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

Pointed question number one: Why is Richard Bruton the last man on earth who should be criticising anyone else on the planet for lacking in leadership skills?

Actually, maybe that’s not as pointed as it seems; you could argue that there is no-one in the world better-qualified than Bruton to recognise a lack of charisma when he sees it. After all, Yappy O’Whingebag has been flapping his jaw in the Dáil since 1982 now, and has been in and around the upper echelons of the Fine Gael leadership since the early nineties. He’s always looked like he fancied a crack as a party leader and has always completely failed to manage it; not only was he judged to be less suited to leadership than big brother John, but he’s now lost a leadership contest to Enda Kenny twice – which, as is a pretty open secret by now, is like losing a toe-sucking contest to a pitbull terrier with rabies. Richard Bruton knows all about people who aren’t cut out to be leader, for the best of all possible reasons*.

The problem is that he doesn’t seem to recognise his own shortcomings. Bruton might not be the least charming man on earth, but he’s in and around the bottom five. We’ve been listening to him yipping away on Prime Time and indulging in petty point-scoring for years but until now – to be fair – he always just came across as a smart man who was sadly bestowed with a crippling lack of likeability. There have been a few comments along the lines of “well Kenny is a disaster and Bruton should be leader and his timing is just a bit wrong,” but they’re as misguided as the man himself. It’s just about possible that there’s a better leadership candidate than Kenny in Fine Gael, but Bruton sure as hell isn’t it.

I should say here is that I couldn’t really care less if Fine Gael were being lead by Tom Baker or Kali, Goddess of Destruction, it wouldn’t make me any more likely to vote for them. This, really, is their main problem; it’s not the leader, it’s that the whole party inspires yawning apathy. What are Fine Gael actually for? Unlike any other Irish party, they don’t have any discernible ethos at all. Fianna Fáil’s aesthetic is that of slightly-crooked pragmatists who bend the rules and Get Shtuff Done, something that they’ve built up through local structures over generations. It might be repellent, and entirely fictitious, but it’s done them nicely for years. Fine Gael have always been faceless in comparison; “Like Fianna Fáil but a bit more clean-cut” doesn’t really cut it as a party ethic. They’ve garnered votes by not being Fianna Fáil, but these votes have been siphoned off over decades by Labour, the Shinners, the Greens, and other parties that gave vague hints of believing in something. The result is a party of middle-managers in bland suits. Young, dynamic, aspiring politicos (there’s an oxymoron for you) don’t join FG, and haven’t for years; hence there’s a complete lack of inspiring people at the head of the party. Kenny really is about as good as they’ve got. Richard Bruton would probably be a half-decent Finance Minister. But who else is there? George Lee… oh no, forget that**. So who else? Hayes, maybe. Coveney?? Varadkar????? Erm… That Guy With The Beard??????? It’s not that they lack an incisive leader, they lack any incisive politicians whatsoever.

Unfortunately, they happen to be the main opposition party in the country, so what they get up to actually matters. No matter what opinion polls are saying now, Labour won’t be the largest party at the next election – call it “The Lib Dem effect” if you will – and we’re going to have to rely on the Blueshirts to get Cowen’s miserable crew out of office. Fine Gael haven’t exactly been overflowing with new ideas, but watching the opposition collapse as we stagger on with the Least Popular Government Ever looks a little bit like an animal called “Democracy” eating its own kidneys.

Listing what’s wrong with Fianna Fáil would use up more memory than Blacknight will give me, but too many people think their collapse in support is due to corruption. It isn’t, although the Golden Circle nature of the current party has damaged their men-of-the-people shtick. Fianna Fáil have always been corrupt, and it doesn’t really affect them. Rather, their problem is that they’ve lost their sheen of competence; Irish people have forgiven Fianna Fáil all manner of bullshit down through the years, but this party is different. As opposed to the well-drilled gombeens of old, we’ve got a bunch of desperate little men, riven by petty jealousies, lurching from shit headline to shit headline. We’ve seen that they’re motivated solely by their own survival, that they couldn’t care less about the country, and that they no more know what’s going on than the England football team would if you made them watch Mulholland Drive.

In other words, just this once, Fine Gael’s selling point of Not Being Fianna Fáil actually seemed… workable. Act like a well-drilled, responsible unit, and they’re miles ahead of their competition. Bruton’s failed rebellion has destroyed that; it smacks of selfishness, and incompetence, and sheer blind panic. Sure, Fine Gael got a slightly disheartening poll result, but they’re still well ahead of Fianna Fáil, and that’s all that really matters to them. This is a time when two reports have damned Fianna Fáil’s management of the banking system, and Cowen’s conduct while Minister in particular. This was something that could actually have brought the government down, if used properly***. Instead it’s been pushed off the newspapers by a banal upheaval, incompetently managed and massively disruptive. The qualities we’ve seen in the party are exactly the qualities that are so hateful about the current lot in charge.

Bruton may have problems, but there’s one thing to say about him; he isn’t stupid. He would have known, more than anyone, that Cowen would be under enormous pressure, and that there were rumblings from his back-benches. He would have known that there was an outside chance – highly unlikely, but just about possible – that Kenny really could have forced an election if he played his cards right. Had that happened, Kenny would have ended up as Taoiseach… and it’s no secret that Bruton fancies himself for that job. Maybe, from his point of view, the timing wasn’t so crazy after all.

Maybe that’s bollocks. What isn’t bollocks is that Bruton put his personal ambitions ahead of any other considerations, and half the Fine Gael front bench followed him for no better reason than self-advancement, and guessing incorrectly what way the wind was blowing****.

What we’re left with is an opposition in tatters. That’s not a great state of affairs. What’s worse, though, is the certain knowledge that the guys across the room are no better than the ones in government. Bruton’s failed rebellion has been a bad joke, with the punchline that incompetence and greed are very bit as healthy on the other side of the table. It’s probably best we know, but it would have been nice if it weren’t true in the first place.

“Collateral” is one of the smartest words ever coined. Its use, like “friendly fire”, was designed to soften the impact of war reports, and it does that job well. You know about this, probably, so I’ll just sweep over all that, you know how it goes – blah blah Newspeak. Yeah, right.

The other thing about the world “collateral” is that it’s entirely accurate in terms of how it reflects the mindset of people who use it. Collateral doesn’t distinguish between people and things; but then, nor do people who run wars, in any real sense. If you work in an environment where you will habitually get people killed, be it deliberate or inadvertent, then you can’t start distinguishing between people and barrels of napalm – if you do, you lose the war. Collateral is a psychopathic word, designed for use in a psychopathic pursuit.

The best way to sum it up is as a Conflict Mentality, and it doesn’t just arise during actual conflict. Israel, as a state, is collectively gripped by it, which is why they can commit a humanitarian atrocity and seem completely unaware of the horror; as far as they’re concerned, any attempt to breach their blockade is de facto a terrorist act intended to aid their enemies, and it gets what it deserves. This isn’t to excuse their (unforgivable) actions, just to understand them. We have our own historical example; the execution of the 1916 rebels is often-cited as a horrific move by the British, but this ignores the fact that they were at war and routinely shooting young men for desertion. There wasn’t a doubt about appropriate action as far as Britain were concerned; Pearse and his crew had committed an act of treason, and they needed to be executed. End of. Any questioning of this wouldn’t just have been dismissed, it would have been met with blank incomprehension.

Adopt a conflict mentality, and any form of moral grotesquery becomes acceptable. “Collateral” is a perfect word, because it’s about people who don’t really count as people, just as a statistic. Now, you can’t use “collateral” when you’re talking about – say – economic policy, so we say “pain” instead. It’s not war, but it is a conflict mentality, in which considering the implications of losing your job or home is an impediment to doing What Must Be Done (assuming we don’t start going mad and trying to tax the wealthy, obviously).

We aren’t at war, though. Not like in 1916, not even like Israel. Let’s put it as baldly as possible; deaths matter. The government being responsible for deaths, be it directly or indirectly, is as close to completely fucking unforgivable as it gets. Officially, we now know that 37 children died in state care in the last ten years (19 of natural causes). But then, that figure was revised upwards from 23 over the space of a day. The HSE don’t seem too certain how many children they lost – yeah, say that again, they don’t seem to know how many children they lost – but there’s plenty of intelligent comment that suggests it’s staggeringly high.

It’s difficult to contextualise – these are children in state care after all, quite literally the most vulnerable strata of society – in terms of the actions of the higher-up, but it’s important to try. By its nature, malpractice in the HSE results in people dying. It’s an organisation where bureaucracy kills. We’re not talking “pain” here.

Mary Harney was appointed Minister for Health in 2004; she has been in the position nearly six years. Since then – if not immediately since she took over the post, then certainly soon afterwards – she has been engaged in a quiet battle with the HSE. Her actions suggest, almost uniformly, that she wants reduce it to irrelevance. When people talk about health care “reform”, they forget that the HSE is an organisation that Mary Harney has never shown any interest in reforming.

