The best way to get to that is by dwelling on the Gallagher affair for the moment. By rights this should be comfortably the least important of the three – “Failed politician gets annoyed after making tit of himself on the telly” is a fairly ordinary headline – but the fallout from this, and the bullish attacks on RTÉ, are becoming something at which it is worth shouting “stop.” I wrote this piece as I listened to Leo Varadkar proclaiming that RTÉ has a left-liberal bias (to a gleeful Newstalk presenter)… and then, a few later, I heard that David Quinn was appearing on The Frontline again. One could write this off as the usual bluster, but…

No. This sort of nonsense can’t be allowed to stand, even if most people do think RTÉ is a pretty shoddy organisation. Anyone who seriously states that RTÉ is populated by revolutionary socialists either thinks libertarian dogma is centrist mainstream opinion, or is attacking the national broadcaster as part of a power-game. The latter means they’re cynical, calculating people who should on no account be in power. The former just means they’re an idiot. In the case of Varadkar, it’s probably both.

There has been some pretty egregious rewriting of the past over the Seán Gallagher “Tweetgate” affair -

(Incidentally, when are people going to stop putting “gate” on the end of things to imply scandal? The implication is that a break-in at the Watergate hotel lead to a political scandal called “Watergategate,” and I’m sure that’s not the case)

- not least by sections of the print and broadcast media who either dislike the concept of a national broadcaster, or are greasing the back-scratching patronage system by which they get information from the government. There is also, of course, plain old-fashioned laziness. Either way, the idea is being propagated that an entirely fictitious tweet from a “fake” (all right, let’s say “unverified”) account derailed Seán Gallagher’s campaign. Well, it didn’t.

Martin McGuinness confronted Gallagher with a story that he had accepted a cheque for €5,000 from a Fianna Fáil donor, and delivered a photograph of said donor with Brian Cowen. This was substantially true, although some of the details may have been awry. Gallagher had been spending much of the campaign portraying himself, quite falsely, as a grassroots Fianna Fáil member; he claimed to be someone who believed the party had gone away from its heritage, and who had no real involvement with Fianna Fáil at a high-level. Picking up cheques for Brian Cowen didn’t exactly square with this image, and so Gallagher decided to bluff his way out of things. Initially, he flatly denied anything of the sort had occurred. It was only when the Unverified Tweet appeared, threatening to produce the man, that Gallagher changed both his tune and his story. What we saw on television was a man caught in a lie, and that’s what did for him.

Had this tweet not appeared, Gallagher’s bluff would never have been called. This was a man who had been evading questions about his party political past and his business affairs for weeks on end. When push came to shove, he appeared willing to flat-out lie about who he did and didn’t remember. And yet, seriously, the people we should be questioning are RTÉ? It’s certainly not good practice to read out wrongly-attributed messages on air but, in the context of the sheer amount of falsehoods being peddled in the presidential election, it was a footnote issue at best.

It’s worth remembering that Gallagher is from the business community as well as the FF tradition, and the tradition of business discussions is that the important person must be respected at all times. When you’re sitting in a room with someone wealthy and authoritative, you absolutely cannot imply that they might be talking bollocks. Particularly if you aren’t a personage of importance yourself; particularly if you aren’t an alpha male (because preferably, you really should be male) and don’t have a decent suit or an employee or two to bully.

You can call this hierarchical, or patriarchal, or whatever you like; the point to emphasize is that it’s as prevalent in the profession of politics as it is in the culture of business. Politicians in Ireland (and indeed, most Western democracies) believe that even when they’re slumming it at election time – no, scrub that, especially when they’re slumming it at election time – nobody should have the right to question their motives, their integrity, or their honesty. You aren’t even allowed to call someone a liar in the Dáil, for heaven’s sake. The culture of politics and business mesh to give a perfect impression of entrenched privilege.

In a way, this is understandable; political discourse wouldn’t get far if it was dominated by people calling each other lying, cheating dipshits. Yet this sense of privilege leads to odd places. Leo Varadkar’s belief that RTÉ is a left-leaning liberal paradise is the sort of tin-hat gibberish that would get you ridiculed on a bar-stool, but is taken seriously in national media because Leo is an Important Person. And this silly shitstorm about Gallagher is a cynical, manufactured exercise in chin-stroking that conceals a placid, low-level conviction that a presidential candidate has the right to deceive everyone about his past, right through an election campaign and beyond, without ever being discomfited. Hey, Charlie and Bertie were allowed to do it, after all.

This is directly related to the extraordinarily crass One-Year-In-Office celebration by Fine Gael this week. This is the sort of exercise that can only ever be given by people who feel the need to remind themselves how important they are. Like businesspeople awarding themselves prizes for being profitable it’s most remarkable, not for its stunning disregard for the people who suffer under the measures this government have taken, but for its amazing self-reflexivity. Of course you disregard “ordinary people” if you don’t think they really matter. The culture of non-questioning – or rather, preapproved questioning – leads to a political class that focuses only on the etiquette-bound ceremonies of a parallel universe. In short, they’ve become self-absorbed dickheads.

At 3:30am on the 8th March, around a hundred Gardaí cleared the Occupy Dame Street camp. There are many arguments that can be had about the effectiveness of the camp, but these simply aren’t relevant. The Gardaí didn’t clear the camp because they felt it had stagnated or that its aims were incoherent. Nor did they clear it for reasons of public order or health and safety concerns. The Safety, Healthy and Welfare at Work Acts concern themselves with workplaces (the clue’s in the name), not protest camps; closing the camp for public order reasons, on the other hand, is like burning down someone’s house in order to prevent it from being burgled.

No; Varadkar had already given the game away when he suggested the camp should vanish for St Patrick’s weekend. At a time when the “eyes of the world are on Ireland,” i.e. vaguely reminded of its existence, Occupy is an embarrassment. It isn’t appropriate right now; it isn’t the sort of thing that should appear, even for a fleeting moment on a foreign news report. When there are parades and photogenic celebrations, a visceral reminder that our society is divided and impoverished simply won’t do.

If it seems strangely banal, that something as fundamental as political protest should be subservient to something so petty, the power of aesthetics isn’t something that can be overestimated. Want to maintain power for a certain social class? The easiest way is to ensure that the only arguments you ever have to face come in predetermined forms, to limit the ruminations of your society to banal orthodoxies. And what better way than to introduce this idea of decorum, of the correct way of behaviour, of appropriateness? Ensure that anyone who steps outside the received norms is automatically a dangerous or ridiculous subversive, and your system becomes almost self-sustaining.

In a healthy society, it would be absurd to suggest a protest camp should be moved for festivals. In a patriarchal, hierarchical society that drips of privilege, it’s… manners.

Authority is cunning and it’s petty. This week it has moved to weaken state broadcasters, held staged media-driven celebrations of its power, and cleared away the most visible sign of dissent. Good work, chaps.

In less than a week, Irish leaders will travel around the world and meet the people who matter. They will style themselves as ambassadors for the country. It’s ironic that, at these times, the question crops up of who’s been left in charge. It misses the point. In a culture that is suspicious of difference, you don’t need anyone to be in charge. You don’t need anything at all, except decorum.

The result is someone who somehow continues to get media coverage he doesn’t deserve, even though his greatest contribution to public discourse has been to reveal to a stunned nation that he’s the poor man’s Constantin Gurdgiev – a role most people had previously assumed to be filled by, well, Constantin Gurdgiev.

This week, Declan Ganley has taken great exception to Galway City Council’s plan to erect a monument to Che Guevara. On the surface of it this seems the usual run-of-the-mill filler, best summarised as “Rich Guffbag Has Opinion About A Thing.” Guevara’s links with Galway are quite real, the monument itself looks inoffensive if tacky (although it may be more impressive than the piss-poor image suggests), it’s not costing any public money, and all-in-all this is one of those stories about which no sensible person should really care all that much. Nonetheless, since the “outcry” of about four Important People, Galway’s mayor has withdrawn support for the idea.

Ganley’s response told you everything you would ever have wanted to know about the mindset of the typical media reactionary. This is evidenced by the lumbering voices who have weighed into the argument; Kevin Myers has stuck his oar in (this time, he’s revealed Hitler to be a socialist – yes, yes, I know), and on Twitter, Marc Coleman has cemented his status as The Newstalk Boor Who’s Even Worse Than Hook by outing Guevara as a “foreign killer.” Not just a killer, but a foreign killer. It’s not even worth engaging with that level of idiocy.

The language Ganley (and all his ilk) used to describe Guevara was revealingly absolutist. The monument is dreamed up by “extremists.” Che Guevara was a “mass murderer” who “tortured, kidnapped, maimed and killed.” Ganley repeatedly described Guevara as having set up a “Cuban dictatorship.”

Let’s be clear; Che Guevara did some fairly appalling things. He was responsible for numerous cold-blooded executions, he killed many people, and of those people many were executed without trial. What’s more, he appears to have held unpleasant views about homosexuals, and wrote things about women and various races which now seem distasteful. Besides, Cuba is a dictatorship, by any measurement that matters. These are not things that anyone in polite society could possibly defend, surely?

