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

In Private

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 14:06:00 +0000

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.

In The Cartoon Graveyard

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:58:00 +0000

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.

Oh, You Know What This Is About

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:02:00 +0000

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.

Special Investment

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:37:00 +0000

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.

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*.
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.
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.

Just Business

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:46:00 +0000

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.

On Telly

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 17:44:00 +0000

"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.

The Public Realm

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:49:00 +0000

Towards the end of last week, Eamonn Lillis was found guilty of the manslaughter of his wife and sentenced to seven years in jail.

Written as baldly as that, it's almost surprising that it made the news at all. And yet the fascination with the Eamonn Lillis case is only now beginning to fade. Today, the Irish Independent have helpfully told us that he'll be living in the most luxurious cell a prison can offer; The Evening Herald were good enough to report terrifying stories of breadknives, gleaned from the perfectly reliable Bloke With No Surname Who Rang Liveline; The Irish Examiner has reported, predictably, of various peoples' fury at the sentence; and just about every paper has talked of how the Gardaí have "defended" their decision not to expose a witness to a rugby scrum. Due to most Irish tabloids never bothering their arse to put anything online, I can't link to the stories about how Wife-Killer Lillis actually cooked his daughter a big dinner before going in the clink. Jaysus, cooking a dinner. Like an ordinary person, rather than the six-headed monster we know him to be.

In short, much of the coverage has been obscene, and was lambasted by the judge himself. The Irish Times editorialises on this today, although does so without coming to any conclusions whatsoever. Probably because there were no trade unions involved.

There are two things that underpin discussion of any sort of questionable newspaper coverage, be it a manslaughter trial that happens to involve people who aren't poor, or Wayne Rooney having a thing for grannies. Namely, the price we pay for a free press; and the fairly inarguable fact that these stories wouldn't happen if people refuse to engage with them.

Obviously, a free press is essential-

Well, hang on a minute. We like to talk about the freedom of the press, but we seldom think about what that means - hardly surprising when 'freedom' can mean the right to choose between a Mac and a PC. Whenever a sensationalised story comes around, it will inevitably be justified by talk of the public's "right to know"... but what does the public have a right to know, exactly? I certainly don't feel I have a "right" to know about Eamonn Lillis' daughter, because her existence doesn't affect my life one way or the other. The word "right" automatically means it's based on a need, and I don't need to know anything about the background of anyone involved.

And this clearly doesn't apply to the profession of court reporting, which is an important and (I imagine) rather thankless task. I do need to know about his trial - or at least, I need that information to be available - because the operation of the law is a fundamental part of society, and the media play a key part in it being seen to be done.

The main restriction of the press' freedom is defined by defamation law, and that can be more or less summarised by "don't make shit up, lads." Discussion of the free press assumes that the media have a right to talk about more or less whatever they want, so long as it's true. In fact, there's no reason for this to be the case, even if it's difficult to imagine a workable law which would restrict what's supposed to be fair game. We've reached a point where it's automatically assumed that the media have a "right" to shove cameras in the face of Jean Treacy - you know, the woman who's not been found guilty of any crime whatsoever - or follow around a seventeen year-old in hope of a photo-op. They don't, and it's going to be impossible to discuss this - or any other form of privacy issue - if this isn't addressed.

So, in the absence of any real control of their topics, how do newspapers decide what they're going to talk about? This is usually where "The public wants..." comes in; certainly, it's self-evident that the media wouldn't bother reporting on stories if they didn't shift papers, and certainly true that the press we get is a reflection of the society we're in.

The tone of that argument is one of a society that's uncomfortable with the idea of elites. We're allowed to have them, so long as we don't acknowledge that they exist. Ultimately, newspapers are institutions that, for all their tribulations, inhabit a position of privilege; they control the spread of information, and they're written by people who are better-educated than the majority of the population. They are an elite, by definition; even phrases like "If people didn't read these stories," with its loaded use of the word "people", gives the game away pretty sharpish (the person talking about "people" doesn't often include themselves in the classification). In so doing, it transfers responsibility away from the institutions, who should know better, to people who demonstrably don't.