Government policy – and I make no apologies for singling this out as a Harney project, since there was a radical shift in emphasis as soon as she took over from Mícheál Martin – is to outflank the HSE by privatising the health system. Now, it would be easy to talk about why this is a terrible thing, but I’ve done that before, and it’s worth looking at the realpolitik for a minute. We might talk about two-tier health as a bad thing, but we’ve been living in a two-tier system for years; the moment that we offered VHI relief, two-tier became a reality. The VHI’s very existence is a tacit acknowledgement that those on a higher wage shouldn’t be expected to live with the service on offer to the clods; the government was prepared to help the middle-classes jump the queue, and that’s pretty much a textbook definition of two-tier. All Harney has tried to do is increase the reach of this two-tier system, by getting private patients out of the leaky buildings with all the inconvenient poor people and into privately-run hospitals. This isn’t creating a two-tier system, it’s just showing up the fact that we already had one.

When Harney (and Bertie Ahern) spoke about the private sector being able to deliver beds, and buildings, “more cheaply and efficiently than the public sector”, what they actually meant was “without involving the HSE”. This is the nub of what they were doing; the co-located hospitals project, and the treatment purchase scheme, were exercises in moving more and more patients to private hospitals. We might put this down to free-market fundamentalism, but in that case… why the hell would Harney introduce risk equalisation into the health insurance market, as anti-free market a move as you can get?

Because, surprising as it may be to anyone who’s heard the woman speak, she seems to have a vision for Irish healthcare; namely, the vast majority of facilities provided by private insurers, a widespread (and, quite probably, mandatory and part-subsidised) health insurance system, in which the state’s direct provision is limited to Accident and Emergency provision at most. A future with no HSE; in which the enormous, fiefdom-riddled, bureaucratic mess has quietly died.

So why reform a body you want to destroy? To Mary Harney, the HSE is the enemy. She’s damned if she’s going to take responsibility for them losing a few hundred kids, since that’s exactly the sort of thing that made her want to wipe the buggers out in the first place.

This isn’t all down to Harney, of course; a fair chunk predates her tenure. Nor is this really about the right or wrong of HSE reform, it’s about the moral horror of the decision to go to ‘war’ with them in the first place. By not even trying to reform the HSE, Harney accepted that there would be collateral. Both sides are aware of the terms, and have adopted the requisit conflict mentality. Because of their unchecked, unchallenged inefficiency, children – and (in other scandals) many more adults, who forgive me for saying so, are no less important – have died or suffered awfully.

The bureaucratic battle, though, has ended up with the grotesque sight of Ministers and leaders refusing to accept responsibility, and the HSE’s many-headed hydras trying to shovel the blame from one mouth to the other. This, more than anything else, is what’s sickening. Not the mistakes, or children going missing, or lives destroyed by foul-ups in the filing system; it’s the blank inability to do anything except mitigate the damage and avoid responsibility. At a time when you’d think anyone would show some semblance of humanity, some tiny hint of awareness of the misery inflicted on families and individuals.

There’s the big picture of the health service, and the ongoing conflict between the HSE and the government. Debating the models of public healthcare, or insurance-based healthcare, is a huge important question, and it shouldn’t be ignored; still this isn’t the sort of war that should ever have casualties or denials. This bespeaks how state and society failed the people who needed them most. It’s a black, rotten spectacle at the heart of our society, and it shames everyone involved.

I write this after the the Sunday Times ran article about Eamon Gilmore, entitled “Mr Popular or Mr Populist”, and perfectly fine it is too; it’s a fairly balanced portrait, even if it doesn’t focus on the most worrying thing about Gilmore – namely, that he looks like a garden gnome that’s lost his hat*. Perhaps the most interesting thing about it, though, is the choice of title;  the main  accusation is that Labour are a touch light in some policy areas, but this is translated as “populist”.

I hate the word populist. Not because it carries with it the implication that people are stupid, and that the political elite only refuse to manipulate them out of a generous sense of altruism, although that’s reason enough; I hate it because it’s almost always misused. It effectively means “telling people what they want to hear”, but most people want to hear the truth, which is the one thing you never get from “populist” politicians. This mindset leads to a situation where you have Populism on one side, and Hard Decisions on the other, which is… oh look, here we are.

However, the meme of Hard Decisions is every bit as devious as anything that any politician has come up with. You can see this clearly by glancing towards the UK. The Tories are happily talking about how they’ll make difficult decisions, but in fact, they’ve carefully manipulated themselves into a position where these decisions will do them the least possible damage. They floated their proposed cuts when they were light-years ahead of Labour in the polls, and were comparatively safe to do so; it was simply an exercise in dampening expectations. Now, they’re cutting early – at a time when Labour’s refusal to cut has been shown to be working – because it puts them in a no-lose situation; if it doesn’t damage the recovery it’s worked, if it does they can blame it on Labour.

Over here, the government’s programme of Difficult Decisions has worked in more or less the same way**. They were in a position where whatever they did would be unpopular, so they chose an approach that would target the sort of people who don’t vote Fianna Fáil anyway. Fianna Fáil steered blatantly clear of touching any of its most sacred cows; most notably it introduced income levies instead of increasing Income Tax, so that it could spin the line that “we’re all in this together”, to minimise alienation of its core electorate (middle class right-wing types who constantly complain about being overtaxed, even though they patently weren’t). The minute any of its voters got annoyed – that’ll be the pensioners, the terrifying actually-going-and-voting demographic – they backed down quicker than Sarah Ferguson accepting ten grand.

In other words, difficult decisions are every bit as “populist” as the alternative; they’ve been selected to vicitimise a  demographic who largely don’t vote, certainly don’t vote for Fianna Fáil or the Green Party, and – this is probably the most important part of the equation – aren’t the sort of people who high-powered politicians ever really have to deal with. The Sunday Independent and its ilk can happily parrot “share the pain”, because – as far as the upper echelons of an institution like the Sindo are concerned – these people don’t really exist anyway. Middle- or upper-income pensioners, on the other hand, are familiar to the Sindo’s powers-that be – they know them, or in many cases, they are them. “Pain” only becomes “injustice” when it’s inflicted on people instead of demographics.

Designing your political policies around people you happen to know isn’t how you might instinctively visualise corruption, but it’s the most endemic form of corruption there is. We’re too quick to ascribe “corruption” to scheming behind-the-scenes behaviour, yet what really burns is its sheer banality. This excellent TASC report on Ireland’s Golden Circle (go on, at least read the summary) perfectly displays how small the ruling class is; if power is vested in a bunch of fine-living, affluent men who have a series of expensive dinners with each other and throw transparent compliments into each others’ fat faces, then as far as they’re concerned, the rest of the world simply stops existing. The shocking thing about our leaders’ ongoing refusal to tax the wealthy is that it literally doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone as a course of action; the only discussion of the subject has been token, dismissed with one-line statements that show no signs of having been thought through (“we need business”, “the wealth will leave the country”, “it won’t raise significant revenue” – you know the drill). The ruling classes are so firmly absorbed by Ireland’s golden circle that they barely notice it exists.

And so, when we ask the question “why is no-one angry?”, – it’s a recurring question in some sectors these days, not least because it makes people think of Network, and everyone likes thinking of Network – it’s because our anger serves no purpose. Calling for the government’s head is white noise. People are angry, but we aren’t people, we’re “People” – disembodied slogans of fury that don’t understand the realities of government, a morass that the government must try and appease with meaningless concessions.

That, right there, is the real nastiness of populism.

The mistake is in thinking that this attitude is rooted in anything other than a government being thoroughly impotent. The pensions scandal was a perfect example of how little power Cowen and his cronies now exert – Cowen’s protestations that he couldn’t legally compel people to give up their pensions was an attempt to disguise the obvious fact that he was no longer in control of his party. No-one suggested there was a legal compulsion, the real story was that Cowen couldn’t use the party whip to get ex-ministers to give up their pensions – he was too terrified of triggering rebellion to do so. When people march towards the Dáil calling for a change of government, and even the national press start to question the legitimacy of government, ignoring these voices isn’t symptomatic of arrogance so much as it is of fear and desperation, like a kid reacting to being told off by sticking his fingers in his ears and repeatedly shouting “rhubarb.”

The converse example of this is probably the rushed legislation about Head Shops***. This was pandering to conservative hysteria was generally described as “cynical”, but more than that, it was desperate; the actions of a group that would grab any chance to be popular, without any regard to how transparently needy it made them seem. It fooled no-one. Similarly, Eamon Ryan’s recent chit-chat about taking the Heineken Cup matches off of Sky and back onto normal telly where they belong was about as well-received as Shirley Temple Bar at an Orange Lodge march; it was perceived for exactly what it was, a nakedly pathetic attempt to be liked. These aren’t the actions of cynical schemers, but of a boring party-guest who laughs hysterically at everything because he’s got no friends.

Ultimately, when you’ve got a government who are so obviously no longer in control, getting angry isn’t as appropriate a response as just pointing and laughing, and their “populist” decisions tend to be the funniest. Some say economic hardship isn’t an appropriate thing to laugh about, but bullies don’t mind being hated; what they can’t stand is being treated as an irrelevance. An irrelevance is now precisely what these emasculated types in power are, and how we should treat them. They stagger from crisis to crisis, reaching for facile legislation that they hope will be popular with the people they don’t understand, and react to the economy by legislating around the whims of the formerly wealthy to whom they’re so enthralled. Laughter and ridicule are among the most powerful weapons we have.

Around the start of the UK election, the Liberal Democrats came up with this incredibly clever guerilla advertising campaign, encouraging people to vote for the Labservatives. See? Get it? Labservatives! It’s like, Labour, and the Conservatives, and it’s… oh man, hilarious. It sounds worryingly gynaecological to me, but what would I know?