Ah, there’s the rub. Guevara didn’t exist in polite society, and it’s cockeyed revisionism to pretend otherwise. His views were shaped by the frightening poverty, suffering and discrimination that he saw up and down the continent on which he was born, a place as good as destroyed and left to rot by neo-colonialism. He had already aided a peaceful reforming government in Guatemala, and then seen its head overthrown by the CIA. When Guevara met Castro and turned his attentions to Cuba, the country was in the grip of a wholly brutal, repressive, and entirely indefensible U.S.-backed dictator: this regime had open relations with U.S. organised crime, it had policies which resulted in over half of Cuba’s wealthy being owned by American companies, and had a well-funded, ruthless militia that killed thousands of Cubans every year. Castro and Guevara had to fight a bloody two-year guerrilla war to overthrow this regime, and anyone who thinks that “Good Guys” don’t do terrible things in such conditions has never read anything about Dresden.

In much the same way, let’s look at this Cuban dictatorship. It’s fashionable amongst the voices of middle-class rectitude to denounce Cuba as an evil nation, a tinpot state visiting repression on all its people. And yet… since Castro overthrew Batista, the island has been constantly threatened by a huge neighbour that makes very little secret of its desire to overthrow government, tear down the country, and then sell off the bits to the highest bidder. There’s very little you can say about the repressiveness of Cuba that doesn’t apply to Britain during the Second World War, a period the country now thinks of as its finest hour*. Yet on a near war-footing, blockaded and starved, Cuba has poured huge amounts of its money into agrarian reform, literacy programmes, free universal education, and a healthcare system that surpasses many in the developed world.

Even under peaceful conditions, it takes decades or even centuries for a country to evolve into a democracy. When faced with external threat it’s even more difficult, and that’s something of which anyone aware of Irish history should not need reminding.

None of this is to say that Cuba isn’t, on balance, a deeply unpleasant place to live. But one of the most powerful tools of the reactionary is to dismiss ‘context’ as a myth that can be exploded by the mere words “freedom of choice.” The now-common sight of Western democracies wagging their finger at Cuba for failing to achieve their own enlightened state, even as they persist to deny Cuba the things it needs to reach that mode of being, is more than a little pathetic. As, indeed, is the sight of a multi-millionaire describing a man as a “mass-murderer” for fighting a bloody guerrilla war – in which his men were napalmed – against a dictator who visited conditions on his people unknown in Ireland since the famine. You might as well criticise victims of the Haitian disaster for failing to form an orderly queue when the food parcels are handed out.

(Ganley’s characterisation of that struggle as being an inconvenient detail about which respectable businessmen should not have to think, meanwhile, just cements his status as an elitist bore. If some businesses really are in danger of making their decisions based on the local statues – rather than, oh, corporation tax and labour costs and accessibility and potential profit margins – then Galway wouldn’t miss them, because they’re run by morons.)

The disturbing truth is that many of the moral lines we so happily draw are those we have the luxury of drawing. It’s easy not to steal if you aren’t starving, just as it’s easy to embrace positivity if you aren’t in danger of losing your home. The reactionary mindset simply parrots “rule of law” and sees no difference between the two. In short, it despises those with the temerity to have nothing.

As with the macro, so with the micro. In the last five years, a vocal and reactionary element of the Irish media has repeatedly tried to characterise the country’s major problems as being down to the duplicity or moral turpitude of the powerless. Most recently, the Irish Times (which has lurched badly downhill since its change of editor) described the politicians who oppose the EU’s fiscal compact as “inveterate naysayers” who are trying to “redefine the issue as ‘austerity.’” The contempt that this displays, both for those representatives and – more importantly – the people who voted for them, would be breathtaking were it not so common. The Irish Times would prefer that we should take a high-minded approach to this, accept the difficulties the compact will cause, but accept the need for fiscal union for the sake of the euro; anything else is simply opportunism. Even if this were an empirically correct viewpoint (it isn’t) it willfully ignores the fact that, for many of the people voting, the euro is a remote abstraction while joblessness and social cuts are not. It isn’t opportunism, it’s desperation.

One could produce any amount of examples at this point: the shorthand characterisation of public servants as lazy, self-serving and overpaid, followed by outrage when morale in these services plummet and relations break down; the unending frustration that the lazy, useless spongers on social welfare aren’t willing to get a job; the shock at the scumbags from Dublin’s poorest areas persisting to behave as though society despises them; the patient explanation that shock-doctrine budget after shock-doctrine budget is necessary, even as the top rate of tax remains untouched. The destruction of context, of basic empathy and understanding, is part of how ruling classes retain their power.

This weekend, the RDS hosted a Working Abroad expo, charging the jobless 10 euro to find out what countries will have them. Low-paid, desperate people wandered around a fair that looked to profit from people whose only option is to leave, while men in suits offered to sort out their visas for just a few thousand euro. Ann Cronin’s description of “hollowed-out people” captured that sense of those with hardly anywhere left to turn.

It’s worth remembering that those people went home to joblessness that evening, and can look forward to yet more comment in which they are described – at best – as a ‘problem’, and at worst as lazy fraudsters robbing the country blind. They will again be “spongers,” a word that gleefully removes the reality of their day-to-day lives. It’s as if those bandying those insults don’t want to be reminded of those details. Almost as if that’s what such words are really for.

Oh, Enda. The classic tourist who behaves abroad in a way that would be unthinkable at home. It was just a few weeks since he addressed The Irish People – well, the ones who don’t find hypocrisy to be the most perfect emetic, anyway – and told every single one of them that the crisis wasn’t their fault.

Surrounded by Europe’s most virtuous multimillionaires, he said something different. Thing was, we all went mad.

In Davos, Enda Kenny indulged that most pernicious myth of all; that really, well, you know, it’s everybody’s fault, isn’t it? It’s worth quoting what he said, even if it’s been much-regurgitated: -

“What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing. The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit was done between people and banks – a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash.”

One of the side effects of how the press is structured is that, when somebody important says something, it pretty much has to be taken seriously – even if the sensible reaction to this sort of wurbling is “Sorry, was he pissed?” In fact, a certain amount of debate was sparked, with some wondering whether – really – he had a point. A similar bout of discussion was seen in the UK lately, with criticism of the criticism of banker’s bonuses (that definitely makes sense). This reached its glorious zenith with an Irish Times editorial, which was almost shocking with the way it presented the all-to-blame orthodoxy.

The fact that actually, many people didn’t buy a second or even a first property doesn’t appear to have quite registered with the IT; nor does the cold truth that those people have been, since late 2007, by far the hardest hit. But Enda Kenny said Irish people went mad. Not “some Irish people,” or even “the Irish middle and upper classes”… just people. If challenged on this, Kenny would probably accept that the unemployed and the low-paid and the disabled and the elderly and the generally misfortunate certainly didn’t go mad, not by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps we should just save time on this and translate the FG-speak of “people” into its actual meaning, “the sort of people that I think vaguely matter. Or at least, whose parents matter.”

(In much the same way, it’s not difficult to translate the “you” of Kenny’s “you are not responsible for the crisis” pre-budget speech as meaning “you, or at least those of you I feel comfortable talking down to.”)

Point is, even if one accepts that meaning, the statement is still garbled, self-serving nonsense. Let’s be clear: a young couple with secure middle-income jobs were not “mad” for thinking they should have a secure home with fixity of tenure, like just about every twentieth-century generation before them. Nor were they “mad” for obtaining that home by doing what every single major institution, financial or otherwise, told them to do.

It isn’t going mad to want security, or a place to live. Nor is it going mad to send your children to university, or to make the investments everybody who’s supposed to know about such things tells you to make. Currently, any mooted policy move on our banking debt is promptly interrogated for its effect on “the markets.” And yet for ten years, a great many Irish people were advised to do exactly what “the markets” allowed them to do… and yes, this includes second properties in Turkey. For many people, those properties amounted to a pension plan; they indebted themselves in the belief that it would pay off in the long run. Stupid as it may seem in retrospect, this didn’t seem unreasonable at the time – particularly since every single institution advised people to do this.

And yet…

…and yet, that isn’t to say the concept of societal guilt is bunk. Huge swathes of Tiger-era culture were irredeemably, unconscionably ugly. It’s moronic and offensive to say that everyone went to Harrod’s specifically to buy handbags, and/or built huge ugly houses in the countryside with seven bedrooms they didn’t need. Some people did do this, and it was… unpleasant.

And yet to call this a “culture of greed” misses the point; what defined the period, if any one thing could be said to define a period, was a culture of preening self-advancement. An end result was that those who showed the most skill at self-advancement were breathlessly portrayed as messiahs, their activities unquestion and uncriticised; that those who made financial decisions that affected millions of people were seen as above scrutiny, unimpeachable simply by virtue of their position.

Oh, and yes, that’s right… the Irish Times editorial in support of Enda Kenny does include a quote from Denis O’Brien. Which does a better job of discrediting it than anyamount of writing here, in truth.

Those who support Kenny talk about the need for us to be able to have a conversation, about blame. I’m a believer in collective responsibility, as it happens. The question of what happened to Irish society during the bubble, and the collective shape that society assumed, is a valid and important one.

But… if we’re going to frame that discussion in terms of debt… well, we should at least begin to acknowledge that the story is not broadly one of people going mad… it is one of institutions going mad. If you want the very rough, back-of-an-envelope, not-at-all-rigorous thumbnail: -

- Our political classes deliberately facilitated a housing bubble that caused enormous inflation of house prices, leading to a culture of public indebtedness and a scramble for property caused by no control of pricing and – initially – a huge undersupply.