The way that we refer to dismissively to tabloids, as if they're unavoidable rags to keep the plebs happy, is the culmination of this perverse elevation of the "educated classes" into a position of an elite without explicitly saying so. A paper like The Irish Times, or Sunday Business Post, or The Guardian, avoids lurid storylines... but that's only because they're not interested in the market, and their chosen demographic views such stories distastefully. Newspapers know who they're aimed at. If the Irish Times occasionally produces a feature on life in a dodgy housing estate, it's written entirely from the perspective of a well-educated middle-class person on a breathless foray into enemy territory. People from Disadvantaged Backgrounds (I'm using capital letters to convey an ironic tone, and I've already put educated classes in inverted commas) aren't thick, or stupid, or genetically predisposed to rubberneck and human tragedy. However, the Quality Broadsheets (yep, capitals again, same reason) make no attempt to understand anything about this section of society, because it's not where their market is. They're abandoned as a market who probably just want to read The Star, and then we get sniffy when they actually go and read it.

Look at it this way, and the institution of our print media becomes obviously an elite; and, because we're so unhappy to even acknowledge that elites exist, and that they aren't by definition a bad thing, we struggle to discuss the responsibilities that come with the term.

We're perfectly happy with this state of affairs in television, which is why all free-to-air channels are given a public service remit as part of their charter... oddly, given the problems that newspapers are having in finding funding, the notion of "public service newspapers" would be a way of securing state subsidies, regulating the nastier press stories, and setting out clearly what is and isn't in the public interest. It would provide for a press regulatory body with teeth, and need not compromise objectivity. The British Government ain't too fond of the BBC, but they still fund it.

Newspapers and news coverage, matters. The Lillis affair has shown, in so many ways, how badly it can malfunction. And yet we shrug our shoulders, mutter about freedom of the press, and assume it has to work this way. It doesn't.

The Cost of Schooling

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:47:00 +0000

One of the favourite memes of the moment is "tough decisions", currently getting most of its airing by Dem Across De Water now that our Budget's been and gone. It comes to mind now, with the news that the inquiry into banking practices - you know, a public inquiry, not a visit from the fraud squad or anything - is announced with the news that it won't include any of the government's actions in propping up the bank. This has been widely described as shocking, although it's that alternative use of the word "shock" that implies no surprise whatsoever.

It's a common trait of power that it avoids scrutiny; our current rulers dislike examination every bit as much as their predecessors. What makes them interesting isn't that they don't want their Tough Decisions to be scrutinised by the general public at large - this is standard. At the moment, you can go further; more or less everything that's been done in the last few years seems to be borne of a wish to avoid making any decisions at all. It's so systemic that, more than protecting the wealthy or remaining in power, it can now be seen as their main raison d'etre.

The big example's looming here, so there's no choice but to address it. NAMA's been described by most commentators as a waste of money; it may not make sense economically, but it makes perfect sense if you view it as a mechanism to take decision-making away from the government - in fact, this is more or less the only 'advantage' it has over a case-by-case nationalisation model. The Taxation Commission, or An Bórd Snip, are more examples of outsourcing the process of decision-making; the ongoing protection of business is motivated by a desire to let the status quo proceed untouched. Altering that would be a hell of a decision, and decision is no longer what government does.

It's within this framework that we might look at Public Private Partnerships.

Public Private Partnership is an increasingly important part of how we build major projects in Ireland. The government's PPP site states that PPP Projects will account for 13.6% of the National Development Plan 2007-2013: that's €7.7billion, not including another €1.6 billion for public tolls.

In short, we spend a lot of money on them. There's all sorts of PPP Projects - toll roads, water treatment, and the LUAS are notable types - and there's a list of the live projects here: scroll across to the right hand side and you can see, indicatively, how much these projects generally cost. The numbers are impressively vague, but they aren't small. The theory is simple; get a private company to build and run capital projects for a certain number of years, pay them off year-on-year, and take ownership of the project down the line, having taken advantage of the (drumroll please) Greater Efficiency Of The Private Sector.

In September 2005, the government announced that they would be building 27 schools using the PPP model. The model is effectively borrowed wholesale from the UK; the true cost of them has been called into question more than once, as with this example (Monbiot, on-form). The first bundle of four schools should be opened by next year, and the second bundle of 6 has seen designs and costs submitted to the government. These competitions generally entered by large companies, often UK-based, who have made bidding for Public Private Partnerships the backbone of their income.

Before the 2005 announcement, 5 schools had been built as a pilot project by a UK company called Jarvis PLC. They're repeatedly described by the government as a "learning experience", which is effectively code for "disaster".

The build cost of the schools is approximately €80m, which is more than traditional methods would have cost. The twenty-five year cost - that's for building the schools, maintaining the building, and providing IT support - isn't known exactly, but the current estimate is €283 million.

Yes. €283 million.