This was all before Nick Clegg became an electoral sensation (oxymoron alert), and the Labservatives campaign has been quietly forgotten. The point of it was to emphasise how all the parties are the same, and Clegg has run with that gleefully; in the debates he made numerous references to “these two”, telling us that there was no real difference between them.

He’s right and yet wrong. There are huge differences between Labour and the Tories, in their attitudes, in their priorities, in the way they approach the job, in… well, the lot, really. And yet, there is a marked similarity between them. It’s not to do with them being the same, it’s to do with them both being desperately confused about what they are.

The Tories are probably the most obvious party to be struggling with this identity crisis. Their principle of Conservatism is one of minimalist state intervention, of the wealthy running a paternalist society where they look after the decent working folk. This isn’t as insulting as it sounds; Tory policy has always been about rewarding, not wealthy people, but decent people; it’s an individualist mentality that doesn’t believe in social causes or endemic problems. Margaret ‘Bloody’ Thatcher was very much a subscriber to this notion; when she said she didn’t believe there was any such thing as society, what she really meant was that people shouldn’t use it as an excuse (it’s also worth noting that, although she’s very much associated with the rise of yuppie-culture, Thatcher didn’t really embrace or hold with it. She was a strict moralist and a rather austere woman, which is part of what makes her such a fascinating figure).

The laissez-faire attitude of the Tories isn’t really about them being neoliberals, although it has certainly evolved that way – a shift that began in the seventies and was consolidated when Thatcher rose to power, and has obviously attracted more and more neoliberals to the party. Historically, the picture is a little different. Rather than being an end, laissez-faire was just a side-effect of a localist vision of society, where the local wealthy decent chap does the decent thing and helps out where he can. The state shouldn’t interfere, because the state’s a long way away, and the local chap knows best. So far from being the agent of change that he styles himself, David Cameron’s Big Society is fundamentally nostalgic – a vision which relies on decent human beings, rejects centralised targets, and wants the people to directly make their own communities.

If it sounds absurdly touchy-feely, it’s not to say that it’s an idea worth rejecting out of hand. Much of the Big Society would simply revolve around governments pissing off and not telling local institutions what to do every five minutes, and there’s little enough wrong with that as a principle. The confusion kicks in as soon as Cameron tries to apply this practically, because the Conservative Party has been so thoroughly divided by Thatcher’s rule and its ramifications; equal part nasty party to patrician organisation, full of many people who sneer at “do-gooders”, and still not entirely sure how to dealt with The Poor. When they try, they get it wrong; instead of Hug-A-Hoodie you end up with the rhetoric of Broken Britain, and all the perjoratives that implies. The Conservatives don’t really know how to deal with the areas of Britain they call “Broken”, and would prefer it if they just went away. Even the Centre for Social Cohesion, set up by Iain Duncan-Smith for (it seems) well-intentioned reasons, misses the point so regularly that it ends up being an object of suspicion rather than real ideas.

In other words, the Tories are now a party that don’t really know what they want, and even if you ignore the fact that their leader looks like an inflated condom in a suit, you struggle to see what their agenda is beyond Cut Spending and Stop Immigration. Their social doctrine ends up confused because they themselves are confused – and they’re not helped by the fact that much of it was dreamed up pre-recession, and looks more suspicious now The Money’s Run Out.

But Labour? Labour’s a basket case. Labour’s main source of confusion lies in their obsession with spin – after years of being misrepresented, derided and just plain old mistreated by most of the British press, it’s now a dysfunctional party that has only recently re-learned the value of just being straightforward… if you forget the perfect storm of Bigotgate, natch, when he called a woman a “bigot” based on nothing more than… well… her ignorant and insulting sweeping generalisation*. As hysteria goes, it was rivalled only by the mass fury in Ireland sparked off by a crisps company having the gall and moral degeneracy to, um, put up posters that parody sexism. It was still a desperately depressing reflection on the British press, and to an extent on English society.

This extraordinary speech to Citizens UK by Gordon Brown is a rare sight of the man not caring about how his words can be twisted – who shows conviction, and drive, and (shock) charisma. It’s instructive because it’s so damn rare. The really big difference between Labour and the Conservatives is that Labour believe that state intervention is a good thing – they’re collectivists, simply. Sadly, they keep struggling to make it work, because Labour’s interest is to centralise everything. Tony Blair’s celebrated “Third Way” really amounted to replacing a system of private companies, governed by targets, replacing direct state intervention; a glance at the PFI bill will suggest that it doesn’t work, and any investigation into the British school system shows that Labour’s centralised targets end up with organisations becoming bound up by bureaucracy. Meanwhile, after 13 years of power, corruption tends to set in; until the last few months and a looming election, the Labour Party have been largely squabbling among themselves, riven by power struggles, and barely remembering the electorate exists.

So, what’s so different about the Liberals?

Well, sod all, in many ways. The irony of the Labservatives campaign was that, really, a cross between the Tories and Labour is pretty much what the Liberals are. Like Labour, they’re committed to social justice; like the Tories, they believe in minimal state intervention. The Liberals would never have set up Sure Start, for example, because it simply wouldn’t have occurred to them. The major difference to which the Lib Dems can point is their opposition to the Iraq invasion, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to pull out of Afghanistan. If the Liberals were somehow to get into office, they wouldn’t actually change Britain all that much at all. So why the sudden tide of voters?

Simple enough, really. The Liberal Democrats are the only one of the three major parties who actually know what they want. They’re comfortable with their principles and there isn’t a huge internal battle over what the party means. They haven’t had decades of horrible press coverage to make them paranoid, and they haven’t lurched from moderate to right in a bid to rediscover their relevance. Nick Clegg is benefiting from just telling voters what he thinks. He doesn’t need to patronise, or obfuscate, or fumble, because he has no-one to appease.

The rise of the Liberals – and there’s no guarantee that they’ll do as well as people are expecting, because these things tend to run out of steam – is nothing but a good thing if you’re a Labour voter. Labour’s leadership is clapped-out, riven by internal dissent, and the party could be destroyed by another five years of government. Even if Brown had somehow won, the effect on the Tories would have been disastrous; a brisk dumping of Cameron, a lurch to the right, and a Tory party tearing itself apart as politics in the UK settled into two dysfunctional parties sitting flabbily in office, outmoded and rotting from within. A Cameron victory had to happen, because the alternative was disastrous for everyone.

Now, the Lib Dems have popped up with a genuine alternative. There are two probably alternatives this Friday: either a Lib-Lab pact, allowing Labour to reinvent itself in coalition and incorporate some of the Lib Dems drive and energy; or Cameron taking power in a minority government, being forced to appease his progressive opponents and freeze out his party’s right wing. This is a sight that Irish people haven’t seen for some time; a political system regenerating and reforming itself. The Brits might rail against their politics, their electoral system, and their lousy choices, but it looks like they aren’t so stupid after all.

Here’s a question no-one really bothers to ask: is openness and transparency in government really all that important?

If that seems like a self-evidently absurd question, it’s because it probably is. Still, it’s worth following through on it for a moment. One of the key points about parliamentary politics is that you elect people for a five-year term, and you know perfectly well that you’ll be stuck with their decisions for that period; hence, the electorate vote for the people whom they trust the most. Whenever news is released about the latest scandal it’s accompanied by a clamour for more openness… but maybe, rather than calling for more openness, we should just be calling for our representatives to be a bit less shit. The neatest summation of this argument was put forth by David Mitchell on Have I Got News For You: “So essentially they’ve said ‘This swimming pool is full of piss, therefore swimming pools are a bad idea,’ not ‘We’ve all been pissing in the pool.’”

What’s difficult to accept is that, when dealing with any institution, individuals cease to matter in the way we think they should. There have been many famous social experiments to show how fragile our grip on morality is, how people adapt to the “rules” of any micro-society; the Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the best-known of these, even if it does seem a bit showy. Back in the seventies they just did experiments to see if people would cross the road on a red light if someone else did it, which seems positively charming. Sometimes you wonder what the Sex Pistols were so annoyed about.

The Stanford Experiment shows how tenuous and flexible the idea of “personal morality” is – and, in relating to prisons, it’s a narrative that should resonate. This story is the latest of too many; the word “inquiry”, when related to an investigation by the Garda Ombudsman, is a touch misleading. The two most well-known cases of deaths in Garda custody are probably Brian Rossiter and Terence Wheelock, and both are characterised by the families’ struggle to obtain information about the deaths. The Garda Ombudsman report has effectively exonerated the Gardaí from wrongdoing, even if it’s rather too polite in pointing out that allowing a ligature point in a cell is a pretty appalling failure.

It fails, though, simply by virtue of how the document is collated. We have an adversarial legal system for a reason; “independence” from the establishment is all but impossible. This generally isn’t malicious, it’s just that people are predisposed to find what they want. The Garda Ombudsman, as a body, is perfectly fine for dealing with minor transgressions; when we’re talking about a death in Garda custody, it stops being an acceptable way of dealing with the issue, particularly given that the inquest into Terence Wheelock’s death arrived at its verdict by a 4-3 majority. The report perpetuates the myth of self-regulation, even when we have seen far too much evidence that self-regulation doesn’t work.