- Irish financial institutions, in collusion with a small, unscrupulous class of the super-rich, sustained this situation by lending money to people who would be unable to pay it back if the housing bubble burst, believing that house prices would keep rising indefinitely. In effect they rewrote the laws of supply and demand, convincing their customers that the game had changed, in order to chase short-term profits.

- The government completely failed to regulate the financial sector, put in place tax-based property incentives to deliberately inflate the bubble, engaged in and encouraged unapologetic triumphalism and – on one notable occasion – said anyone questioning this economic miracle should “commit suicide.” The result was a culture of business, and in particular property development, in which “entrepeneurial risk-taking” was seen as a virtuous thing that carried with it an automatic entitlement to success.

- Major European banks, including those of Germany, France and the UK, loaned enormous sums of money to Irish banks at extremely low interest rates, but did not carry out any meaningful diligence checks on the asset-books of the banks to whom they were lending, thereby facilitating a huge credit bubble.

- A portion of the Irish population – by no means the majority, but a significant percentage – overextended themselves financially with loans they could not service. Some of these loans were not for necessity but for pure financial gain on the property market. A proportion were, in all probability, entirely frivolous.

A conversation about the last group is somehow seen as healthy debate, rather than self-involved navel-gazing to justify the infliction of poverty on the country’s poorest people. Meanwhile, mentioning the other groups involved is just ducking the issue. Mentioning the foreign institutions, in particular, marks you out as a dangerous subversive lefty nutcase who has yet to say sorry for all the shopping trips to New York you didn’t take.

But.

All this talk of blame misses the point. If we look at the groups named above – the super-rich and the financial institutions, national and international, that stoked the crisis – there’s one clear dividing line between them and those frivolously-borrowing Irish people: it’s that the latter are now – almost uniformly – in a position of financial ruin, while the rest have paid no meaningful penalty at all. Debates about “blame” are meaningless under these conditions; the only question that matters is about fairness.

What burns is that the people who mutter “all of us” are happy to inflict this punishment on others as part of a guilt-assuaging cleansing ritual. Those with the least pay the most; those with the most pay nothing, standing arms-folded in grey suits and murmuring “difficult decisions” in the most moralistic of tones.

Against that backdrop, abstract ramblings about collective societal guilt come across as the rank hypocrisy they so clearly are. It’s myopic, it’s elitist, and it’s pathetic. Enough of this.

I try not to write about what are often called “liberal issues” on this blog, because decrying things like racism and homophobia usually seem so cock-obvious to me that it’s too dull to bother writing about. Dammit, at least sexism can be subtle. I considered writing something about the Suarez – Evra affair, but again, it’s not even complex enough to get a 1,000-word post about. This is an affair in which Suarez – and Liverpool Football Club, who let us not forget are a fucking community organisation – have cried all sorts of foul, alluded to various conspiracy theories which are all clearly absurd and – having seen their stance thoroughly and fairly discredited – are now down to muttering that the comprehensive 115-page report about the affair has left important bits out. Not that they’ve said what those omitted bits are, of course. All this to bravely and courageously assert the right of Luis Suarez to call an opponent “negro” in an argument. Because, y’know, it’s actually quite friendly in Uruguay when used amongst friends.

(For the record: some black Uruguayans actually do object to the use of the term; Suarez and Evra were not friends; they were engaged in an angry argument; Evra was clearly incensed, but Suarez continued to use the term and never apologised for the “misunderstanding”; Suarez was not in Uruguay; Suarez has lived in Europe for 5 years, but somehow claims he never learned that black Europeans aren’t generally wild about the word “negro”; Suarez knew Evra’s name but referred to him by his skin colour, and all else is whataboutery.)

Similarly, the Diane Abbott affair is beyond stupid. But sometimes it’s worth walking through stupidity. I do this is a middle-class white male, who is therefore one of the vulnerable minority that Abbott slurred.

It’s easy to forget that racism is, like any other form of discrimination, fundamentally about power. This is why people who complain about “reverse racism” always look so silly. And this is why the furore over a Diane Abbott tweet - “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism” – is so very stupid, and cynical, and desperately unhelpful.

The old standard – “imagine if a white person had said it” – requires a heroic ignorance of how power works. Racism is a very distinct and nasty way of reminding people that they are, in some way, inferior. It’s particularly vicious because it relates to qualities with which one is born, and of which one should be proud rather than ashamed. It is also a form of discrimination that has enslaved and killed hundreds of millions of people.

Without being backed by that sort of power balance, without implying an inferiority that has been affirmed in other ways by real and bloody discrimination, enslavement and dehumanisation, racism has little or no meaning. It is a form of thuggery that can only ever be visited by the powerful on the powerless. On occasion the standard dynamics can reverse, which is why – say – it’s broadly OK to have a robust pop at US foreign policy in a public forum, but not particularly noble to start slagging off a lone American backpacker in a bar.

Quite apart from the fact that Abbott’s tweet actually referred to colonialism, making the context of her statement abundantly clear, the careless wording could not possibly be said to seriously attack or offend anyone. If it had been a white person had said it… yes, it would have been worse. Because when white people attack black people they do so in a context of centuries of slavery and dehumanisation, ongoing and very real discrimination, and a world which still sees murder being committed on racial grounds, and nasty bands like the BNP getting too much attention and support (not least by some very stupid Irish student debating societies I could mention). There are surveys to back up the oft-denied reality that black people are not well-treated by western societies. Now, I can’t know what it’s like for somebody black to take racial abuse against that sort of background, because I’m not black. But I do know it’s a damn sight worse than someone slagging off my cultural heritage, because being shit at dancing isn’t exactly comparable.

And as for that role-reversal argument; it’s also worth remembering a mostly-forgotten tempest of 2011, when Brian True-May – producer and creator of Midsomer Murders - defended the lack of black (and other non-white) actors in the programme. At the time this was largely dismissed as a storm in a teacup, with politicians and commentators of all stripes queuing up to say it was all a bit silly, really, and we all knew why Midsomer Murders didn’t have black actors in it, and it wasn’t exactly realistic what with a small village playing host to a new murder very week. They dismissed it as “PC”, too, which we all know has gone too far.

Now, I’m sure Brian True-May is a lovely man and is nice to his mum and would never dream of being racist, etc etc. And yes, we do all know why Midsomer Murders doesn’t have black people in it; it’s a deliberately nostalgic programme that presents a weird hybridised world that’s halfway between 1930 and the present day, with huge chunks of it based on an Agatha Christie aesthetic. Just as Agatha Christie stories didn’t take place in a multicultural society, a multicultural aesthetic doesn’t suit Midsomer. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about what that says about its viewers, and what they expect from television -

(Full disclosure: I quote like it)

- but all that misses the point. True-May didn’t say this. What he said was that Midsomer was a “last bastion of Englishness.” The implication of that statement, whether he meant it or not, is that non-white people are not properly English. It is not “PC” to point out this sort of sentence as being unpleasant. Nor is it a stretch to suggest that the same people who decried Abbott’s supposed racism would have shrugged off the Midsomer affair as oh, just one of those things, PC out of control, you have to think twice these days before speaking in case you offend someone.

(The last of those was a comment by an audience member on Question Time, right after the True-May teacup-squall. The Important People nodded sagely, instead of saying “actually, yes, you do. It’s called having manners.”)

The other thing about power is that it’s a relative concept; the powerful tend to think of themselves as ordinary. They speak of being under attack, when in fact all that’s happening is th removal of privilege. We see it in the rhetoric of pro-church commentators in Ireland, desperate to look for an anti-church agenda, smarting at a series of “attacks” that actually just amounts to the church being treated the same as any other organisation. And we see it in the white establishment, so convinced that if you aren’t a racist you can say whatever you like, so used to making good-humoured jokes about minorities, so happy to be in the position of power. Their right to affirm that power, always with a smile on their face, has been compromised. So they seize on any chance to show themselves as persecuted. The doctrine of “political correctness,” a term that has always been used as a meaningless slur on tolerance, was and is an important tool.

Abbott’s tweet was silly, for a politician speaking on an open forum. It was open to misinterpretation by stupid people, and her apology was sensible. But newspapers and far-right voices have seized on this, just days after convictions in the Stephen Lawrence case. It’s an attempt to recaste power-dynamics that obscures the real meaning of racism. It’s cynical and nasty, and ultimately dangerous; it is the action of people who are unthinkingly desperate to portray themselves as the hunted, and in so doing hold on to what little power they have left.

Back in 2008 and 2009, the cuts seemed to be inflicted as a result of desperate, bludgeoning, selfish incompetence. Just as Ireland had reacted to BoomTime (cue hollow laughter) by cutting as many taxes as it could, it responded to recession by cutting public services with quiet savagery. It became a simple truism that Ireland had been successful because it was A Good Place To Do Business, and very, very few voices even wanted to think any deeper than that. In much the same way that the Tories believe that the Private Sector will drive the UK’s growth once the state is rolled back, because – um – well that’s what business does, Ireland’s government believed it would naturally get out of this rut if we only kept cutting, because that’s how Celtic Tigers work.

If there’s a difference between the Fianna Fáil government and today’s Blueshirt-piloted brigade, it’s simply that Noonan, Kenny, Varadkar et al do what they do out of ideology rather than cronyism. Fine Gael have long-since styled themselves as the respectable, pro-business, small-state party who wear well-ironed suits. Fianna Fáil treated the IMF as enemies over whom they had failed to pull a fast one; interest rates on bailouts aside, Kenny sees them as partners. Shrinking the public sector and cutting back on Ireland’s excuse for a welfare state is something he’s more than happy to do; Eamon Gilmore, meanwhile, has apparently decided that it’s Frankfurt’s way after all.