Subtract the construction costs and you're looking at €203 million to maintain five newly-built schools, whose average attendance is 700 pupils. That's an average of over €1.6m per school, every year, for twenty-five years. This is basic building maintenance, cleaning, and security; it doesn't include teachers' salaries, or even energy bills. The best indicator of the undemanding nature of the contract is that the winning company, Jarvis, doesn't even have an office in Ireland*. The Auditor General's estimates put this as being 8-13% more than a traditional public procurement would have cost. On the face of it, this looks like a conservative estimate.

So the pilot failed, and failed badly; the government pushed on anyway, maintaining the line of the faster, better, quicker nature of the private sector.

As for Bundle 1...

Well, there's the rub. The figures for Bundle 1 aren't available. Nor is Bundle 2, or indeed any detailed breakdowns or value-for-money analyses from the Pilot Bundle. They are exempt from - say - Freedom of Information requests, because they are commercially sensitive. Apparently:-

"The disclosure of this record would have a negative impact on future negotiations on PPP procurement as it would disclose the Department's position on its requirements and the detailed criteria by which each bid was evaluated and the results of that evaluation as well as negotiations and positions taken by bidders in this process."

(That's from the response of my own, refused, Freedom of Information request. Thankfully, this might be reconsidered when the PPP programme is complete. Hooray!)

This is nonsense, of course. Firstly, because the more a company knows about a clients' requirement, the better they can meet their needs; the notion that that the projects will be damaged because the companies know the government requirements is ludicrous. Secondly, the bidders are privately debriefed anyway, and the same companies tend to be involved in these projects. They already know how they fared and where they failed. If anything, it gives repeat bidders an unfair advantage.

And so we simply don't know whether they're good value or whether they're not, because the figures aren't available. All we know is that the Pilot Bundle wasn't; that they're proving not to be so in the UK; and that hundreds of million of euro of exhequer funds are already being spent (the Department of Education alone spent around the €30m mark in 2009), but the precise figures aren't considered fit for public consumption.

As for the other advantages? Quicker? It'll be the best part of 5 years after the announcement that the first schools open. Innovative? Construction firms don't do 'innovative', they do cheap, traditional, and quick. The schools are, in design terms, strictly bog-standard stuff - since the projects are fast-tracked there's almost no consultation, and everyone is under pressure to keep costs as low as possible. The bundling of the schools - this is to make the projects worthwhile for the private sector - means that a good design can be excluded if it's bundled with a few poor ones, or a series of good schools might be let down because the maintenance company prices the job too high.

And yet, for all the Tough Decisions we're making, this particular project shows no sign of slowing down. Bundle 2 has appointed a preferred tenderer, and Bundle 3 is in the pipeline. You might wonder why, given the halt on capital expenditure. An interesting point to consider, of course, might be that DBOM (Design, Build, Operate and Maintain) projects - such as the schools - aren't actually classified as General Government Debt . No wonder governments love them.

But that isn't really it. We should return to that "avoid decisions" mantra. One of the other listed benefits of Public Private Partnership is that it removes risk - a meaningless term when applied to schools. More accurate to say that it removes responsibility; it removes the possibility of headlines for late delivery, it prevents the government taking flak for leaky roofs. That's worth any amount of money, when the papers are on your back about classes in portacabins. The only decision the government has to make is who to pay; and, perfectly, that decision is taken behind closed doors. By the criteria it sets itself, this is perfect government.

*Although they have had a series of high-profile problems with the rail networks in the UK, as a result of which their reputation plummeted, and at one stage their share price fell from £6.50 to 3p. Because that's how efficient they are.

On Weather and Wossy

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:01:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And So, It Ends

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:02:00 +0000

In which I stop babbling about social and political issues, and focus on something that's actually important for a change.

So David Tennant is no longer The Doctor, and has been replaced by a kid doing a David Tennant impression. Whatever your opinion about Doctor Who, you'd be hard-pushed to argue that the series hasn't changed massively since Eccleston burst on to the scene in 2005. It's difficult to remain anti-establishment while being immensely successful; if Doctor Who's first season was a subversive tract dressed up as a family drama, David Tennant has left behind a commercial juggernaut, firmly esconced among the detritus of showbizness.

This isn't to say it's been rubbish, although the overall quality has generally been on the slide since Eccleston's glorious début. This isn't surprising; all power corrupts, and Russell T. Davies is now one of the most powerful men in television. When Davies started out, he was paranoid that the press were out to get Doctor Who at the first sign of weakness; now he basks in the glow of Heat Magazine and tabloid approval, and appears to produce the sort of thing he knows these people will like. Dramatic revelations accompanied by whooshing noises, flashbacks whenever a character remembers anything from the past, and a look that's as shiny and colourful as an episode of Hustle. It doesn't matter; Davies leaves as the genius who reinvented Doctor Who.