Over time, institutions tend to protect their own existence. If you’ve seen The Wire – and if not, then go away and come back to me when you have – you’ll have seen a near-perfect treatise on this, but it’s worth making the point again. Large organisations follow a simple form of Darwinian mechanics; those who rise to power tend to be those who play by the existing rules, hence the rules become self-perpetuating. As a result, almost all institutions tend to protect themselves first; they act in their own interest rather than the people’s. Usually, they convince themselves that the two are more or less the same thing, with a murmur of “the public don’t understand” as justification.

One of the benefits of free-market organisations* is that their connection to the general public is built-in, and comes in the form of whether people buy their products or not. Since this only really polices quality and price, these are the only two areas where standards are reflected. In all other areas, companies will do whatever the law allows them to do; granted, they might act “morally” to aid their brand identity, but only because it’s more or less impossible to keep their morality secret. Coca-Cola don’t volunteer information about child labour in El Salvador or the deaths of union leaders in Colombia, because they don’t have to**. The institution acts in its own interests, with a distorted perception of “the common good” that comes filtered through its own needs, until you end up with Irish doctors removing the wombs of women then being protected by their peers. Or you have the astonishing abuse perpetrated in industrial schools, tacitly ignored by the Irish population, and no doubt justified by Christian Brothers still managing to tell themselves it was for the children’s own good.

The key point is that this behaviour isn’t unique to doctors, or Christian Brothers, or to any other group – not law enforcement, not politics. Most institutions retreat from scrutiny, it’s just that these are the most prominent examples. It’s a pattern that recurs in any group that becomes isolated from society as a whole, and that isolation – what turns a “group” into an “elite” – will become generally guarded. It’s accepted by most people, for example, that salary is a private matter. In fact, there’s no real reason that it should be, it just suits most parties to keep it that way; it suits employers, because it prevents wage inflation, and it suits better-off employees, because it stops their earnings being questioned. We accept the privacy of salary as The Way It Works, and don’t really question whether it’s right or not.

Scrutiny is the only real way to keep people honest, to prevent that degeneration into unaccountability and amorality. When it comes to politics, the five-year ballot box simply isn’t a sufficient connection. It’s too easy to disguise shortcomings, and complete openness is the only real way to prevent a slow, moral decline. Nowhere is that clearer than looking at the current government. A future general election simply doesn’t matter, because as things are going, they’ll be wiped out at the ballot box anyway. The greatest threat is from within, and so everything done by Cowen and his cronies is designed to stave off revolt from within his own party. The people aren’t important to them, so they don’t care what we think.

In short; all institutions resist scrutiny and resist change, and the only way to reform them is to do so from the outside. Hence, as much as is possible should be made public, and that comprises the overwhelming majority of information. Law enforcement tends to be amongst the most secretive, and that is in no way unique to Ireland – I could pull up all sorts of examples, but I’ll just say “Stephen Lawrence” and leave it there. As an “impartial” investigation exonerates the Gardaí over the death of one young man, another man dies in a Garda cell elsewhere. It seems obvious that there should be a full, judicial inquiry into the death of Terence Wheelock. It’s largely because the family deserve one. However, although they’ll never realise it without prompting, the Garda Síochana desperately need it to happen too.

*I always hate typing that sentence. Always.
** Neither of those things are directly related to Coca-Cola, I should add. The child labour in question came courtesy of separate companies who just happen to sell to Coca-Cola, and the union leaders happened to represent people who worked for independent companies that worked for Coca-Cola. So nothing to do with Coca-Cola at all.

There are a number of things that any sane person would find offensive about the last episode of Doctor Who (please note: this post isn’t really about Doctor Who, just give it a paragraph or two and it settles down); the version of Winston Churchill composed entirely of mannerisms and soundbites that never once seems like a real person, or the multi-coloured merchandising-friendly new Daleks, or the complete absence of any character given to Amy Pond (or the Doctor, for that matter), or the way that the new Daleks happen to know that a robot is a bomb when they shouldn’t even know he exists. Of course, though, none of these things come close to the most moronic item of the story; when the Daleks forcibly switch on London’s lights for no sodding reason whatsoever, and intone “the humans will destroy themselves” as the Luftwaffe advance on the city.

This is stupid for all sorts of reasons; at best, it would lead to a worse-than-usual bombing of London, which doesn’t quite equate to wiping out humanity. The very assumption that London = Civilisation is ridiculous initially, the sort of thing that you’d normally write off to aberrantly bad scripting. In context, though, this this scene is just the most spectacular version of the story’s comic-book aesthetic, cut from the same cloth as the “top-ho” Spitfire pilot and the shiny-buttoned brylcreemed officers. Victory of the Daleks reflects the most shallowly mythologised view of WWII, which works like this: the Nazis lost cost the British held out; the British held out because they weathered the Blitz; they weathered the Blitz because of their chipper attitude and because Churchill was bally marvellous. That’s how history worked, boys and girls. Sure, lots of people died, but only to make the whole thing marvellously bittersweet – in the world of Victory of the Daleks, the whole setting is just a theme-park of a well-known historical period, and the human suffering involved barely seems real at all.

It would be silly to pretend that this caricaturing – or even cartooning – a palatable version of history is in any way unusual. In fact, it’s more or less a universal tendency; you can find examples in the way that Irish people tend to turn the Civil War into an argument between Slimy Dev and Big Mick, or quietly forget the various acts of torture committed by the 1798 rebels. The fetishisation of Rosa Parks as a Civil Rights figure is the American example.

It’s not just that this over-simplification is factually inaccurate, it’s that it enables the telling of convenient lies. Rosa Parks is beloved of American establishment history because she’s the acceptable face of Civil Rights. It suits them to pretend – not overtly, but subtly – that Civil Rights began because a polite woman wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus; in fact, it grew from countless humanitarian atrocities committed against black people, which were still being committed when the Martin Luther King-era marches were going on (of which we see footage) or when the Black Panther Society was burgeoning (which, by contrast, has been quietly excised from popular history). Focus on Parks (and King) as icons of American history, and you can take ownership of the systematic brutality that your country inflicted on its own people. You can turn your appalling past into a comfortable morality tale that sits nicely with the rest of your mythology, one where discrimination was about seats on buses, and black people were taken seriously once they started asking nicely.

In these narratives, history becomes a simply story of black-and-white morality, featuring goodies and baddies, or maybe people with not more than one flaw or redeeming feature. Hence you have a television programme treating Churchill – who, fan of his or not, is an endlessly fascinating character – as a collection of speeches and mannerisms. You can start having that “would you go back in time and kill Hitler” Moral Dilemma so beloved of cheap science fiction – the answer “No, because World War II was a result of a massive tide of anti-semitism, economic collapse, and a lingering German resentment over the crippling conditions imposed on them by the Treaty of Versailles, and if Hitler hadn’t come along someone else probably would have” isn’t an acceptable answer in a Comic Book History, because that’s not how comic books work.

Caricaturing the past is one thing; caricaturing the present, though, is so common that many people don’t even notice it. Certainly, caricature is how the knee-jerk reactionary commentariat (I’m trying to avoid mentioning the D**ly M**l by name here) operate, and how they can present addled opinion as a form of debate. Reactionary arguments are almost never consistent – the sort of tedious guffbag who argues for lower taxes will frequently complain about the condition of hospitals, and see no apparent contradiction – but when you live in a world of caricature, you don’t see any reason that your arguments should be consistent. You just end up with a series of tropes, slogans to which you instinctively attach approval or outrage… in much the same way that your view of Churchill might be filed under Greatest 20th Century Briton, Smoked Cigars, That’s It*.

In an Irish context, what’s so worrying is how freely this technique is used, to the almost total exclusion of any rational debate. Much of what passes for informed comment is only distinguishable from an Editorial Cartoon because it doesn’t feature any drawings.

It’s almost too boring to talk about Trade Unions, the Government, the Meeja and the will-they won’t-they pay deal drama at this point… still, I’ve started now, and it seems important to point out just how much caricaturing is engaged in by both sides (although, really, the fact that I’ve just described the people involved as “sides” tells you everything about how this boring argument has been conducted). On one side, you have the Trade Unions insisting that their workers are the most vulnerable members of society, that no-one in the private sector has really taken a pay cut, and that Seán Fitzpatrick’s got all our money. On the other there’s the vast majority of the media commentariat propagating the image of a “public sector worker” – in this particular cartoon, it’s important to remember that all public servants are exactly the same – as a lazy, tea-swilling freeloader who works at a desk, dreaming up new forms to make people sign.

The result is two factions who throw catchphrases at each other, no more a debate than an episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. On one side, we have The Pay Cuts Are Unfair; on the other, We Need To Save Money. The suggestion that both these things can be true barely seems to feature.

At this point we might as well look at what we know.

We know we can save money on expenditure in the Public Sector. We know this because we commissioned a great big report on it (you know, the McCarthy Report? Remember that? People thought it might be important, once upon a time). This report was limited enough in its scope as it was – it was about staff numbers and spending rather than the broad structure of the public service – and still managed to recommend €5.3bn in extra revenue. Much of this was from new charges and reduced spending, although the purpose of the report now seems to have been a way of proving that We’re Spending Too Much.

We know that the pay cuts and pension levies are massively unfair. This is obvious just from looking at the numbers, even before you factor in the judges ‘n’ civil servant anomalies. The pay cuts make a nominal show of being progressive, but still target every single worker regardless of their pay levels. Quite simply, someone earning €30k or less should not have to take a pay cut, no matter what sector they’re in. A private company should not do it. A government that believes in fairness definitely shouldn’t.