It’s easy to think of the indiscriminating butchering of Ireland’s social structures imprecise, but the cuts of the last four years have been very precise indeed. They have unerringly sought out the neediest, the weakest, the most powerless. They have never visited any financial hardship on the wealthy that has not first been visited on those with little or nothing. Every year, social welfare has been cut; community projects have been ravaged; health entitlements have been scaled back. Corporation Tax and the top rate of tax are untouched.

The justification that is always given for these actions is to reduce Ireland’s budget deficit, and yet-

No, wait. Let’s spell things out. Ireland’s budget deficit is in the order of €18 billion. It has begun to shrink, but not by any serious amount, and to a triumphant fanfare that betrays the fervour of people who know they are wrong. And yet in 2009 the Irish government took the decision to close Combat Poverty, an organisation whose funding amounted to €5.5m or so per annum. What sort of impact did that €5.5m have on Ireland’s budget deficit, exactly? Let’s just remove the emotion from the equation, and look at the figures; who talks about the desperate need to balance the public finances and cuts a 5.5m project, while voluntarily repaying billions of the unsecured loans of defunct, non-systemic bank that have nothing to do with the state? For that matter, who point-blank refuses to consider even a one percent increase in an absurdly low corporation tax rate, or even to close off any of the loopholes in that tax rate, and then focuses on the chicken-feed of community employment schemes? Are these seriously meant to be financial measures?

The truth, or course, is that this is not about public finances; it is about shaping the future. It’s only if you accept that simple fact that the budget makes any sense at all. Once you do, of course, a number of things become switchblade-obvious.

Ireland’s budget has confirmed eloquently that who we have in government makes no real difference. Both Fine Gael and, loudly, Labour, were flushed into power while shouting how they were going to change things. Enda Kenny called the bank bailouts an “obscenity,” but has happily continued them when no such obligation exists.

This week has seen an astonishing attack on the disabled, the introduction of a VAT hike that could tip thousands of families into poverty, and even – there’s something almost poetic about the historical irony of this – a “Household Charge” that has yet to be widely decried for the poll tax it is. It has brought about the end of countless community employment schemes and projects. I use the word countless literally; no-one appears to have collated just how many schemes have been terminated in the last couple of years (this was, of course, the sort of thing Combat Poverty used to do). The Festival of Defiance and Hope had children carrying fake headstones, each one representing a cancelled scheme. There were a lot of headstones. This has saved the state next to nothing.

In fact, let’s play the accounting game for a moment and forget the emotive specifics; just look at the headline figures. While the government happily talks about “savings” of 3.8bn, the truth is miles from this. Much of the money spent by the state comes in the form of wages; about half of it would immediately come back in taxes and levies anyway. Benefit payments are spent by those who receive them, and translate to VAT receipts. This is even before one factors in Leaving Cert Economics concepts like the multiplier effect. If the €3.8bn “savings” knock close to a billion off the bill, the government will have done better than anyone could reasonably expect. The notion that these “savings” will close Ireland’s deficit is laughable, and the accounts of every government currently in the midst of austerity provide clear data to support this.

In fact… let’s stop using this word austerity. It is no longer enough. This is a very, very distinct and deliberate economic war.

It is born of many things. The radical individualism pioneered by Thatcher and embraced in this country – in particular – by the PDs, although it’s increasingly become a default cross-party position; this has lead to the belief that those with the least are, in a basic all-encapsulating way, to blame for their own misfortune. The gutting of production industries, be they manufacturing or agriculture, and the embracing of a service-based economy as a template for “success.” The pseudo-professionalisation of our workforce, resulting in huge swathes left behind and feeling unwanted. It was David Simon who put it clearest; there are 10% of our workforce that we no longer economically need.

When the revenue was flowing, the solution was simply one of containment; so long as budgets balanced, and those at the top continued to be treated and paid as natural emperors, the system was fine, and it didn’t matter what happened at the bottom. You only worry about pests once they begin to bother you.

This is not just about protecting the rich; about protecting the illusory system that sustains them; about refusing to puncture the belief-system of capitalism, the mantras of trickle-down and wealth-creators and ever-expanding growth. The week has closed with European leaders making a pact to preserve their mythologies; they formalise austerity rulings, based on nothing but dogma, that will inflict astonishing suffering on tens of millions of people. The only man to walk away was preserving his own mythology, about Britannia and the fundamental goodness of bankers.

Community schemes are being destroyed, not because of budgets, but to appeal to people who flatly believe that they should not exist. Enda Kenny says that Ireland must show we are prepared to pay our way. What he means is that we must show we are sufficiently cruel, sufficiently callous, sufficiently contemptuous of our people. Then, and only then, will we be a viable credit risk to the powerful.

To a small, influential coterie, this recession is not a hardship. It is an opportunity. They see a chance to remake the world in a dreamed of image, and they see an acceptable collateral. When people talk about resisting, and resistance, they use the only words left that are apt.

But Michael Casey’s article about architects in the Irish Times… that really can’t be allowed to stand. It isn’t the usual portrayal of architects as a feckless, superpaid elite (unemployment over 50%, many others part-time). It’s a deconstruction of architects’ standard forms of contract, and it’s wildly inaccurate. It’s just… untrue.

I’ll probably write a broader, more contextual article about this in a day or so. I don’t think it’s really about architecture as much as it’s about all professions, and that deserves a brief discussion. But first, it’s necessary to go about the wearisome job of dismantling the article itself. I’ve had to reprint about 80% of the original article, such were the inaccuracies. The thing is that, even if you took it on trust that most of what Casey wrote was nonsense, phrases like “almost entirely untrue” and “scurrilous hyperbole” have lost their meaning. I don’t think anyone would guess how untrue it is.

If you believe me that the article was about as accurate as a Richard Littlejohn opinion piece, then you might want to come back in a couple days for my super-broad socio-economic assertions. For those of you who are interested, here we go. To liven proceedings up, you may wish to visualise Casey’s article keeling slowly to the ground like an enormous wicker effigy of Del Boy.*

Frank McDonald recently quoted the director of the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland (RIAI) claiming that “architects are not involved in the construction stage of buildings . . . where the problems happen”.

Important point; the quote was taken out of context. It related to developer-lead buildings, from which – on-site – architects were usually excluded.

It’s a small distinction maybe, but important. Casey invokes Priory Hall, a horrible story… but the article he goes on to write ignores the existence of property developers entirely. He deconstructs an RIAI Building Contract (badly, as we’ll see) – but the problem at Priory Hall, and other developments like it, was that this contract wasn’t used. This means his article is gloriously irrelevant from the kick-off.

I want to be clear here because I don’t want to play the apologist. First, the construction trade in Ireland is desperately corrupted and far too many of the buildings built over the last ten years were awful. Second, the architectural profession – simply through a terrible acquiescence to a status quo they knew were wrong – has a chunk of responsibility for this, even if it’s not a primary responsibility. Third, in my opinion the profession needs some reforms.

But what Casey attacks is something the profession has got right. It is where architects save clients a lot of money. It’s why architects exist.

For years now, architects have deflected responsibility from themselves by means of a standard contract that they encourage their clients and building contractors to sign. Take the short form contract, SF-88, drawn up mainly by the RIAI. This neatly encapsulates the mindset of the architectural profession. (My request to the RIAI to provide a copy of this contract fell on deaf ears but I managed to acquire a copy elsewhere.)

A big error from the off: SF-88 is not “a standard form.” It is a deliberately simplified form of construction contract, used for very small jobs – usually internal fit-outs.  You want to build a nice reception desk in the lobby of a hotel? SF-88 is your man. Occasionally it might be used for small domestic extensions, but even that’s a stretch. In my ten years of practice I have never used it. The construction contract is called “The Agreement and Schedule of Conditions of Building Contract,” and is about five times as long. Maybe that’s why Michael Casey chose to read SF-88 instead; he’s probably a busy man. One can’t spend more than an afternoon on these matters.

(Small point; all the building contracts are available from the RIAI Bookshop on Merrion Square. They post them, too. Specimen forms are €2.99. Not so hard to get hold of.)

The contract is between the client (employer) and the builder (contractor). The architect does not feature prominently in the standard version. In fact, his relationship with, and duties to, the client/employer are vague.

Focus on this.

Remember how I said SF-88 was a construction contract? That’s because it’s a contract between the client and the builder. The “architect” (it doesn’t have to be a registered architect, it can – theoretically – be anyone at all provided both parties agree) administers the contract between them.

So the architect’s duties to the client / employer are “vague” because this isn’t the agreement between the architect and employer. There’s a completely separate contract, which both the architect and the employer sign, that sets out the architect’s scope of services and duties to the employer; the standard form is very thorough. It’s signed at the beginning of design, months before the job even starts on-site. It isn’t set out in SF-88 because that’s not what the form is for. You might as well criticise the warranty for your car because it doesn’t contain the rules of the road.

So if you think Michael Casey might have expertise in this area, just bear in mind that, on two counts, he hasn’t actually managed to read the right form.

For example: “The architect shall carry out periodic inspections . . . these inspections shall not in any way relieve the contractor of his sole obligation [my emphasis] to carry out the works in accordance with the contract.”