But... did he reinvent it, exactly? Certainly, many of the things Davies is credited with "transforming" about Doctor Who, by that tedious, uninformed, know-sod-all-about-Who-but-like-to-pretend-otherwise body known as the national media, were firmly in place beforehand. Even if you ignore those poxy, rubbish, Just For Geeks spin-off novels*, the new series followed-on almost seamlessly from the 1989 version. The last ever story from the old series** featured a working-class companion whose development was at the heart of the series, housing estates, council-flats and the companions' group of friends; weirdly, the last person we saw the Doctor meet in the old series was indistinguishable from Jackie Tyler***. The real difference between the two was that Doctor Who 2005 had an experienced and competent production team, a stable background, a decent budget and superb leads. This wasn't the case in 1989.

If anything, then, Russell T. Davies got credit where he warranted none, and missed out on the kudos he deserved. His simple decision to dress the Doctor in a leather jacket and prattle on in a Manchester accent seems an obvious call now - it was done with a great lightness of touch - but everyone assumed that Eccleston would be using his posh voice and dressed in Victorian clothing. Similarly, the notion that we'd make return journeys to the Powell Estate, and that Rose's Mum would feature in over half the season's episodes, seemed bonkers before it went and happened. If Davies' tweaks were tiny, their effects were huge. It wasn't that the show became "savvy" or "sexy" or (heaven help us) "glossy", it was that he rooted it in the real world. The final episode featured, at the core of the story, a scene in which Rose ate chips with her Mum and boyfriend, desperately fretting about what she could do to help the Doctor, stuck in the year 200,000. Jackie's response, that it was a long way from here, was gloriously fatuous and exactly what we tell ourselves every day.

Hence, the show became - as it always had been - massively important. A friend of mine - not a fan, I hasten to add - once said that "it teaches children about love and rebellion", and I can't really put it any better than that.

So let's skip forward, to David Tennant bowing out, and look at why the disappointment is so keenly felt.

Now, let's just ignore "plot mechanics" and "structure" here. The main issue with The End of Time, particularly Part 2, is that it's really boring; it features Time Lords sitting around a table, talking, forever. There's a place for that analysis, but that can happen elsewhere. The gap between mainstream cheerleaders and SF fans is now so big that, if I mention that the Doctor shooting the Master-copying machine makes no fucking sense whatsoever, then I'll be lumped in with the dullards who complained that the radiation-proof cupboards have gaps at the bottom of the doors, or complaining that Tennant's fall through the roof is further than Tom Baker fell at the end of Logopolis. The ethos of new-era Who has always been that anything can happen, provided it's cool; this was made windolene-clear from the moment Eccleston waved his sonic screwdriver around and saved the day with a test-tube of anti-plastic. The science isn't important, so let's accept that it isn't and engage with The End of Time in its own terms. This is a show about Love and Rebellion, not science.

And yet it still, patently, doesn't work. At times it misses the mark by such a long way that it's actually offensive.

Just as Eccleston's Doctor was a rude, capricious vigilante who was genuinely dangerous, Eccleston's episodes were rooted in the real world. The End of Time, though, never once seems real. There's a brief mention of Barack Obama and the economic crisis, but this doesn't go anywhere. The only real, substantial characters we meet are the regulars; the villain, Mr Naismith, is supposed to be Very Very Sinister before we've even met him, and we learn nothing more about him. No, we're in SF netherworld; where rich people find alien technology and have private armies of scientists, and two figures facing each other down a dark alley is "dramatic" rather than "utterly hackneyed and shit". It doesn't relate to the real world, because it doesn't take place in anything like the real world.

This is why Catherine Tate is the worst thing ever to happen to the programme, not because she's a terrible actress (which she was, early on, but she's quite good in her later stories), but because she's a comedy chav in a programme that's supposed to be about ordinary people. The best thing about Who, when it came back, was its firm conviction that Average Anybodies were as noble and important as nice Guardian reader types. Bring in Tate, and the immediate subtext is that ordinary people can, at best, hope to be amusingly loud and stupid. And so you end up where we're expected to be excited by Time Lords narrating the plot around a table, simply because we're told they're important. And Wilfred Mott is presented as wonderful and marvellous, more or less because he unwaveringly believes in the Doctor's magnificence.