Finally, we know that the cuts haven’t actually saved us very much from the fiscal deficit at all. About half of the salary cuts would have gone straight back to the government in tax anyway. The holistic view sees less money circulating in the economy, which has resulted in deflation, which has lead to a loss of jobs, which all ends up as a larger Social Welfare payout and a smaller tax take. We know this is true just by looking at the deficit figures over the past year-and-a-bit, whose climb hasn’t slowed in the slightest.

So yes, we need reform. However, a near-arbitrary series of pay cuts isn’t “reform”, it’s an ineffective books-balancing exercise with no regard to a workers’ value. The McCarthy Report recommended abolishing the Department of the Gaeltacht; if the Department really is of so little value, then it’s hard to see why a nurse caring for cancer patients should have to take a pay cut to subsidise it.

Once consensus is reached about the need to reform things, you might then have to accept that simply laying staff off won’t save all the money that you think it will, and might not be worth the social hardship you’re inflicting on huge numbers of people. You might have to look at voluntary redundancies, retirements, and natural wastage. You might have to put aside the old “they take two-hour tea breaks, fuck ‘em, they should be taken out and shot” line, since – amazingly enough – it’s not really very helpful.

But hey, reason doesn’t sell as well as indignation. We have a government that sees public resentment of government employees as an ideal opportunity to take the heat off itself for a while, and we have a media that cheerfully lets them do it. It’s the sheer transparency of the ruse, and the fact that so many people have fallen for it, that really burns. We have two groups whose primary aim is to maintain their positions in their own fiefdoms, and will oversimplify anything to achieve it. That’s what passes for government, now.

The clincher? It’s the pensions levy, obviously. The levy was desperately unfair in all sorts of ways. It takes a proportionally higher chunk of salary from a worker earning less than €30k than it does from one earning more than €100k. It cut the take-home pay of the public sector without cutting their gross salary; if you browse through the public sector pay grades, the salaries still seem high enough to justify a second round of cuts (and meant you still weren’t liable for, say, a university grant, even if your pay had effectively been cut). Most infuriating of all, it pretended to be about pensions, when it plainly was nothing of the kind – if the levy really was about pension reform, then why can’t a public servant forego their pension and opt out?

The levy is a direct result of a Cartoon Debate. It suited the Government, because they were avoiding pay cuts, and presenting public sector pensions as a convenient strawman. It suited the Union Leaders, because “no pay cuts” was the macho stance they were adopting, and it enabled them to climb down from that position without looking like they’d lost the argument. The levy was more inequitable than the salary cuts, and more severe, but there was no Work to Rule action over that.

Hence we have two elites continue to parrot their own respective mantras, “Difficult Decisions” and “Protect Our Workers”. Meanwhile, lost beneath the slogans, some skilled professionals do valuable jobs for little pay and even less thanks, and find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Like the ever-growing army of unemployed and working poor, they’re seen as collateral, there to add texture to the story. They’re not important; they’re cartoons, ciphers, not really people at all.

*You may substitute “Imperialist Warmongerer” or “Guy Who Came Up With That Joke About Being Sober In The Morning” for “Greatest 20th Century Briton” if you wish. I don’t want to go near that one.

When discussing how Doctor Who works, it’s important to discuss it in the wider context of television.

I love television. I always have done. I love the idea that stories and dramas and images can be beamed into the home, I love the lightweight immediacy of television, I love the inherent flexibility of the medium and the way it can tell stories that last fifteen minutes or twenty-four hours. It’s long been my opinion that television is the most important medium we have, simply because it’s the most sophisticated that’s widely – indeed, almost freely – available to all.

What’s interesting, then, is how increasingly television, and particularly British television, seems incapable of telling stories.

A historical note here. When Doctor Who first returned to television in 2005, it’s easy forget how shocking it was. This was a time when television had become increasingly smug and inward-looking, when Ally McBeal and its ilk had propogated a whole sequence of programmes based around the concept of “affluent learned professionals complain shrilly about their made-up personal problems”. Doctor Who, from the very first shot – a zoom from the expanse of space to Billy Piper’s bedroom clock – set itself up as a drama in which people were tiny, perspective was everything, and a job of work was something that you could show in a 60-second montage. The plot of Rose (and no-one would claim that Rose was perfectly made – in fact, it was badly-directed and had a rather rushed alien invasion plot) was simple; a rude, strange and untrustworthy man wanders into the life of Billie Piper, bringing untold carnage with him (the first thing he actually tells Rose is “Wilson’s dead”), and shows her the broader world, where empires rise and fall and the universe barely notices.

And yet if you describe this as the basis for “drama”, you miss the point. More than anything, Rose was about two people. Characters who would later get rounded out (Mickey, Jackie) were portrayed as caricatures, representative of a wider society where people sue for compensation or do silly dances to impress their girlfriends. The story was about Rose and the Doctor, and the most important and memorable scene wasn’t anything to do with Autons, or killer wheelie-bins, or shopping centres being invaded; it was when Rose entered the TARDIS, and stood in front of a man who baldly admitted he was an alien. Rose burst into tears at this point, suffering from culture shock, and this was the most human reaction to anyone entering the TARDIS since… well, possibly ever, and certainly since An Unearthly Child aired in 1963.

Eccleston was/is the best actor ever to play the role, and was never as loved as David Tennant simply because he was more difficult to get a handle on. This was a character who would point a gun at you, nearly get your boyfriend killed, call you stupid ape and then tell you what to do anyway. He didn’t pull rank; rather than bigging-up his own mythology, he did his level best to hide it. The very first thing we ever saw him doing was blowing up a public building, but he didn’t flinch from admitting he’d have been buggered if the Chav Companion hadn’t been around to save him. If Tennant’s Doctor might open up a window on your dusty world and show you the glorious sun outside, Eccleston would do the same even if it meant you got drenched.

In short, he was dangerous.

If that danger was what made this meaningful drama, it wasn’t what made it drama; that lay in the Doctor knocking on Rose’s forehead, or taking her for chips in The End of the World (before remembering he didn’t have any money), or surprising – and yet not surprising – the audience by degenerating into a rage-fuelled, spittle-flecked avenging angel in Dalek. The most memorable scene in that first series is probably – probably - Richard Wilson’s transformation into gas-mask-thing in The Empty Child; the most iconic is Eccleston’s repeating of “no” in the Bad Wolf cliffhanger. And yet, for all the glory of these moments, the greatness of that series lay in the almost-forgotten moments that the sharpened the point of the drama. I’m thinking here of Eccleston’s grin fading the moment Rose vanished from sight in The Long Game, or Gwendoline castigating Rose for thinking she was stupid in The Unquiet Dead, or Mickey’s line of “we can write them a letter” in World War Three. The most affecting of these scenes is Rose’s incoherent, tear-soaked speech a chipper in The Parting of the Ways, and it’s worth remembering that at no time has Who – nor, indeed, any other series that springs to mind – ever done anything as radical as removing one of its central characters from the story in the season finale.

(The principle exception to this rule is telling. It’s The Wire, of course. The very first scene in The Wire is McNulty having an irrelevant (plotwise) conversation with a character who never appears again.)

We might now look at the current main contender for “serious” sci-fi drama of our times, True Blood, which has replaced Heroes and Battlestar Galactica as the one we’re all supposed to think is Proper. Perhaps what’s interesting in this comparison is that the opening follows all the same lines – a mysterious stranger walks into the life of an ordinary working-class girl, and promptly starts buggering it up as soon as she gets too close. Why, then, is True Blood so utterly, killingly banal?

(Oh yes it is.)

It wouldn’t be worth continuing without pointing out the clunking banality of the central metaphor, vampires-as-underclass, which is too vague and obvious to hold any attention; besides, it becomes offensively stupid if you try to equate vampires to any actual underclass. Certainly the “metaphor” isn’t at all convincing, and is little more than a hollow attempt to give an unsustainable worldview some (entirely spurious) ethical weight. This is hardly surprising, as most television can’t do big subjects without getting a nosebleed. You could cite the recent BBC drama Five Days here, and the way it mentioned terrorism and training camps before quickly changing the subject; or you could talk about an episode of House called The Tyrant, in which the team faced the moral dilemma of whether to save the life of an African dictator who was preparing to slaughter millions of people – but he was dictator of a fictional country, and the people belonged to a tribe that don’t actually exist, which made the line “it will be worse than Rwanda” more than a little inaccurate.

So the sheer vapidity of True Blood’s central metaphor is commonplace, and besides, it isn’t the principle problem. Rather, it’s the fact that neither of its central characters ever do or say anything interesting. Sookie’s character seems to consist of “waitress, telepathic, strong”; Bill Compton, the object of her affections, is a broodily good-looking mannequin with old-fashioned clothes and a pale skin. This is a time when character and character outline are more or less the same thing; this is why we’re supposed to believe that there’s an attraction between Bill and Sookie, even though for the duration of the first episode they barely have a conversation worthy of the name. They’re “characters”, a shorthand version of people; televisual constructs that comply with the rules of demographically-targeted cult television, Dark Moody Stranger and Aspirational Girl, approximations that never once take the time to behave like an actual person. We’re supposed to accept their attraction because, well, that’s what characters in these dramas do.