This means that the architect has no responsibility to ensure that the works are up to standard. Periodic inspections are almost always done after work has been done, usually too late to make a proper assessment. Quality control is the contractor’s responsibility. This is extraordinary since it allows the builder/contractor to supervise himself.

There is a very clear division of responsibility in the contract. The architect is responsible for the design in every detail. This means where the lead flashings go; what the skirting boards are made of; the position of light switches. This is obviously a huge responsibility.

The builder is responsible for building the design accurately, and in a workmanlike manner. The architect has a duty to inspect the site to ensure this is happening; if the builder is not following the design, the architect can and will instruct him to make changes. Inspections are usually every 1-2 weeks; if the architect isn’t inspecting the site regularly enough, s/he is being professionally negligent. In practice, the duty of inspection makes the architect partly liable for anything that goes wrong.

Michael Casey’s confusion at this is moronic. Of course it’s the contractor’s sole obligation to carry out the works in accordance with the contract (“the contract” includes all the drawings, specifications, schedules… everything). The architect can’t be responsible for someone else doing their job; they are, however, responsible for inspecting the works to ensure they comply. It’s clear and sensible.

… the builder…  is contractually bound to follow all instructions given to him by the architect. Even if these instructions are unsound, the builder has to take responsibility for them, not the architect. This makes no sense.

It makes no sense because it isn’t true. The architect is responsible for every single instruction – be it oral, written, a drawing, or conveyed by interpretive dance. The builder is responsible for carrying them out accurately. The thumbnail is that the architect is responsible for the design, the builder is responsible for workmanship. It’s very clear and it makes sense.

Under this contract, the client/employer has few rights. The architect becomes, through some mysterious process, the administrator of the contract between the client/employer and the builder/contractor. In essence he is the boss. The architect can issue new instructions without invalidating the contract and he can put a value on any additional works he deems appropriate. This is such a sweeping power that one wonders what purpose the initial contract serves.

The architect is the client’s agent; s/he is duty bound to pursue the client’s interests in all regards. That’s in the client-architect agreement and it’s the cornerstone of the profession. The employer is represented through the architect.

There isn’t anything “mysterious” in the process by which the architect becomes the administrator of the contract. It’s written into the contract. Somebody has to administer the contract, and the architect – with knowledge of the design, experience of and training in construction, and a relationship with the client – is the obvious person to do it. The architects powers and duties are very clear, and the most important of all is that the architect be fair and equitable to both parties.

With regard to instructions: buildings tend to vary as they go on. The client might change their mind, or the budget may need to be cut, or their may be a soft spot found in the ground. The architect has to be allowed to issue instructions or no construction job would ever be built.

The idea that architects can value the work themselves, however, is purely fictional.

“The architect can decide when he deems the works to be completed so that they can be taken over by the client/employer for their intended purpose.”

This is nonsense. The building contract specifically sets out when a building is “practically complete,” – it is when the works can be used for their intended purpose, and where any outstanding defects are trivial in nature and their rectification will not interfere with the use of the building. The architect administers the process, that’s all.

“If it happens that the architect and the builder have a long and cosy association then the client could be on a hiding to nothing. In administering the contract, the architect could, if he wishes, always take the builder’s side.”

Wrong again. If the architect takes anyone‘s side, s/he is professionally negligent and will end up in court. The architect has to be fair and impartial in administering the contract. It’s also worth noting that Michael Casey offers no evidence of anything of the kind ever happening.

If the builder runs over time, the architect can grant him an extension.

The contract sets out every single criteria for which a builder can claim an extension of time. These include “exceptionally inclement weather,” “civil disturbance, strike, or lockout” and “force majeure,” amongst others. The architect administers the process, but can’t simply grant extensions.

He can certify stage payments to the builder, thereby accepting and vouching for the quality of the work done. This is surely inconsistent if the architect has no responsibility under the contract for quality control to start with.

The architect isn’t responsible for the contractor’s workmanship, but the duties of inspection mean s/he cannot certify payment for defective work and would be found negligent were s/he to do so. The architect does control stage payments, but it’s a detailed process based on the contractor’s Bill of Quantities**; a Quantity Surveyor*** (or more often, two – the builder will employ one) is usually involved.

There are other weird aspects to this contract: a liquidated damages clause which is more or less unenforceable, the delegation of site safety completely to the builder…

The clause about “liquidated damages” enables the client to be fairly compensated for financial loss suffered as a result of the builder running late. In the case of a house, for example, it would be rental payment on another property. I’m fairly sure it isn’t unenforceable, since – ahem – I’ve previously worked on a job where it was enforced.

Given that it’s the builder who runs the site and is there every day and all day, it’s difficult to see what’s “weird” about him being responsible for site safety.

Notwithstanding the lack of responsibility, architects were able to charge lucrative fees during the Celtic Tiger period. For some jobs, they could charge up to 30 per cent of the total cost of works.

Unsubstantiated, and utterly ludicrous. I don’t know an architect who has charged one-third that figure. During the boom, a domestic job generally cost about 8%. Larger jobs varied according to their complexity, but 5-6% would be a decent fee. At the moment, many architects are bidding at about 2%.

[Architects] were protected by a one-sided contract which should, in the public interest, be scrapped immediately. If retained in anything like its present form, no client should ever sign it.

Let’s be clear about this. The contract is not “one-sided.” It is fair.

The first standard form of contract appeared in 1910. The current contract grew out of a liaison committee between architects, surveyors, contractors and engineers that was set up in 1950; it isn’t a unilateral architect’s document. It’s been tweaked on numerous occasions to keep up-to-date, but has been more or less unchanged since the early 80s.

This contract has been tested in court many, many times. Building is an expensive business; people tend to look for weaknesses in contracts as there’s a lot of money in it. And the whole point of contract law is that contracts have to be fair and equitable. If they aren’t, they aren’t valid contracts.

The fact is, the standard building contract still exists because it is fair – if it wasn’t, a court would have thrown it out years ago. It’s a touch overcomplicated, yes. It’s written in some legalese that’s difficult to understand (there is a plain-language form that is much clearer, and isn’t used half enough in my opinion), and this can alienate clients. Because of this, architects have to study it very carefully for months, and there is a guidance book that’s something like 350 pages long.

But it is not one-sided. It’s court-tested and repeatedly found to be equitable. On the other hand the person who is calling for it to be “scrapped immediately,” based – apparently – on reading it for maybe half a day, wasn’t even reading the right contract.

The director of the RIAI seemingly accepts that architects should do more. He believes that, from now on, “the design team on each project should carry out inspections during the construction phase and, on completion, to ensure building works have been carried out in line with the original drawings”.

Note where Casey’s quotation marks are located. I doubt that the RIAI said this should be the case “from now on,” because it is already the case when the contract is used.

This represents some improvement, but “inspections” are not the answer. Supervision is. Otherwise the builder will continue to supervise himself. If the architectural profession is not prepared to step up to the mark, we should bring back clerks of works or other hands-on professionals to ensure works are carried out properly.

First of all, I’m going to ask two people in my office to ring the Clerk of Works on their jobs and inform him he doesn’t apparently exist any more.

Second; the answer, it seems, is “supervision.” This means an architect on-site, all day, every day, fully devoted to the job. The good news is that there’s a lot of unemployed architects around at the moment, so you won’t struggle to find candidates. It does mean for – say – a six month house extension, that if you want a properly experienced candidate you’ll have to shell out an extra €20k or so for something that’s completely unnecessary. Did I mention the bloke with this thorough an understanding of value for money was a board member of the IMF?

Existing standard contracts need to be fundamentally re-examined, with input from the Competition Authority and consumer representatives. The International Monetary Fund-led troika will also be able to advise on this matter. The efficiency and fee-structures of professional groups in this country have an important bearing on the competitiveness of the country.

And here’s the crux of the matter. Quite apart from the absurdity of the IMF advising on private construction contracts – and let’s fact it, Michael Casey’s attempt at understanding the contract doesn’t exactly suggest that IMF board members are particularly gifted here – the paragraph is a code for the meme of opening up these inward-looking, inefficient professions. Except Casey offers no evidence of the fee-structures beyond his batshit, unverified 30% comment (architects don’t even have imposed fee-structures – they have competitive tendering for all jobs), or their inefficiency. It’s also interesting that a former member of the Central Bank and the IMF is castigating another group as an unpaid, unaccountable elite with enormous power over ordinary people. The word “transference” springs to mind.

And yet, if we accept that Casey wants to open up the construction trade, what this actually means is deregulation. For all the obvious reasons, that’s a word no-one wants to hear in relation to construction.

It leaves the question of why. There are two answers. One is that an architect once keyed his car. The other… oh look, I’m going to write about that in the next day or so. You’ll love it. You know you will.

I’ve only really mentioned Occupy in passing previously, for a number of reasons. The main two are easily summarised: first, that this is something that doesn’t need a patronising pat on the head from a lazy do-nothing shit of a – ugh – blogger like me; second, a deep-seated sense of shame that I don’t do anything to participate in such things. My enjoyment of Occupy Dame Street as a concept is appallingly vicarious; given that I’m not entirely comfortable in the company of the demographic group known as “Other People,” my engagement generally consists of saying “good for them” and hoping no-one actually tries to talk to me.