They almost get away with this, largely because Bernard Cribbins is a superb actor and could make you like anyone... until we're done with that plot, and we have to watch Tennant deign to save Wilfred's life. Dear God, it's a horrible scene; Tennant throwing a tantrum, complaining about Wilfred blundering around endangering himself, shouting that it isn't fair. And there, really, we have the true heart of the programme; the nice intelligent people might act to save the ordinary folk, but only after they've made them feel well and truly shit about it, and made it clear that they're doing it out of superhuman niceness. Ordinary people, they're wonderful. Stupid, but noble and cute and faithful. You know, like a pet dog. Tennant may tell Wilfred "it's an honour", but we're left in no doubt who's on the higher plane of existence.

(At this point, it's worth comparing this with Peter Davison's regeneration in The Caves of Androzani. Davison stumbles into a war zone, and he and his companion get themselves infected with a killer poison. Davison undergoes torture, fights off his own death through sheer willpower, gives Peri - who he's only just met - the antidote ahead of himself, and dies not knowing whether he's going to regenerate or not. No-one can claim that Caves isn't emotional; when the Doctor dies, he's clearly terrified and alone. And yet Davison's Doctor doesn't ever stop and tell us all what a heroic thing he's doing, because he's too concerned about his friend to even consider it. I watched The Caves of Androzani a few days before Part 2 of The End of Time, so no wonder it seemed so cheap.)

And so we're left with a show that eulogises humans, but treats them with contempt****; a show so busy telling us how brilliant we all are, that it never has to show a human doing anything worthwhile. A show that shows us Donna's wedding day as a valedictory moment of happiness, even though we were already told she's "making do"; and the Doctor brings her a lottery ticket, because millions of quid is as close to happiness as stupid people can get. A show whose valedictory farewell to Cap'n Jack is the Doctor helping him to score someone in a bar, which might be the most crass scene in Doctor Who history.

And so, Russell T. Davies has bowed out. Worth your time, ladies and gentlemen; the man who not only brought Doctor Who back, but had the courage to make it mean something. And yet, the thing he set up has become exactly what it set out to attack; navel-gazing, self-satisfied, elitist, contemptuous.

Tennant's last words were "I don't want to go." It was more than time he did; a fine actor, sure, but for too long now he's been making things easy for the writers. Eccleston's Doctor wasn't charming, or irreverent, or a hearthrob; he blew up buildings, called you a stupid ape, and couldn't be bothered telling you whether your boyfriend was alive or dead. Eccleston forced the writers to work hard, and automatically gave the show an edge. With Tennant, too many writers have happily churned out scenes where he talks very fast and / or looks intense 'n' broody.

So he regenerates, at a time when the programme desperately needs regeneration. This is one of the great things about Doctor Who; it is, ultimately, self-renewing. The only difficulty is that the programme has become so hyped, so much the product of drooling backslappery, that it may not change until the public realise how bored they've become. The End of Time is all noise and spectacle, but it's rudderless and goes nowhere; a perfect symbol of the show itself. A wholesale reinvigoration could make it matter again.

*One of which was written by Russell T. Davies, so the fact that they introduced a shaven-headed leather-coat wearing Doctor and an all-encompassing Time War which destroyed Gallifrey isn't exactly irrelevant.

**I should mention that it's called Survival and was mostly set in the London suburb of Perivale, just in case there's any non-fans reading this. No, seriously.

***To the extent that I'll bet someone's written fanfic in which they're related. She complains about "flippin' cats", mostly.

****Which, interestingly, is almost exactly the opposite of how the Eccleston season worked.

...in the Country

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:25:00 +0000

I have, as is common practice for me, spent my Christmas getting pleasantly drunk in West Cork. On Christmas Day itself I watched Into The West and The Commitments on the same day, and the idea that we once made films that looked upon Travellers and Unemployed People From Ballymun in a vaguely positive light seems as quaint as watching scenes from a 1970s thriller in which someone is desperately trying to find a working payphone*. Sandwiched between them was Once, and as moany as Glen Hansard might be, there's something genuinely shocking about watching scenes of a woman walking down Gardiner Street at night and not getting mugged or threatened. Similarly, there was something surprising about watching a sweet-natured drama about people who don't have televisions. We should take it for granted that people from disadvantaged communities / areas shouldn't be portrayed as if they're all fundamentally evil criminals in the making. Somehow, we don't.

Taking a community on its own terms is, of course, something we have a difficulty doing. I have a number of ways to enlarge on our culture of Scumbagdom at this point: I could discuss the recent Prime Time Investigates, in which Ireland's crime epidemic** was thoughtfully blamed on working-class people with nasty accents; or I could enlarge upon our general attitude towards the Travelling Community, and how we appear to blame them for behaving like they're a discriminated minority who live in poverty, for no better reason than that's exactly what they are.