Directly comparing them to the Doctor and Rose tells you all you need to know. Eccleston’s Doctor is a damaged character. We know this because his clowning is never quite convincing; because of the way he risks everything by giving the Nestene Consciousness a chance at the end, and obviously does so out of guilt; because of the flicker of vulnerability in his face when he asks Rose if she wants to come with him. Bill is also supposed to be damaged, and he shows it by staring off into middle-distance and intensely whispering all his lines.

Of course, it’s a long time since Rose aired, but what distinguished Davies-era Doctor Who was its ability to just show people relaxing, chatting, and being funny and likeable and ordinary and vibrant. This was always part of the narrative, even if it was seldom part of the plot. In the (dreadful) story 42, the Doctor openly says how scared he is. It’s incidental, a moment that just occurs, and then lets the audience process it. Even in the later, tawdry, self-satisfied sequences of his tenure, Davies could sometimes get this looseness of characterisation right, as with Midnight or Turn Left. But by then, the programme had become corrupted by its membership of the establishment. Davies was once obsessed with the idea that the press couldn’t wait to bring down Doctor Who. By the time he left, he knew he was the media’s darling, and had lost sight of his aims to such an extent that… well, that he thought casting Catherine Tate was an acceptable thing to do.

But it’s Stephen Moffatt who’s in charge now, and Stephen Moffatt is another question. Davies may have wanted to be many things, but he never wanted to be cool. Moffatt has certainly been one of the best Who writers since the series came back, but he’s also been a “look-at-me” type of writer. His banana joke in The Empty Child went down well, so he used it again in The Girl in the Fireplace. Blink is an extended exercise in the writer showing how clever he is, and he only gets away with it because the slices of ostentatiousness tend to take place at bits that really are pretty clever. Because of this desire to be admired, you can take it as read that Who under Moffatt will never be as downright odd as it was under Russell T. Davies. We won’t get a Love and Monsters, or a Gridlock, or any story as bonkers as Smith and Jones. Davies tended to indulge himself; Moffatt will indulge his audience. The odd counterbalance here is that he’s every bit as much the fanboy as Davies, who’s nerdishly thrilled by the idea of clockwork soldiers, but still takes the piss out of geeky fanboys who work in a video shop.

The conflict between nerd, show-off, and hard-headed demographically-aware careerist is apparent through every moment of The Eleventh Hour. You can see it in the new Doctor’s costume, which is the most inoffensively English-professor uniform imaginable… but at the same time, you can imagine Matt Smith’s Doctor genuinely thinking bow ties are cool because Indiana Jones wears them when he’s not adventuring. If the show has fallen away since its vivid Eccleston-era debut, we know that it won’t get back to those peaks any time soon, and we can’t expect it to. As a story, The Eleventh Hour uses plenty of Moffat’s old tricks, and the trailer for the rest of the series makes it clear that we’ll be getting Daleks, Weeping Angels, Cybermen, and more. The appearing-throughout-a-young-girl’s life that sustained The Girl in the Fireplace pops up again. The nasty aliens have an odd catchphrase. You can only see the bad thing from the corner of your eye. Lines are re-used from Blink (the “Duck” scene) and The Girl in the Fireplace (“You’ve had some cowboys in here”), neither of which really make sense on their own merits. The Shy One lives with his mother, stays in his bedroom and watches porn; the Boring One is ignored by the hot girlfriend who’d rather eye up the fit young bloke while he’s changing. In the end, the Doctor scares off the aliens with a “don’t you know who I am?” speech. We can safely assume, even at this early stage, that this period of Doctor Who will never run the risk of being uncool.

And yet, and yet… if we accept that this is a demographically-targeted Doctor, far more interested in playing to the cool crowd and tolerating the geeks with patient good humour, then you might ask: what’s the first thing we see Matt Smith’s Doctor doing, once he’s finished hanging in the skies over London?

He’s having a conversation.

This is something that Eccleston did in another Moffatt-scripted story, The Empty Child. It’s also something Tennant never did, not with anyone, and that includes his companions; the only real exception is Joan at the end of Human Nature, and that’s marked by how catastrophically he misjudges the situation. He bantered with his companions, he didn’t talk to them; he showed his Tortured Side by the accepted method of walking around with staring eyes (or, in the case of Wilfred Mott, making self-aggrandising speeches). He was far more interested in making jokes over the head of companions, and much as he made speeches about how wonderful humanity was, he didn’t actually bother interacting with it.

Matt Smith is entirely different. His performance is excellent, that much should be stated immediately. Some of this is technical – just look at the way that he starts out with Tennant-like quirks, but these are carefully-modulated and thinned-out as the story progresses. However, the choices he makes are more interesting. Even though he has to do all the Doctor-as-demigod stuff, even though his character is closer to Tennant than is comfortable, even though he’s asked to declare “I’m the Doctor” as if he’s declaring himself to be Christ incarnate… Smith actually seems genuinely interested in Amy Pond. When Tennant grinned wildly, it was because he wanted people to know how good-humoured he was. When Smith grins wildly, it’s because he’s delighted. The simple line “She sounds good, your Mum” is more real and empathetic than anything Tennant uttered in four years. Smith, in the first hour, has already become a Doctor that won’t laugh at anyone unless they’re joking. If Tennant was in the kitchen with him, Amelia Pond would have told him to leave as soon as you could say “smug git”. This is no longer a godlike figure condescending to lower himself to our level.

In just over an hour, then, Matt Smith has made Doctor Who palatable again.

So palatable, yes, but will it ever be unexpected? Probably… not. We’ve already seen Daleks in World War II (did you know they’re a bit like Nazis?), the comeback of the Weeping Angels, and Professor River Song – this series will be playing to its strengths, or what it perceives as its strengths. This is aiming to be a Science Fiction series, not a festival of the unexpected, and a Science Fiction series is the one thing that Doctor Who has never comfortably been.

But then, Doctor Who has always been an entryist tract. The period of the programme I remember – that’s McCoy, since you ask – desperately wanted to be popular, and it still managed its moments of magic. Perhaps the most telling thing about this story was how charming it managed to be. This was Doctor Who on the village green, fixed in the mind of most fans as “traditional”, but not actually seen in the new series since it returned. If more or less every plot element was an old one reused, it’s no mean feat to keep pace going as well as the story does. In short, if it was generic, it was fresh and open and wanted us to like it. If it barely added any meat to the bone of other characters, it still portrayed those characters as real people. It’s the most exciting Doctor Who story since 2007, even if there are as many worrying touches as there are reasons to be cheerful. Over the next thirteen weeks, as much as we’ll be watching the Doctor battle monster-of-the-week, we’ll be watching Steven Moffatt’s inner fan do battle with his sneery side. No matter what side wins, it won’t be Great. But it may well be Very Good, and there’s reason enough to believe that will happen.

We might remember that, when Matt Smith was cast, Stephen Moffatt made reference to “the look, the hair.” It’s ironic, because Tennant was the Doctor who was once actually described as having “great hair”, and he did look like he’d spent an hour getting it right. Tennant was the self-aware Doctor, and what smothered his era was the programme’s self-awareness. Smith didn’t even bother checking what he looked like until the end of the episode. The series may be concerned about how it looks, but Smith’s Doctor clearly doesn’t.

So not Great, but Very Good. There’s a sense of this series moving upwards for the first time in a long time and for that reason, it no longer feels like a commercial juggernaut. Almost by default, there’s the feeling of an underdog. The series is on the outside again. Where it belongs.

Obviously, any Irish-based blog which purports to have an interest in current events has to talk about NAMA, and these articles have to be either sober, academic analysis or steeped in outright fury.

There always a problem with trying to dispassionately analyse NAMA, because it simply doesn’t lend itself to dispassionate analysis. The numbers are so large that they’re almost impossible to comprehend on their own merits; sure they’re important, but working up anger about them is as difficult as it is for Sonic the Hedgehog to get into a fury about badly-written machine code. It’s hardly surprising that much of the populist comment blended outrage with irrationality, because it’s difficult to get angry about NAMA without being irrational. Humans tend to be angry about things we instinctively understand, and the notion that we were spending fictional money for the past decade is too frustratingly abstract to really get mad about. It’s easier to believe that the money all vanished because the bankers paid it to themselves in bonuses, because it’s a neater story.

I should say, from the outset, that I’m not really qualified to judge the merits of NAMA v Nationalisation v Letting Anglo Fail and all that. Suffice it to say that any of those options would have been enormously expensive, and it’s not like I can judge which is which. The majority of informed voices that I respect tell me that NAMA is bad value for money, and I tend to believe them; I’ve long been of the opinion that NAMA was specifically created to distance politicians from the decision-making process, and anything comes second to that.

And so, today, I’d like to talk about SSIAs.

SSIAs are one of those bizarre historical oddities that now seem like some sort of ironic joke. Imagine how, nearly ten years ago, everyone in the country had so much money that the government had to pay them to stop spending it. They were the bright idea of Charlie “Just An Average Fella” McCreevy, and you can get an overview here. Short version; they were a five-year saving scheme in which the government gave you a euro for every four you saved. Most SSIAs matured in 2006, which by a remarkable coincidence was just before the General Election.

Now, there’s a few things to remember about SSIAs.