So I’ll just say that I really, really like it. I like it simply as an image, for starters – given that the public space outside the Central Bank was appropriated in 1996 so that the Important People within didn’t have to suffer the indignity of people sitting on their steps and eating sandwiches, the sight of an open community taking some of that space back is really rather glorious. And that’s even before you take into account everything they’re actually talking about, and the space and environment given for open discussions that lead to real engagement. But many others have written about that – these two rather good Observer and Grauniad articles are good places to start.

So instead I’d like to talk about something rather more primal and petty and childish, which is this; that anyone criticising it, so far, has looked like an arsehole.

Perhaps what’s interesting is that, faced with a movement that is participatory and states its openness for people of any political opinions, the commentators who opposed the idea lapsed very, very quickly into just stereotyping those involved. One of the first notable smackdowns to circulate the web came courtesy of whatever-show-it-is-Bill-Maher-hosts-these-days, with Alan Grayson delivering a robust rebuke to PJ O’Rourke:

What makes this notable isn’t so much the cogency of Grayson’s statements; it’s the fact that the first rebuttal O’Rourke could come up with was to refer to bongos and shoelessness. O’Rourke is a humourist – well, insofar as he thinks he understands humour, anyway – but only a child, an idiot, or a bully could argue this way. This wasn’t an unusually cheap or lazy mode of argument for the getting of laughs, it was just stripped bare of the usual cushioning language that the “serious” press use to couch some facile points.

Most seriously opposed commentators say that the protestors are incoherent. Well, on a point of order; why is Occupy Dame Street’s statement so thoroughly cogent? How is it that every single meeting is minuted (I read them, y’know; look, I said it was vicarious)? This isn’t the usual work of an incoherent mob…

…but even if it was, multi-voice conversations probably do appear incoherent to those who expect everything to be in the form of a policy document. “Incoherent” is simply a code for “not normal; not couched in the usual language; naive; stupid; the work of hippies.” In other words, it doesn’t count. But if that’s the case, then we might borrow a meme from Occupy… this is what coherence looks like:

By turn, the “protestors” (and that clearly isn’t the right word) have been characterised as hippies, crusties, posh middle-class kids playing at being poor, a dangerous rabble, feckless idiots getting in everybody’s way, threats to life and limb for people escaping from a burning cathedral, and – usually – a combination of the previous, no matter how mutually contradictory they seem. Most memorably, Occupy London were simultaneously classed as stayaway wealthy spoofers, and – um – Nazis:

Seeing an establishment lapse into name-calling without actually engaging in argument, seemingly without even realising how petulant it looks, ultimately just suggests that they don’t actually have any decent arguments. All we get is a succession of strawmen, and gratuitous discrediting based on thermal imaging cameras on the wrong setting.

Perhaps the most telling incident of all was the hearty slap-down on Have I Got News For You of Louise Mesnch – formerly Louise Bagshawe, still a purveyor of chick-lit, and one of the new breed of media-friendly young Tories – dismissed the rigour of protestors who got coffee from Starbucks as they they tried to bring down capitalism. The full exchange is here - at least until someone from Hat Trick Productions spots it – and it’s worth your time, not least for Mensch’s apparent belief that people can’t complain about the financial system if they own a tent. Yes, really.

There are two things worth mentioning about this. The first is relatively straightforward; by mentioning iPhones and coffees and tents, Mensch was deliberately implying that, should capitalism vanish without trace, these items will cease to exist. Only someone who sees the main purpose of life as acquisition – who simply doesn’t believe that anyone really cares about liberal concerns like societal equality and fairness – would actually think this qualified as a point, even a satirical one. Mature, intelligent people don’t believe you can deal with grownups by threatening to take away their toys, or that adults would be turned to quivering jelly by the prospect of a world without frappacinos. By searching for the cheapest angle, Mensch just cast herself as a smug, privileged adolescent who tries to win arguments by doing impressions of the other kid’s speech impediment.

But there’s something even more telling. Mensch referred to the protestors being “against capitalism,” and implied that they wanted to indiscriminately rip apart the system with their bare hands. This is not a million miles away from the shorthand of “anti-capitalist” for anyone who opposes the financial system. But… how “anti-capitalist” are these protestors, exactly? All capitalism really means is a system of private citizens selling things to each other. Given that many involved in various Occupations actually run their own businesses, how anti-capitalist are they?

Since this is a rather personal view, I might as well make it more personal still. As someone whose own politics lie somewhere between Noam Chomsky and Lenin, and whose clothing regime consists of rotating three jumpers, I probably fit that “anti-capitalist” slot quite well. That’s not so far off the mark as far as my broad, future-of-humanity aspirations go, but… deep breath… I don’t see any system more credible than capitalism as a means of distributing goods at this particular moment. The financial system, the delusion of growth, and the increasing power of tiny elites aren’t actually essential to a capitalist system – they’re central to our capitalist system, sure, and there’s a welter of evidence that these things need be controlled. I just have an antediluvian belief that shared ethics and social principles should decide how we order our economy, rather than the blind devotion to the doctrine of growth; that an economy should adapt to serve society rather than the reverse. It’s not a particularly radical manifesto, I grant you, and places me – shudder – as a dull moderate who wants to reform our capitalist system rather than destroying it.

To those within the system, of course, the distinction doesn’t matter. Whenever they hear the word “change,” it’s interpreted as “tear down”; anyone who suggests real reform, as distinct from cosmetic sops to fairness while doing whatever the mantra of growth requires, is immediately a dangerous subversive and/or naive crackpot who wants to destroy any post-1893 technology and execute the entire staff of Google. This isn’t even the logic of a 13 year-old; it’s that of a tantrum-throwing toddler who, as soon as he’s told playtime is over, starts screaming that his parents hate him.

Like many others, I heaved a sigh of relief when Seán Gallagher failed to become president of Ireland. This wasn’t actually because of his Fianna Fáil bagman status, or questionable business dealings, or even the telling way his first instinct was to deny everything when confronted with the (actually quite widely-known) reality of his fundraising for the party. My quibble with Gallagher was his sheer vacuity, his inability to talk about anything other than business, the repeated references to “jobs” and “entrepeneurs” and being “open for business” as if they seriously qualified as any way to talk about a country. Were you to ask Gallagher to talk about Irish society, and tell him he wasn’t allowed to talk about the economy, he would literally have nothing to say. This view – that the economy is all that matters, and society is something nebulous that happens around it – is exactly how we wound up with a culture where enormous equality, and endless attacks on public provision, are justified with “well, the economy works that way. Don’t complain, you’ve got an iPhone.” It’s an attitude that meets the fact that people are angry about the injustice of the bank bailout, rather than simply its economic effects, with blank incomprehension.

By providing a space, an environment for real, meanngful discussion, Occupy Dame Street is the antidote to that emptiness. The catchphrase “this is what democracy looks like” doesn’t really sit well with me; I’m uncomfortable with anyone telling me what democracy looks like, and the implied notion that there’s a “right” form of democracy. That’s a semantic quibble. But as a place  where non-orthodoxies aren’t automatically crazy, where ideas of social change take in more than what to cut next, it’s a vitally important democratic space. It’s a long time since we’ve seen anything like this. We’re lucky to have it.

It’s necessary at this point to do a quick thumbnail of how Ireland polices what gets built in the country, if only because there’s been little enough attempt to explain the situation and a fairly surprising number of references have been made to – say – Planning laws, or Health and Safety, which have nothing to do with the situation at Priory Hall.

There are two main strands of legislation pertaining to buildings: there’s the Planning process, and there’s Building Control. The broad thumbnail: Planning is there to police what gets built – how a development fits into the local area (zoning, its use, connections to sewers and so on) and what it looks like; Building Control is concerned with how something is built – it’s the legislation that makes people build things properly.

There are twelve main building regulations – Parts A through to M – and the best known is Part B (Fire). It’s necessary to get a Fire Safety Certificate before starting to build at all (except for houses, which are exempt from this process, althought they still have to comply with the regulations).

So. Did Priory Hall comply with its Planning Permission? Probably, but this isn’t relevant to the current situation.

Does its design comply with Building Regulations as regards fire safety? Almost certainly. The building wouldn’t have got its certificate otherwise.

And the big one; was it built in accordance with Building Regulations pertaining to fire, or indeed anything else? No, it definitely wasn’t.

How could that happen? Because no-one checked. This was reported by the Indo as if it were a great revelation, but they missed the point; it isn’t anybody’s job to check. Sure, Fire Officers “may” check under the legislation, but there’s no requirement for them to do so. And by and large, they don’t.

Ireland has an official self-certification system. There’s no “Building Control Guy” who shows up every now and then to see everything is in order (as there is in the UK). There are so few spot-checks carried out in the country that there might as well be none. There’s… well, nothing at all. It’s essentially like having a legal system but no policemen; in fact, the most difficult thing to explain about the whole Priory Hall affair is how Building Control found out there was anything wrong in the first place.

There’s been a bit of talk about the “certification,” so this should also be clarified. All that happens is that a suitably qualified person (and the list of acceptable qualifications is a broad one) walks around a building at the end of a job, then produces a certificate to state that - to the best of their knowledge – the building is compliant. At that stage most defects are hidden, so regardless of who does them, these certificates are almost worthless – and even these aren’t lodged with the state. If banks, solicitors and insurers didn’t demand them, most developers probably wouldn’t bother producing them at all.

In summary, the building industry in Ireland has, for decades, been almost completely unpoliced. Priory Hall has been a disaster waiting to happen for some time, and most people in the building industry will tell you that it’s probably far from the only one. It’s just the one that happened to get caught. The issue of non-compliance in Ireland is endemic.