Still, the current topic of choice seems to be the Urban-Rural Divide (URD for short, as I feel acronyms befit meaningless phrases), which barrels its way to the top of the agenda whenever lovable rural non-media-aware folk start bellyaching on the television about something or other. You know, planning permission, or drink-driving, or shaking the hand of a convicted sex offender en masse.

There's an awful lot said about the URD, much of it absolute cock. It's a phrase usually used by Dublin-dwellers to lay every problem at the culchies' door without actually making it sound like they're all ignorant horse-fucking savages; a convenient shrug of "ah they don't know any better", while not feeling even vaguely pressured into understanding what living in a rural environment entails. There were a few sniffy dismissals of the URD being applied to the difference between Listowel and Meen, a village four miles away. But... if you grow up in a rural village, then your background will be primarily agricultural; it's highly likely you'll have spent most of your life moving cows, saving hay, cutting turf, and other such pursuits which urbanites feel don't really happen any more. Grow up in Listowel, and your parents probably work a steady-hour job, you live within walking distance of a supermarket, and your car breaking down doesn't bring your life to a grinding halt.

So - actually, the difference between a small village and a small town is significant, thanks very much; in many ways, it's a greater divide than exists between Listowel and Limerick. However, to those brought up in Generation Urban, that distinction is meaningless. Country folk all do non-specific country things, then go and elect Michael Lowry and the Healy-Raes. Differentiating between them is like racially segregating Smurfs.

If the electoral choices do seem indefensible at first glance, then... let's imagine what it's like to be part of a Rural Community (TM). On the coast, to throw another variant into the mix. You'll have seen, in the last twenty years, the population of your townland plummet; your sons / daughters head off to live in a major city, as the only place they can find work; the indigenous industry (fishing) decimated; the foundations of your way of have been fundamentally life eroded; and all this while the central establishment whistles blithely and talks about progress. You'll probably have developed, quite quickly, the idea that the central establishment of the country doesn't really give a shit about what you do. In those circumstances, the corrupt gombeen of a TD or Councillor is pretty much the only man who professes to care about the good of your community. If he's swiped a bit of money from a builder, or the government, here or there, then you frankly couldn't care less; these are the precise people who've looked on as your environment has been eroded, so it just shows he has the same contempt for the establishment as you have. It's all very well to talk about "principles", but when your life is disappearing around you, you don't have the luxury of principles. You just want employment in your town, and a hospital within forty miles of your house.

If that's a melodramatic depiction then, when we're talking about attitudes, perception is all that really matters. Certainly, many of the difficulties afflicting rural communities are self-inflicted - however, it's worth remembering that most disadvantaged communities end up in a situation where self-oppression is the biggest obstacle they have to face. I could pick all sorts of global examples here, but I'll just say "The Wire" and let you work out the rest yourselves. It's all very well for media-saturated, middle-class urbanites (like me) to talk about the need to be positive, but this is from a position where our environment is a central concern of the powers that be. Even if we don't always agree with them, we do at least know they're aware of our existence, and we're aso used to this that we don't even view it as a privilege.

This, ultimately, is why the Prime Time Scapegoats programme was so offensive. It wasn't the lack of context, or the tabloid levels of insight, or the close-ups of the subjects' rotting teeth and heroin injections; it's that the people who made it felt justified in judging the subjects by their own moral criteria. Even though the subjects live in grinding, institutionalised poverty, and the filmmakers' biggest problem is when the box-set of Flash Forward is coming out.

It's within this framework that the Danny Foley handshake affair has persistently failed to be discussed. The closest anyone has come to "context" is some slightly desperate vox-pop pieces in the national newspapers, but these are desperately compromised by their nature; to most people outside of our major cities, the Indo and the Irish Times are dublin-centric mouthpieces that only show an interest in them if a newsworthy tragedy has happened.

Certainly, the dozens of people who showed up at the sentencing did something foully insensitive; show support with whomever you like, but doing it in a public forum with the victim present? It's a horrible thing to do; whether or not it was calculated to make Foley's victim feel intimidated, it certainly had that effect. At best, it's callous and inconsiderate. At worst, it's a calulated attempt to make a young woman feel ashamed for standing up for her fundamental rights.

Again, though; let's look at it from the other side of the prism, if only for a moment, and set aside the educated principles that a privileged urban existence has bought us. This isn't to justify or excuse what those people did, just to try and understand it. There's been far too much loose talk about Listowel being a town of rape-sympathisers, or Kerry being some walled-off crazy part of the country where every village if populated by the cast of Deliverance, and it has to stop. We've reached a point where our taste for cartoon villains is no longer funny.

