fat blokes jump up and down at either end of a see-saw. There was a single grain of truth in Quinn’s arguments; “progessives”, for want of a better word, have grown so used to the central tenets of tolerance and equality that, when challenged, they tend to resort to name-calling and taunts of bigotry. This is understandable, but it’s sometimes necessary to engage with reactionaries on their own pseudo-logical ground – if we don’t, then Quinn and his ilk can maintain the illusion of reason, crushed by the bias of the establishment. Maybe he is a bigot, but more importantly, he’s an idiot – a man whose logic is terminally warped. If even that can’t be exposed, then those of us who value equality and fairness will never win any of the important arguments at all.

Let The Great World Spin, Colum McCann, 2009

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill, 2008

I have nothing against the Leaving Cert – as an exam, it gets you where you need to go. “Points make prizes”, as Bruce Forsyth used to say, and it’s still true. Leaving Cert Irish gets you into the NUI, where you can either forget the language or learn it properly; meanwhile the sciences will get you thinking a certain way, before you go on to study at third level where the first thing you learn is that there are no certainties or nailed down facts. This is even true for boring old accounting – in the real world, liabilities can be transformed into assets through the magic of securitization before you can say “total banking collapse.” What’s black is white; the world needs to be learned anew.

Leaving Cert English, however, seems to be all you need to be a hotshot post-9/11 novelist. That turgid, ploddingly descriptive language that we all employed to get through Paper 1 seems to be all a boy needs to make it big with the book club / reading group crowd on both sides of the Atlantic – clumpy, leaden prose and a depressingly Irish obsession with The Mammy. As in Let The Great World Spin, Book 1, Line 1; “One of the many things my brother, Corrigan, and I loved about our mother was that she was a fine musician.” Jaysus. Books cost money, otherwise there would have been no reading on from here, because this is just shit. Neither of these books is completely without merit, but the reading experience is similar – you have to plough on through gritted teeth, mindful of each error of style, pace and language. As a reader you’re left floundering in school essay-level prose with no trust left in the writer.

A cousin recommended Netherland to me, presumably because of the cricketing theme in it. It soon becomes apparent, however, that while O’Neill may have done some research and faced a few overs in his day, he knows bugger-all about cricket; as a result, he spends much of the book trying to name-check his way out of it. The hero is supposedly Dutch, but any amount of research doesn’t make him so. In my experience, Dutch people like to appear normal – you know, relaxed, tolerant and international – but invariably they’re none of the above. It’s obviously a stereotype to say that the Dutch are like the Germans but often try to hide it, that they’re anally-retentive, nationalistic, humourless and uptight – all this depends on the individual, and Hans has a right to be different. However there’s a core of Dutchness, a strangeness, that’s simply lacking from his character. In much the same way, he’s not a cricketer or even a sportsman.

Ultimately, this is a suspension of disbelief problem, and it’s only aggravated by sentences like this one describing the Hotel Chelsea: “Over half the rooms were occupied by long-term residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child, a murky tanks in which cheap fish hesitated in weeds and an artificial starfish made a firmament of the gravel.” Overladen, quickly followed by overblown.  “Made a firmament”, for fuck’s sake! So much of this book is written in a quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog style that it doesn’t just reek of old exams, but there also seems to have been an allotted two-and-a-half hour period to write the thing.

McCann can at least write a character, and that does ultimately save his work. When you read books, though, you just want to hand over power of attorney to the writer and cruise through a new fictional reality with your feet up. Let The Great World Spin had me a nervous back-seat driver throughout, unhappy at having handed over the keys; when McCann described Philippe Petit’s preparations the night before his celebrated tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, I found myself screaming at the book for not describing how he got the wire across. Turned out this detail had been held back for effect, but the book hadn’t come close to me trusting it enough for this to work, and once again it had lost me to the grim company of indifferent sentences.

Both books seem to operate with the same formula; show a new side to New York, remain suspiciously upbeat about the city, and mention tragic events tangentially. South Park has skewered that brand of 9/11 mawkishness better than I ever can; however, as far as new takes on the city go,  I prefer Joan Didion’s unrepentantly critical essay ‘Sentimental Journeys’ from the early 1990s. That portrays New York as a city that gorges on its own false myths to hide its racism, bureaucracy and uncompetitiveness. That wouldn’t get you any book group royalties, though.

Recently, Stephen Fry made a speech to BAFTA, in which he said that television wasn’t quite as good as it used to be; that it was clearly more aimed at demographics than was once the case; that it didn’t challenge the audience as it should.