I’ve posted on these matters previously – and so this time, I’d like to focus on why we have a system that’s so obviously open to abuse. I mean, seriously – a lot of knowledgeable, well-paid advisors of all stripes must have looked at this legislation, and they decided the best thing was to let the building profession police itself? How did that happen?

The Building Control Act dates from 1990. Before this, there were a few local building by-laws, but nothing else. The notion of regulating buildings was comparatively new; the industry didn’t trust book-learning. And in 1990, Ireland wasn’t in good shape. Unemployment was at 17%; the national debt was one of the favourite themes of public discourse. There’s a lazy-minded tendency amongst some of the commentators to talk as though the country spontaneously turned around after Italia ‘90, but it wasn’t actually like that, and only professional talking heads could believe otherwise.

At the time, government was doing it all it could to generate recovery. So how exactly would it have gone, against this background, to introduce a regime where builders had to submit drawings demonstrating that they complied with all twelve building regulations? How would it have played out if Building Control officers regularly appeared on sites and stopped work that didn’t comply? If councils had to inspect and police every building in the country?

Badly, let’s say. And let’s also imagine what those counter-arguments would be. Huge government inefficiency; extra time and cost; red tape; that old favourite of those who hate regulation, “bureaucracy.” And yes, establishing a procedure where the state examines buildings to ensure its laws are complied with would be enormously expensive. They did it in the UK, but no doubt there was a certain amount of pride in Ireland’s leaner, more dynamic solution.

Does any of this sound familiar yet?

The grand lesson of the Priory Hall situation-

- if indeed you need a lesson, in a story that has already left hundreds of people homeless and comes with near-certainty that many other buildings are in as bad a condition -

- is that, whenever the great monolith that is “business” complains about being over-regulated, or wrapped up in red tape, then… well, at least cast a sceptical glance in their direction. The narrative of “bureaucracy” is beginning to surface here – it always surfaces during recession, when margins are squeezed and the focus shifts increasingly to Getting The Economy Moving. Business needs to be freed up from red tape; bureaucracy needs to be cut. Enough with this obsessive regulation!

After the Conservatives came to power in the UK, they instituted a programme whereby owners of ordinary businesses – they love that chat – could tell them about the red tape that needed to be done away with. The overwhelming winner was health-and-safety, so glibly demonised by the same party (and right-wing press) that happily talk about faceless bureaucrats without having the slightest idea what they actually do. Health and Safety, that law that’s brought nothing but trouble… with its break entitlements for employees, its requirements for decent places of work, its standards for sanitation, its necessity for clean drinking water and comfortable desks, chairs and equipment…

…and that’s even before you look at the huge falls in construction related deaths and serious accidents since its introduction. There are hundreds of thousands of people walking about in Britain and Ireland who, were it not for Health and Safety, would be confined to a wheelchair. Or dead. The occasional pointless seminar is a small price to pay.

That’s the reality of red tape.

People who run businesses have a difficult job, and it’s not surprising they see such things as a pain. However, it’s these “pains” that protect those with the least power. Many people tell us that we should trust the business community, with its respectability, to do the right thing anyway. They tell us the market will punish those who don’t.

They’re foolish, and they’re wrong. The proof is 250-strong, in a hotel in Drumcondra; evicted from their homes, cheated and forsaken. Not by a discrete, walled off phenomenon like “cowboy builders” or “developers.” By businessmen.

No, wait. There have already been far too many articles about Jobs, and (for those of us who believe that the main change Apple brought to the world was to fill it with shiny white objects, and “being able to do the same boring stuff I always did, but on a bus” doesn’t constitute that much of a change) the barrage of hagio-analysis has long since passed the point of silliness. It’s the tone of the analysis that intrigues. It highlights how effectively Jobs perpetuated the myth of “nice” capitalism. Many who have lionised Jobs seem to speak of him as the antidote to capitalism as evil and lowest-common-denominator (based largely on the belief that non-tactile, cloyingly slick objects represent a triumph of design, rather than a blank, branded aesthetic). Those who quibble have pointed to Apple’s involvement with Foxconn – not exactly unique to Apple, it should be said – and their restrictive and tightly-controlled licensing. Both are pretty much what you’d expect of any firm in Apple’s position, and the thrust of these critiques is to somehow imply that Jobs wasn’t as cuddly as all that; that he wasn’t a “nice” guy. Rather than look at the capitalist system, they ask us to question the individuals who operate in it.

A disinterested observer would be fairly astonished that Jobs should be criticised for doing exactly what his competitors did, and exactly what the system in which he operated expected of him. The notion that Jobs was personally responsible for oppressing the unfortunates at Foxconn, or even that he failed to reform this system, is ludicrous. Apple is a public company, bound by law to maximise profits for its shareholders. To criticise its heads for exploiting cheap labour in China is, ultimately, like criticising a pilot for Ryanair’s carbon footprint. They do as the market demands. If they don’t, someone leaner swallows them up.

The notion of benign capitalism buys into the great myth of patrician conservatism; that all that’s necessary to control market forces is a voluntary decency, and one that comes naturally to the rich because they are – generally – a nice, well-bred lot. This year’s Global Ireland Forum has given us the grotesquery of tax exiles discussing what can be done to fix and streamline the country. This talking-shop is treated as important no matter how banal it is, just because of who’s involved. Admirers justify the enormous salaries by muttering about “creating jobs,” but the truth is that these individuals see their wealth is naturally fine because they’re decent people. And, of course, they’re decent people because of their wealth.

This idea of decency is – in a very important sense – unabashedly cosmetic. Status is a game of appearance, in which the most important quality of all is decorum. The reason Michael O’Leary gets a bad press is that he’s not interested in behaving like a respectable, pre-eminent citizen. In spite of what some think, he’s not any more disliked by the left than anyone else of his ilk; he’s disliked by the establishment, who hate the frankness with which he speaks about his purpose as a money-maker. This isn’t a million miles away from the rush to be furious at, and to deny the legitimacy of, Alessio Rastani. He told us nothing about traders we didn’t already know. He just failed to couch it in the language of respectability, and didn’t bother concealing the grubbiness of what he does. Small wonder the Daily Telegraph did their best to discredit him as a representative of his trade.

The problem with this attitude is that, if you’re going to put such emphasis on decorum, you can’t be surprised if your commentariat speaks about nothing but decorum. What’s frightening is how rooted this idea, of powerful men behaving decently, has become.

This presidential campaign has been soaked in piousness, both from the candidates themselves and those who purport to examine them. The real pity about the tanks of muck being slopped on the various candidates is just how insubstantial it is. Mary Davis announced she would be publishing her expenses for the last 67 years or so after rumblings had occurred about her being on the board of a few too many companies for comfort. Seán Gallagher was queried over the earth-shattering news that he had been in Fianna Fáil, and that he was wealthy (points of fact that Gallagher hasn’t exactly hidden). Rose Scallon was revealed as untrustworthy because she didn’t reveal her dual citizenship, even though it has no bearing whatsoever on her candidacy – unless you seriously believe that repeating the wording of the U.S. oath should be taken literally as proof that, as soon as she’s in office, she’ll sell the cliffs of Moher to Texas (it’s also worth noting that the IT article which broke this story de-emphasised the real point of interest, which was that a judge said she had been economical with the truth in a court case). Gay Mitchell is bad, of course, because he’s kind of dull. All these people are, in their own way, quite ghastly. But to expose their ghastliness would mean engaging with their views, or their beliefs. And in a political world run by ideas of decorum, discussing the merits of a view is not what anyone does.

(This is why a certain amount of righteous distaste about Seán Gallagher’s wealth is de rigeur in right-on circles – there was even discussion of him releasing his accounts, don’t forget – but anyone who suggested that wealth might be capped by a 90% tax rate for super-earners is dismissed as a lunatic idealist. This is about picking fleas off the individual, not questioning the system.)

Even without bringing Norris and McGuinness into the mix – the latter is too big to even begin to discuss here – what’s notable is how all the negative stories have focused on the candidates’ deviation from the Right Sort Of Person. The ideal politician must be of moderate wealth (not poor, obviously – darling, they might have an accent or something then) and preferably ascetic, entirely non-violent throughout their lives, completely honest about everything that has ever happened to them, unfailingly generous and humble, rarely utter a sentence that the ‘ordinary’ person would find unusual, and generally behave like real people with all the inconsistencies and foibles ironed out. If you prioritise this “ideal” political profile, and if you and look hard enough, you’ll probably find the right man-in-a-suit eventually. You’ll also end up with a succession of people who have nothing to say.

It’s interesting that Seán Gallagher has done the best in polls, and is probably the one who’s come closest to saying nothing at all. He is a triumph of decorum, of the notion that there is a correct way to behave – but this is such a limiting, management-class belief. If you believe that transgressing or challenging “acceptable” beliefs or behaviour is stimulating, rather than a desperate gaffe in a comedy of manners, then all the piousness of election coverage achieves is to guarantee that you won’t be presented with anyone interesting. Similarly, if you satisfy yourself with describing beliefs or behaviour as “controversial,” rather than bothering with the tedious business of trying to understand them, then don’t be surprised if you end up with a political climate that does nothing but preserve orthodoxies.