Most of these people were probably completely unaware of the facts of the trial, and received their information through gossip and fourth-hand rumours along the lines of "yer wan went out into the car park with him, then suddenly she's calling him a rapist". Many of them, as rural people, might have an inbuilt prejudice against the establishment that neglected them, and consequently against authority. They have grown up in a background of the community appearing, en masse, for significant moments in the lives of all the inhabitants. Even if a lot of those feelings might not really make coherent sense... if you don't engage people in discussion on their own terms, there's no reason that their views have to be coherent. Until someone is engaged in an even-handed discussion, then knee-jerk prejudice and instinctive bias will do them just fine.

Much as the narrative of a misogynist or patriarchal society has a huge element of truth to it, there's a further factor to throw into the mix. Foley was a popular, churchgoing, well-known figure; the woman in question lives, apparently, in a working-class estate in Listowel. Let's not forget that we've been carefully conditioned, by our media, to believe that we know what a sex offender looks like; a sex offender is a scanger kid in a hoodie with a shitty half-beard, or a middle-aged man in a dirty raincoat.*** It's hardly surprising that people respond with a murmur of "he isn't that sort of person", because they've been told for years that criminals come from the criminal classes; and Prime Time Investigates, and its ilk, has left us in no doubt what they look like. Reverse their backgrounds, then ask yourself where the sympathies would lie.

What we're left with is the spectre of one underclass turning against another. It's nasty, and tasteless, and foul. But it isn't a weird anomaly, and it certainly isn't surprising.

Here's to 2010, everybody****.

*The other oddity is that everyone in The Commitments - which has otherwise stood the test of time far better than anyone could reasonably expect - spends their time leching over Angeline Ball, and yet barely glancing at Maria Doyle Kennedy. There's obviously a convention that the girl with the blonde hair and lipstick should be the object of male desires, but there needs to be limits. I could happily devote an entire issue to Reasons That Everyone Should Be In Love With Maria Doyle Kennedy, but that doesn't seem appropriate somehow. I once - briefly and semi-disastrously - had a conversation with Maria Doyle Kennedy, and somehow I'm not comfortable harbouring lascivious thoughts about women I've actually met. Quite what this says about me, I'm not sure.

**Yes, of course we're in the middle of a crime epidemic. The Daily Mail said so.

***You can add whichever religious vocations you wish to that list, of course, but this piece is getting too long so I don't want to list them.

****In which we're supposed to be visited by alien monoliths, but I'm not holding my breath.

The New Orthodoxy

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:18:00 +0000

If there's a word that I wish people would say more often, it's "socio-economic."

Yes, really. Obviously, socio-economic is an ugly word, and it would be nice if we could come up with an alternative to it. And yet, that ugliness is part of the point - it reminds us, in the most jarring way possible, that "society" and "economy" are intrinsically linked; that we shouldn't, can't, run our nation-states as if our government were an auditing accountant from KPMG.

If that statement seems almost too obvious, it's a reality that has persistently failed to assert itself in how we run our countries. This has been clearest in the last two years, ever since The Money Started Running Out, but you can comfortably trace it right back to the moment that Bill Clinton hung "It's the Economy, Stupid" on the wall of his campaign headquarters.

This phenomenon, where the economy is viewed as something discrete and walled-off, has matured into a situation where we see the management of the economy as the primary function of government; meanwhile, society is something that just happens, an accidental occurrence around the figures in the ledger. More and more, governments see their jurisdiction as functioning in purely economic terms. Even more damagingly, the people are encouraged by their media to view things in exactly the same way.

It's now law, under the Musings On Society Act 1998, that you have to coin a word for any social phenomenon; I'm going for Economism as a suitably clunky meme. The best current example is Newstalk's vapid editorial of the last week; this was greeted by a mixture of vague outrage and smug agreement by listeners, some of whom registered approval, others who sputtered their annoyance at Newstalk's arrogance in editorialising at all. Still, the real nastiness of the speech wasn't really discussed (well not to my satisfaction, anyway): it wasn't the arrogance or the banality, it was that Newstalk discussed the Irish nation exactly as if they were discussing a Limited Company. Lines like "we must compete against Newry and Bratislava" are pretty unambiguous in this regard, but you can go further with the parallel; if you replace the words "Taoiseach", "country" and "Ireland" with "CEO", "company" and "McDonalds", then a dullish self-satisfied speech becomes shockingly cogent. The recent collapse of laissez-faire economics and consumer culture was an opportunity - a painful one, but opportunity nonetheless - for us to reconsider the economy-lead society we have allowed to develop. Instead we've gone into retreat, grimly pushing beads on our abacuses and calling it government - or even more destructively, 'political commentary'.