1. SSIAs were spectacularly unfair. They benefited people who could afford to save, and the more you could save, the more money you stood to make. Someone on the minimum wage couldn’t dream of getting an SSIA; they got nothing, but when the billions of SSIA funds flooded onto the market in 2006, it was these people who suffered most from inflation running riot. At the time, there were various questions asked about the cost of SSIAs, or how effective they would be. There was very little discussion about whether it was right to introduce a scheme that gave government money to the middle classes and excluded the poor*.
2. SSIAs were very, very expensive. We aren’t talking NAMA-levels of money, but the numbers weren’t small. The total cost of the scheme was well over €2.5 billion; to put that into perspective, it would buy you 2.5 billion things in a pound shop**. That’s €2.5 billion that could have been put into building schools, for example, and instead was spend on helping the middle classes build extensions. This is a lot, even before you consider the opportunity cost of the scheme. It was introduced, primarily, to reduce inflation; now, if there’s too much money in circulation, the obvious way of dealing with the problem is to raise taxes. Quite what, say, an additional 1% on the top rate of tax would have generated is way beyond my ability to work out, but “more than nothing” is a fair guess.
3. Most tellingly; SSIAs were incredibly popular. The take up on this scheme, this wholly unfair, incredibly expensive and fiscally bonkers scheme, was in and around a million people.

It wouldn’t exactly be fair at this point to lambast the people of Ireland for taking part in something so nasty. They were being offered free money, and there aren’t many people who can turn that down. It’s a fair bet that a huge swathe of the people investing in SSIAs would agree that it was a warped, inequitable scheme, but hey; it’s not like refusing to take part would have made the blindest bit of difference, and if you’ve got a few kids to support then it would have just been short-changing your family for no real reason. Everyone else was doing it; the government were encouraging it, and telling you it was virtuous; if you didn’t take part, then you would be left behind.

So, about bankers-

Hopefully, the parallels with Dem Baxtard Bankers are becoming more obvious. Bankers are just about the only professional group who are now less popular than politicians (apart from taxi drivers, who aren’t so much a professional group as another species). There’s now a story doing the rounds of Seán Fitzpatrick being asked to leave a pub after the rest of the clientéle objected to him being present***. Even Brian Lenihan got in on the act when revealing some of the figures behind NAMA, stating “Truly shocking… our worst fears have been surpassed. They played fast and loose with the economic interests of the country.” The majority of the press joined in, with headlines like “THEY SHOULD BE SHOT” being pretty unambiguous in this regard.

And yet, being angry with bankers (and, to a slightly lesser extent, developers) seems to miss the point to a spectacular degree. I don’t mean this in a hand-wringing “well we’re all part of it” sense – which in this case, is academically true but completely unhelpful, like pointing out that the atoms in the Central Bank are as old as the atoms in Newgrange during a discussion about building conservation – but that we seem to be expecting morals from organisations that do not and cannot have any. Banks, like every other company, have to make maximum profit for their shareholders; they are forced to do this by law. Sure, these institutions are made up of individuals, but that’s where the SSIA comparison is worth remembering. If you’re a bank and you don’t pull every trick in the book to vastly overinflate your balance sheet, then your competitors will, and then they’ll wipe you out of the market. Individual morality doesn’t work as a safety-catch, because we’ve specifically designed the market to eradicate it as a consideration. The only safeguard is the law, and while we denounce what the bankers did as “criminal”, the evidence would suggest otherwise. Arrests are conspicuous by their absence; by and large, the law let them do what they did.

(As an extension of this argument – it might be satisfying to say that the Fitzpatricks and Quinns and McNamaras are all arseholes, and they probably are arseholes, but frankly, that’s their problem. There will always be people in the world who are arseholes, and it wasn’t Seán Fitzpatrick who created a system that rewards arseholedom.)

If the polar bears break out of the zoo and eat a four year-old, you don’t blame the bears; you blame the zookeeper. On Tuesday, Brian Lenihan had strong words for the bankers, and the country concurred. In terms of hypocrisy, and chutzpah, and just the sheer… crapness of the man, this is extraordinary even by his standards. We’re talking about a government who, over the last decade-and-a-half, systematically gave these people exclusive access to power; who drafted every piece of legislation, and made every economic decision, with the welfare of these people foremost in their thoughts; who threw themselves wholeheartedly into opulent banquets and the trappings of power, and gleefully forgot their responsibility to the rest of the country.

After the budget, Lenihan was frequently referred to as “brave” and, in one notable instance, as “a hero”. On Tuesday, the Bravest Man In Ireland (TM) lambasted the bankers, and in so doing he quietly removed the requirement for himself and his colleagues to bear any responsibility. As the various parties debated the economic mistakes of NAMA, and the media embraced the line of a few reckless bankers, the pathetic little perpetrators melted happily from view. Every headline, or enraged blog, or spittle-flecked slice of barstool fury directed at a banker helps them get away with it. That’s why we shouldn’t fall for it. That’s why we should all know better.

*But then again, this was 2001, when no-one was really poor. Well, some people were, but no-one important.

** Joke courtesy of Chris Addison. Never say I don’t credit my sources.

***I should say that I’ve heard this from two separate people, but one of them was a taxi driver, so it’s almost certainly not true.

It’s entirely likely that no-one who reads this has ever seen an entire episode of the Front Line, not least since until Monday I’d never seen a whole episode either. Having viewed an hour of Pat Kenny talking to De Young People about how it, like, totally sucks to be unemployed, I can report is curiously invigorating in a painful and self-hating way; a bit like vigorously whipping yourself with aromatic birch rods.

It should be said at the outset that this was a depressing programme, although not for the reasons it wanted to be. The Front Line has yet to work, largely because it gives too many vested interests too small a platform over its running time, so there is no meaningful debate or justification of a position. You rarely learn anything from The Front Line, and it tends to end up with polarised ideas getting kicked around to limited purpose. Last Monday’s episode wound up being a question of whether Young People Had Been Failed By The Government or whether They’re All Just Pampered And Spoiled, but no-one at any stage suggested that, shock horror, it’s actually possible for both these things to be at least partially true. Failure of government is self-evident, and it’s stupid to tar an entire generation with the brush of whininess. However, it’s also true that many people under twenty-five have grown up against a background of affluence and jobs always being available; it’s difficult to quantify exactly what the social effects of this are, but it’s not stretching a point to suggest they exist.

The most annoying moment came at the end, however, and it didn’t even involve Bill Cullen*. Nor did it involve the self-consciously “young” TDs wheeled on by FF and FG, one of whom couldn’t make a 90-second speech without cue-cards, or the seventy-four times that Pat said “well that’s for another programme” as soon as anyone mentioned government policy.

No, the best bit was at the end, when a young self-made-millionaire called Smugford McTosserton** was asked what he would do to turn the country around. His response: “I’d hire a bunch of people like me.” The rest of his reply was drowned out by the dying breath of satire.

To be fair, the fact that a millionaire-at-twenty-five, open-necked shirt type might think he’s what the country needs isn’t particularly surprising. What’s rather more shocking is the traction this viewpoint gets. Certainly, the political establishment are shamefully quick to pander to the cult of the entrepeneur, but it isn’t the political establishment who send in texts saying “We need people like Michael O’Leary to run the country.” The view is embedded in our culture, to the extent that Pat Kenny can ask whether any members of the government have run their own business and no-one points out that it’s a bloody stupid question.

To sum all this up; we have reached a point where many people genuinely see being an entrepeneur as the only meaningful qualification to run anything. This is desperately muddle-headed, and harks back to what I said about Newstalk’s pre-Budget editorial; that something has gone badly wrong when governing a country and running a business are seen as one and the same thing.

It would be easy to go off on an anti-capitalist rant here, but I’m going to drop the rich-people-are-evil shtick. This isn’t about the need for a new system, new paradigm, new priorities, yadda yadda yadda you know how it goes. Let’s assume – just for the hell of it – that the system we’ve got is the one that works, and we need to get things back on track as opposed to climbing out of a wrecked train. Let’s imagine, briefly, that the word “entrepeneur” doesn’t make you want to clean your inner ear with a breadknife.

Even if you accept all this, entrepeneurs still aren’t suited to government, because their priorities are terminally warped. These people operate within a well-defined system, and any system will always end up being dominated by obsessives. The best footballers are the ones that kick the ball against a wall for six hours; the best novelists are the ones who see the world entirely in terms of books. The most successful people in any field are those with a wholly unreasonable passion, and they are usually shocked that their passion isn’t shared by the world in general. They’re people with unbalanced priorities, basically. The rest of us accept we’re only ever going to be Quite Good At What We Do, and just go for a pint instead. The obsessives rise to the top, driven by the misconception that their chosen passion is the most important thing in the world. If you wanted, you could view some of these people as ill, but with an illness that happens to be socially or economically useful.

Obsessives always think their pet subject is more important than it really is, and you can see this in the shared rhetoric of the self-styled entrepeneur. Both Cullen and Smugford referred to themselves as “being out there, creating jobs.” This is comparable to a midwife claiming s/he creates babies. Certainly, they’re an important part of the process, but the operative term is “part”. Job creation simply isn’t the point of what an entrepeneur does; they expand their business and make money, and jobs are a by-product they do their best to avoid. An entrepeneur will never create a job that doesn’t reward them handsomely for their trouble, and yet Bill Cullen will still ask why he should be taxed like everyone else. This isn’t avarice, it’s just a skewed perspective.