(Literally as I wrote this paragraph, Gay Mitchell said in interview that he wouldn’t be “drinking champagne and reading poetry” if he was elected. As Michael D. Higgins was the only candidate as-yet unblemished, it wasn’t long before someone implied he was a feckless poet and pseud, not a serious individual. I’m tempted to rest my case at this point, but we might as well tackle the obvious example first.)

David Norris obviously can’t be ignored any longer. In all the discussion of what-was-probably-called-Lettergate-dear-god-why-can’t-people-try-harder, the most notable thing was how these letters were described. They were “controversial,” “disturbing,” and they would “trouble” many people. And yet… discussing the content of the letters was nowhere near as prevalent as discussing how Norris had handled the issue. The discussion centred largely on matters of conduct (his use of Seanad notepaper) and appropriateness in their existence at all, on his suitability for the presidential role, and on how many of his supporters would be “concerned.” Many said that this was about character, but no-one actually discussed what the letters actually said about Norris’ character. His views were controversial, and that was it.

So it’s worth saying that Norris didn’t actually say anything particularly unreasonable at all. It’s impossible to judge his claim of the victim being a honey-trap without more information-

- this claim is almost certainly why his other letters aren’t being released on legal advice, incidentally -

-but it is, at worst, the error of a man concerned for someone he loves. His other assertion – that sex with minors should be seen differently in a heterosexual and homosexual context – is uncomfortable, sure, but… isn’t it just true? This was a time when gay relationships had been criminalised and stigmatised for a lifetime, and when just by dint of a same-sex relationship one placed themselves outside the law and conventional morality; yes, that is a very different context, thanks very much. I don’t really know what that life would be like in such a world, and how it would affect my behaviour, because I’m not gay and it isn’t 1988. But I do know that David Norris is probably a better-informed commentator than me, and I certainly wonder what my behaviour would be like if being attracted to women was both illegal and a sign of my own sordid evil.

And the irony is this; the other point for which Norris was so castigated was his Magill article, particularly his discussion of pederasty. And as it goes, I actually remember that article. In articulating a wish that when he was younger he could have been guided through his sexual awakening by someone older, Norris said something I found instinctively repugnant. Considering it further, it occurred to me that – when I was fifteen or sixteen – I would have really, really wanted the same thing, albeit with a woman rather than a man. So who was I to judge? Perhaps this wasn’t always a predatory situation; or perhaps this wasn’t as absolute as it seemed. Perhaps my instinctive revulsion at the idea was based on a personal view, not an abstract unquestionable morality.

So David Norris is one of very, very few politicians who ever made me seriously think about anything. For that, I’ll always have a certain regard for him. And yet that is why he isn’t suitable for office.

The other grand irony, of course, is that the Presidency is now concurrent with the Occupy Dame Street campaign. On one hand, you have a group of people – just instinctive, ordinary people – setting themselves up as a mini-community within sight of the heart of the Central Bank, and roundly rejecting the pre-eminence of the institution simply by being there. Regardless of what they say, or achieve, they have made the landscape of the city just a little more joyous, and textured, and interesting.

It’s a glorious contrast to the spectacle of besuited, respectable figures, on a quest to become Head Of State by saying as little as they possible can. Barely aware of how empty they are, of their own elegant irrelevance. Never stopping to ask themselves what all this was ever for.

From the start, it’s worth noting that these comparisons are no longer academic. Whatever insults you want to hurl at Fianna Fáil government and their crass, testosterone-sodden backroom excuse for “vision,” it was always clear that they weren’t quite like any of the British equivalents. To see what’s changed, it’s simply necessary to glance at the makeup of the two governments: one traditional party of power, out of government for a generation, with a small-state pro-business edge that’s rooted in ideology rather than expedience; one smaller party previously styled as nice, uncomfortable with its new position, embracing an austerity programme with obvious discomfort and no courage. If you want to find a foreign equivalent of Fine Gael, you couldn’t do better than glance at the Tories. The two are, socially and economically, indistinguishable.

Jeremy Hunt, the UK’s Culture Secretary, has a thing or two to say about the BBC. He is, he assures everybody, an enormous fan of the BBC. He loves it. So it’s odd that pretty much everything he does is geared towards reducing its power. Recently he has approved plans for local television stations, which – so long as they include an hour of local news-based programming a day – can pretty much show whatever they want, with as many adverts as they want, free from any independent quality control (or “bureaucracy,” as small-staters like to call it). Like most Conservatives, Jeremy “Rhymes With” Hunt is…

Okay, let’s be charitable here. Hunt is uncomfortable with the BBC. His gripe is that it’s a huge, publicly-funded body that is both popular and miles better than commercial competition anywhere (have you seen ITV lately?). The BBC isn’t perfect, but at a time when popular culture is in a ghastly place, it still produces more worthwhile programming than anyone else.

To anyone of the mindset embraced by the Tories – or Fine Gael, Ireland’s very own Tory-anaologues – the success of the BBC is further proof of just how wrong it is. Those who detract from the BBC despise its core being, the very philosophy on which it is based. It is an unfair behemoth that extinguishes competition. Commercial channels can’t match the BBC’s enormous resources (so long as you ignore, say, the last twenty years of bidding for football rights). Nor can they match the BBC’s huge outlay for its stars (except they can, and do, and the supposedly-enormous salaries of BBC presenters are as nothing compared to pay-packets ITV offer). No, the BBC is a state bully, driving well-intentioned private companies out of an otherwise-lucrative marketplace. It’s worth noting that the pressure under which the BBC now constantly operates – the ooh-it’s-too-big handwringing lead entirely by the UK’s elites – really began after a speech by James sodding Murdoch.

The BBC is there to serve the public, and the public are happy with how it works*. Thing is, the Tories don’t see a successful state institution, they see disenfranchised companies being unfairly excluded from potential markets. It’s exactly the same instinct – because “theory” is too strong a word – that has them opening up the NHS to private companies. Or, in an Irish context, has every party talking about Health Insurance schemes, but never once treating the question of genuine state provision of healthcare seriously. Essentially, a successful public organisation is unfair.

If looking at the grotesquery of JobBridge, it’s worth clarifying what this mindset really implies. It believes that the basic unit of society is not the individual, or even the family**, but the company. I don’t mean this in a lefty rhetoric way, but just as a simple statement of fact. If a government has been made to believe that business is the engine of the economy, if they are conditioned to listen to the advice of Ireland’s entrepeneurs above everyone else, if representatives of Google can blithely give Powerpoint presentations to the entire cabinet about how Ireland should be run… once you swallow that, it’s easy to start unconsciously believing that businesses matter more than anything else, and a government’s prime responsibility is to PLCs***.

JobBridge – in which prospective waiting staff can receive six months training for fifty quid a week, in which owners of a Chemistry PhD are employed for less than the minimum wage – is perfectly coherent if, and only if, you see the company as the basic unit of society. The systematic outing of its more appalling positions over the last week or so has been one of those events that actually remind you what a good thing Twitter can be, and while the results of the JobBridge initiative aren’t a surprise, it’s been a joy to see it laid bare. However, many of the conclusions have been fundamentally misguided. The JobBridge situation is characterised as that of unscrupulous companies exploiting a well-meaning government programme that was supposed to Get Ireland Working. While I certainly won’t be drinking in the Lansdowne Hotel any time soon, and it’s nothing but a good thing that this sort of exploitation is exposed, the idea that tighter controls will solve the problem of a basically well-meaning scheme is fundamentally off-base. JobBridge is working exactly as it’s supposed to.

When Ireland’s banking-lead collapse occurred, a narrative emerged – driven entirely by the business sector, it should be said – about the uncompetitive nature of Ireland’s economy. Ireland’s high wages and inflated economy left the company incapable of competing in markets. This has persisted even though Ireland’s export market is just about the only sector of the economy to do well, and very little economic policy makes any sense unless you bear in mind the mantra of “competitiveness.”

The last three to four years have simply been a protracted exercise in internal devaluation, and JobBridge – with its obvious downward pressure on wages, and its state subsidy of low-cost jobs dressed up as “training programmes,” is a carefully-judged extension of that policy. The hastily-reversed minimum wage cut was just the most obvious forerunner. The cuts in public sector wages, dressed up as being about savings, have not actually saved anything at all; what they have done is provided downward pressure on wages through the economy as a whole. Cuts in welfare, and increases in taxation, similarly reduce consumer spending and prevent wages from increasing.

None of this is to protect the jobless, or to provide training for Ireland’s workforce. Since the programme of cuts began, Ireland has made no move to protect its low-paid, or its struggling self-employed, or its citizens as a whole. It has routinely, however, protected its companies. If you are asked to name a scheme to protect individuals that has been introduced in the last three or four years, you’ll struggle. On the company side we have the reduction in VAT, the proposed reduction in the minimum wage, the sudden pressure put on weekend wages, and now an “internship” scheme specifically designed to give companies cheap labour. So who, exactly, does this state prize?

This week, Eamon Gilmore stated that the Ireland that emerged from recession would be different than the one that came before. And yet, if we want to look at one of the most corrosive beliefs that came from the Celtic Tiger, it was the notion that – rather than an “economy” being something that fitted around the rights of citizens and the values of the state – the rights of citizens were subject to the expedience of the economy. There are many things nasty about JobBridge, but its core being is the facilitation of companies and the commodification of the individual. Because ultimately, if companies are all that matter, commodities are the only entity worth anything at all.

Note: this will have all the necessary hyperlinks and what have you added over the next couple of days. Once UPC actually get internet into my apartment. Because they’re a shower of – no, no, never mind.