Now, this is a pretty uncontroversial statement, albeit one that seems a bit odd coming from Stephen Fry. After all, this is the man who made and starred in Kingdom, and has a nice line in persuading the BBC to film him while he goes on holidays before calling it a documentary. Still, he’s clearly got a point and, even if it’s obvious to most people outside TV-society, there’s not many people within that society bothering to make it. It’s a shame (but drearily predictable) that the press have instead reported it as an attack on Doctor Who, on account of how Stephen Fry had the gall to say it’s not an adult programme - for no better reason than that it, um, happens to be perfectly true. Doctor Who fans across the world were infuriated, apart from the very few millions with a functioning sense of perspective, and of course those who couldn’t give a toss what Stephen Fry says about anything.

The only mistake Stephen Fry made was in not going far enough. When he mentions actors being made to wear seatbelts, or programmes not wishing to offend, he suggests a world where TV is enslaved to a faceless bureaucracy. This may well be true, but it’s not the cause of the problem; the defining obsession of the last fifteen years isn’t a bureaucratic mentality, but a corporate one. I don’t mean this in the sense of Evil Corporations, but something more insidious and subtle; namely that we’ve been quietly encouraged to view society entirely in the same terms as we view a business and, because it’s now so commonplace, many people have stopped noticing just how much this mentality defines almost everything in our culture.

I could produce all sorts of examples at this point: I could talk about how the prevailing view of politicians as people who should run the finances, and society as a thing that just sort-of-happens around the economic framework, a view that would have been unthinkable even in the early 1980s; I could mention the glib references to things such as the “Nanny State”, a two-word objection to the role of government (a body legislating for the public good) that would once have been met with blank incomprehension. The overwhelming majority of our commentariat are so used to thinking about society in corporate terms that they lazily transplant business rules onto entire nations, and very little about current economic debate makes much sense if you don’t bear that in mind. Take Social Welfare, and the low-level resentment with which it’s viewed by many, even as a concept; this comes from an instinctive view that we should be able to somehow fire people who aren’t producing, and moronic ideas like “workfare” come almost entirely from a conditioned, instinctive desire to get the nation’s employees (sorry, citizens) doing something. “Make people work for the dole” isn’t an economic or social idea, it’s a purely aesthetic one.

Aesthetics are defined by culture, so it’s culture that should take centre stage. Over the last fifteen years, popular culture in Britain and Ireland has become increasingly self-absorbed, increasingly unwilling to make any jabs at the establishment or run the risk of making its audience uncomfortable. This has long since been a problem, ever since people like David E. Kelley got their hands on television and started filling it with their warm-milk brand of evil, and it became perfectly acceptable to portray characters in any drama as having an endless stream of money from a non-specific job; however, as the background has changed, it’s now more glaringly obvious than ever before*. This is a time when the political paradigms of the last couple of decades are shifting or imploding, when the economic prosperity shared by all (except the poor, but of course they didn’t really matter) has been exposed as a Visa bill that we kept avoiding by increasing the credit limit, when the truisms peddled by out leaders (The Markets Will Decide, What’s Good For Business Is Good For Ireland, Get On The Ladder, Reward Enterprise) have exploded and spattered everyone with claggy grey shrapnel. Economically and socially, these are times of hardship. But culturally…?

Culturally, this is as exciting a time as anyone could hope to live through. The placid complacency of the last couple of decades that gripped our media-classes has fallen to bits, and nothing is yet taking its place beyond a vague sense of austerity. All in all it’s time for a new aesthetic, a new idiom, some shiny new movement in music or television or cinema or gaming or whatever it is the internet does. So why, given that we’re in a society that’s ripe for reinvention, is it so difficult to remember a time when popular culture was been more banal than it is now?

One of the charges that used to be levelled at TV was “dumbing down”, which has now been superseded by Fry’s charge of demographic blandness. These are all linked to the phenomena know as Political Correctness, which I’ve long since argued doesn’t actually exist at all… however, in a sense it does, it’s just called “political” instead of “Corporate”. The vast majority of popular culture is firmly enslaved to corporate mentality, and one of the key axioms of that belief is that a product should never run the risk of offending anyone. It’s a universal truth that no film should risk having a minority figure as a villain, even though I’d imagine that Lawrence Fishburn and Denzel Washington would be as game for wearing fake scars and putting on an Evil English accent as anyone; this isn’t borne of any political pressure, it’s because films are financed by businesspeople and they don’t want to risk alienating a black demographic. Dumbing Down, Political Correctness and Demographics are all a form of graded blanding-out, a process of removing anything unusual or challenging or eccentric from stories, in case it a particular section of the market objects.