Michael O’Leary running the country would clearly be a disaster, unless you really do think that no corporation tax and social welfare cut in half is a good thing. However, this because he’s evil, or greedy, or obnoxious; it’s just that he isn’t capable of seeing the bigger picture, and assumes what’s good for his own pet project is good for everyone. O’Leary, Cullen and Smugford belong in the same category as those boring doctors that talk about smoking and drinking as social diseases, or bloggers who say anyone that doesn’t like Blake’s 7 shouldn’t be allowed to vote***. Entrepeneurs are unique as a group who have elevated selfishness to an ideology. They’re nerds, basically, albeit an alpha-male variant.

Last Monday, Lucinda Creighton trotted out the David Cameron-inspired soundbite that politics is broken, but no-one ever suggests why this is (beyond broad phrases like corruption, which is a symptom of the problem rather than a cause). And so I’d make this suggestion; as we turned towards market-driven politics and a business-dominated culture, too many people have forgotten what politics is for.

The word “ideology” is a difficult word to use in politics, particularly now that our first shot at having ideologues in power has been such a disaster. The Greens have (in theory) a perfectly decent social manifesto, but in practice they’ve steered clear of the big picture and sent out excited tweets about electric cars – because they’re nerds, and that’s all they’re really interested in. If anything, the role of the politician is to sift through all the weighted advice, and make a decision that’s best for everyone from a social, economic, legal and cultural point of view. The only overriding passion needs to be a broad social vision, coupled with pragmatism about putting it into place. That’s a hell of a job description. The bunch we have now clearly aren’t up to it, but you’re certainly not going to get any social vision by embracing The Cult of The Entrepeneur.

The can-do rhetoric and false simplicities of the market might sound liberating, but it only works within a narrow context. Some of these people are admirable in their own framework, and they’re as important to our economy as the labourers, tradesmen, artisans and professionals out there. Ultimately, though, they’re a bunch of people who take the work or creativity of others and – to go all Prop Joe on yo’ ass – buy it for a dollar, then sell it for two. They aren’t leaders, they’re shopkeepers. That their ego gets the better of them is only natural; that is, ultimately, why they do what they do. They need to believe they’re important. We don’t. We shouldn’t.

*For foreign-type readers, he’s the Irish version of Donald Trump or Alan Sugar. Except, erm, not as charming.

**Obviously, I’m joking. His real name wasn’t Smugford McTosserton. It was Slimey O’Twatbag.

***In the words of Stewart Lee: there is a subtext there. Oh yeah.

“Media bias” is an oft-quoted phrase, so it’s a shame that the conspiracy theories are so contradictory. The obligatory far-right will tell you that the BBC / broadsheets / RTÉ / international media are promoting a broad left-wing agenda, while those on the left will claim that exactly the same organs are promoting a pro-establishment neoliberal doctrine. The most well-known biased outlet is Fox News, spewing – as it does – right-wing ill-informed drivel to a frightening percentage of the world. And yet, fans of Fox News will tell you that it’s not biased, that it simply counteracts the bias of the rest of America’s news output. It calls itself “Fair and Balanced”, and many people believe quite firmly that it is.

So, amid the accusations of bias in various directions, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that there really isn’t any bias at all, or at least not much of one; that the complaints are made by people that don’t consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they’re the ones with the bias. It’s a slightly fatuous response, but there’s more than a grain of truth in it.

However, many people seem to miss the central point; the media’s innate bias isn’t to the right or the left, but to itself.

“Media” is increasingly a vague term, but I see the main problems with bias being connected to cultural output, which as any right-thinking person knows is more important that trivialities like news. However, it would be churlish not to pick the obvious news-based example here, because it illustrates this point so clearly.

The strange, almost universal truism about the George Lee affair was that Fine Gael failed to use Lee’s “talents”. There have been differing opinions on where the blame should be apportioned, but most of the commentary predicated itself on this sense of loss. And yet, the key point is this: there is little or no evidence that George Lee had any real talents at all.

I already feel like I’ve been stating the obvious, so I might as well go further. Politics, grubby trade though it may be, is a particular type of occupation with all sorts of skill-sets (most of which revolve around lying, cheating, and being a two-faced wanker). Assuming someone will definitely be good at it, on the basis of a media career, is as fundamentally wrong-headed as assuming that a cast member of Holby City can carry out open-heart surgery, or that Martin Johnson will automatically be a good rugby coach. Lee would appear to be well-intentioned and intelligent, but there’s no reason to assume he’d be any use as a politician. I mean, I’ve got some pretty decent political policies (I still maintain my idea that you’re allowed to vote in one thing per year, i.e. if you express a preference in X-Factor you lose your vote in a General Election, is pretty much flawless), but I’d be useless, since whenever I appeared on The Front Line I’d be too busy punching Breda O’Brien to answer the questions.

So the core assumption, that Lee is a form of political dynamo / economic maestro, seems to be based on him being smarter than the other people who work for RTÉ. Lee is by no means the most brilliant economist in the country, but television doesn’t really care about the rest of the country; it’s only aware of its own ecosystem. EDIT: I really shouldn’t have forgotten to mention Dermot Bannon being described as “one of the country’s leading architects” on an episode of The Restaurant, which is the most extreme example of this insular delusion.

(I should clarify that television is by no means unique here; any institution ends up operating according to its own rules. This is why doctors ended up acting as a self-appointed elite, politicians become detached from their electorate, and architects managed to systematically fuck up their own industry and then blame it on everyone else.)

You could pull up all sorts of examples of this if you wanted, such as the news referring to the “poor public performance” of Politician A when in fact it was only the TV camera crews that were unimpressed, or – to pluck out a more recent example – the constant reports of “mounting pressure” on John Terry, when all the “mounting pressure” was generated by the news outlets themselves.

However, I’m not that interested in this phenomenon in the news. I’m more interested in its effect on our culture.

You might start with this from That Newspaper I Read. It’s a(nother) story of the death of television and the convergence with the Interweb, based largely on what looks like some hard work from SeeSaw’s PR agency. At the core of a ooh-changeing-face-of-the-industry piece is this: “Microsoft research that suggests one in seven 18-to-24-year-olds no longer watches linear TV”.

Now, no-one’s going to argue that this isn’t a significant change, but nor does it indicate cataclysm. This means that 6 out of 7 of these people do, which isn’t exactly terrible market penetration. However, television isn’t really interested in people, it’s interested in “People”. It’s an insular environment that listens to trends and demographics, and doesn’t question the narrative assembled by its peers. TV People listen to other TV People, and It’s About The Internet, Stupid is their prevailing mantra. This is just an expansion of this (news-based) opinion piece by Dan Gardner, courtesy of Charlie Brooker.

If 6 out of 7 of the most internet-savvy demographic are still watching television, then it clearly has a cultural role to play. However, it’s so unaware of how the populace views it, so isolated from its own users, that it doesn’t even seem to consider what that role might be.

Television can do something that internet streaming never can. The first is straightforward, TV presents its entertainment in such a way that everyone watches it at once. This might seem fatuous, but it’s no more ludicrous than the fact that the principle, lingering attraction of theatre is that the performance is happening right there in front of you. There’s an immediacy to a television broadcast that isn’t there when you watch exactly the same thing on DVD. More importantly, there’s a social cohesion from being able to discuss a broadcast the next day at work. Cinema has been chasing the notion of the “water-cooler movie” for years. This is something that TV can just do, but it seems to be forgetting this. Before Doctor Who was relaunched in 2005, TV channels were openly disdainful of its chances, because conventional wisdom was that Viewing By Appointment was a old hat. In fact, it was one of the most defining things about the series. Life On Mars, The Office and even (god help us) X-Factor ride on the same wave.

The related benefit of television is best illustrated by another quote from the Guardian article; “watching it online means you can avoid the annoying ads and you can watch whatever you want whenever you want”. The best way to sum this up is Choice, and everybody likes choice.

Or do they? Perhaps the most noticeable thing about contemporary television is that it no longer even ackowledges the importance of scheduling. It’s not so long ago that every channel thought in terms of providing an evening’s entertainment; where a trailer at six in the evening would list every single programme between then and midnight. And, frankly, there’s something pleasant about putting your viewing in someone else’s hands. There’s a skill to scheduling, just like there’s a skill to a DJ composing a set; this used to be tangible, but it’s now limited to nostalgia-trips like The Liver Birds Night on BBC 2 or Some Minor Celebrities Show Us Programmes They Used To Watch. That one’s on Channel 4, natch. Instead, we’re being sold the line that digging up our own programmes, as recommended by review sites we found on Google or someone mentioning it on Twitter, is automatically a better option than finding a channel you trust and letting them present you with an option.

And there lies the rub; for that to work, the programming has to be good, and so much of it is now so bad. Ultimately, focusing on the method of delivery has allowed the channels to stop questioning the quality of what they provide. It’s obvious to anyone that there hasn’t been a decent British comedy since The Office – Peep Show is a partial exception, but Peep Show is no better than all right – but why would anyone notice, when the executives and back-slapper writers are laughing and pretending that The IT Crowd and Pulling are works of genius?

Too many people disparage popular culture, but television remains the single most powerful medium in Western society. At the moment, we’re seeing the results of a near-terminal detachment. Television tends to be self-renewing, but the internet argument is different; the talk is of tipping points and revolution. This is a spectacle of a medium ignoring the very things that can make it unique; this current argument resembles a theatre responding to falling attendances by putting on worse and worse acts, then sending its best artists out to busk in the streets for business.