Of course, this is nothing new; it’s just that it has permeated the minds of those who make the films in the first place. The best example was the BBC’s only ambitious drama of the last year, Five Days. It was multi-stranded, and intelligent, and had some cracking characters and a decent cast; then, about half way through, it revealed one of the central figures had been to a terrorist training camp. As soon as this was revealed, the character said he was very sorry and very stupid and shouldn’t have done it… and that was it. Now, seeing a drama do something as crass as introducing a topic like Islamist terrorism and then change the subject before things get too awkward is bad enough. Worse, though, was that it was somehow supposed to be worthy that the issue had been raised at all, even though the programme had fuck-all to say about it. There was a time when raising uncomfortable truths was just the sort of thing that drama should do - programmes like I Claudius, The Boys From The Blackstuff, Our Friends in the North, Prime Suspect and Queer as Folk were all obsessed, in their own very different ways, with showing viewers a view of society they’d never seen before. There’s still the occasional programme doing it – Bodies comes to mind, and the Torchwood mini-series had elements of this - but these are very much the exception.

It’s fashionable to associate the risk-averse nature of modern popular storytelling to patrician voices in the BBC assuming they speak for the people. In fact, it’s just that the maximise-the-target-market mentality has become the default setting for anyone involved in drama. Young creative-types like to imagine they’re on the edge, stifled by The Man, but in fact are so fully a part of the establishment and don’t even realise it. They produce bland programmes for exactly the same reason that a generation of property-development programmes have made everyone paint their walls in neutral colours – the most easily-sold product has become the default aesthetic. The recent, appalling, unforgiveably bowdlerised BBC adaptation of Money got this point across, albeit unintentionally. John Self was a grasping, unpleasant and slightly stupid character making a shit film, but his film also sounded six times as textured as the actual programme we were watching – in much the same way that his gaudy 1980s apartment was far more interesting, and full of character, than any of the houses Sarah Beeney advises people to produce. Everything in our culture aspires to be tasteful – a meaningless word that has somehow acquired meaning, a shorthand for a well-matched ambient atmosphere that alienates no-one and says nothing. The only debates anyone now has about television is how it can compete with the internet. Discussing content is ridiculous.

If all this is sailing pretty close to nostalgia, I might as well add that the vast majority of popular culture has always been crap, and that a fair slice of today’s television is better than what came before it. Documentaries are the things that leap to mind here – Welcome to Lagos and Wonders of the Solar System were tremendous efforts that benefited from the increased budget and exposure documentaries are now given - while “family programming” has enjoyed a renaissance after a long ten years where Ant and Dec were seen as the pinnacle of the genre. It’s interesting that both these break-out successes cut against the grain. Family drama has been lead by Doctor Who, widely forecast to flop when it returned, at a time when viewing-by-appointment was assumed to be dead. The resurgence of the documentary can possibly be traced back to Michael Moore**, who almost single-handedly reinvented it as something that could be shown on a cinema screen and have wide appeal. In the 80s, the thought of a documentary being in the cinema was ludicrous, certainly as ludicrous as we now find the idea that the most popular film of the year could be a romantic comedy about a time-travelling ancient Egyptian woman incarnated in the body of a shop-window dummy.

It’s perhaps interesting to finish off by looking at comedy. Ever since Brand-and-Ross, there has been much talk of comedians being afraid to be “edgy”. But comedy has been in a black hole for years, and there hasn’t been a genuinely “edgy” comedy since The Office. In the late 90s, Pegg, Wright and Stephenson tried to make Spaced about a corner of society nobody had really documented, and it wasn’t their fault that every subsequent comedy began to assume that everyone has an encyclopaedic knowledge of TV and cinema stretching back to 1968. In the last few years, the only British / Irish comedy that tried to document anything was the godawful Pulling; meanwhile, we keep being asked to pretend that The IT Crowd is acceptable, or that Peep Show is anything more than acceptable.

Comedy writers are convinced that British comedy is in a wonderful state. Of course they are; they’re in a monopoly position, where the same few names dominate all the channels that mean anything. Their comedy is selling because there’s no alternative, because we now just expect it to be toothless and vapid and about middle-class people we couldn’t give two shits about; those writing it, of course, are so enslaved to the Mentality Corporate that their work’s existence, the mere fact that it is selling, is all that really matters to them.

Here’s the clincher:-

…this is all sorts of things comedy usually isn’t; it’s silly, and irreverent, and the funniest, most accurate view of Irish politics for years. It came from the RTE sports department, from three guys who have somehow crept under the radar and wangled their way onto television. Meanwhile, the established comedy professionals keep making glib cracks on panel shows and think calling John Prescott fat, or taking the piss out of Willie O’Dea’s moustache, somehow qualifies as satire. There are no real digs about the recession, because someone might take them the wrong way.

Besides, recession is nothing to laugh about. It isn’t appropriate. It isn’t tasteful.