Obviously it's impossible to mention Newstalk's editorial without referring to it being owned by Denis O'Brien - a multi-millionaire tax exile who made his fortune from buying up state-owned companies and bleeding them dry of their assets. That such a noxious little man can lecture us about our overpaid doctors, lawyers, teachers and accountants is a grotesque triumph of economy-lead thinking, where O'Brien's wealth is the only measure of the man that matters.

The reason that economics-based commentary of the IBEC variety grates so much is that it's so utterly fatuous. The IBEC brigade view governance of a nation entirely in terms of running a company, then discredit their opponents by the implication that Silly Lefty Pinkos can't grasp the desperately complex issues. It seems infra dig in these situations to point out that the abstract theories of running a business aren't really all that taxing; you want big numbers in one column and small numbers in another, and that we give these people the status of "experts" is possibly the most depressing result of the entire budget-driven malaise.

The false simplicity of the "It's the Economy, Stupid" mantra is probably the reason for how well it had endured, in spite of how obviously unsuccessful it's been. If you want to view the last two decades or so as an economic experiment in deregulation, then the results are far from encouraging. And yet we keeping looking at the world through the same shit-tinted glasses - scrambling to overturn the sudden deficits of the past by cutting where it's most convenient, discussing what we social measures we "can" and "can't" do against the same discredited backdrop. The most remarkable doublethink about this climate - where we venerate the entrepeneur above all others, and seriously suggest that Michael O'Leary should be allowed to run the country - is that we accept the truism that business is dynamic / adaptable / the powerhouse of the country, yet we're asked to make all our decisions based on the need to facilitate the wonder of business, as if this is oh-so-resourceful and benevolent god will run screaming at the mere mention of the words "Tobin Tax".

(Interestingly, the great electoral successes of the recent past weren't based on the economy, but on social aspiration. I'm thinking principally of the triumphs of Barack Obama and, in 1997, of Tony Blair; these were people swept in on a tide of euphoria because they actually spoke about how they saw society, in terms that were - admittedly - broad and aspirational. Nobody in Ireland has done this since 1997, when John Bruton opened a pre-election debate with Bertie Ahern by talking about the Ireland he wanted to create. Bruton wiped the floor with Ahern, but lost anyway, mostly because he looked like a farmer's simple older brother.)

And so we can justify any measure as being all about "sharing the pain", one of the most detestable aphorisms to be coined in the recent past. We aren't talking about pain, we're talking about economic hardship, and if the distinction seems pedantic then it's one we shouldn't forget. "Pain", in these terms, is something transient and unavoidable that we suffer as a healing process. Economic Hardship - that's poverty, if we're discussing the least fortunate of our pain-sharers - doesn't serve any purpose at all, it's just a long exercise in powerlessness and futility. Being on the dole isn't pain; it's a gnawing, everyday reminder that you live in a society where you have nothing to contribute. That, frankly, you don't matter, and that you might never matter again.

It's only if you accept and believe the Economism dogma, only if you're utterly persuaded by the primacy of the public accounts ledger, that the 2010 Budget is admirable or competent.

And fair's fair; viewed from that prism, it probably is. Certainly, it was better than we could have expected, knowing who we were dealing with; if you're setting out to save €4bn as simply as possible, then that's been achieved. The cutting of Social Welfare payments is unfortunate, but probably just about manageable. The cuts to public sector pay have been applied with half an eye on progressive principles. The abandoning of the 0.7% foreign aid pledge, comfortably the most bitter part of the whole document, justifies itself with the cry of The Money Isn't There. There's nothing really there to aid job creation, but we didn't expect that there would be - this was a steady-the-ship exercise, not one intended to catch more fish. Hence the hollow ring to the attacks from Labour and Fine Gael - they've banged on about job creation, but they've yet to suggest that they'd do anything substantially different.

The wrongness, then, comes from a deeper source, a sickness in the whole lousy paradigm to which we are addicted. A budget isn't just a set of accounts; it's a narrative, a statement, a manifesto of where we want to go. It is a socio-economic document, not a purely economic one. At this point, where our econo-culture is more or less bottoming out and looking where it should go next, this budget was a way of saying who we saw as being truly important. The answer is depressing.

It was suggested several times that a third tax rate on high earners should be applied. This was rejected on the basis that it wouldn't raise any real revenue, and that many of these people would probably up and leave the country (like, say, the owner of Newstalk). This is, quite probably, true. The tax wouldn't be any great economic benefit; and yet it would set an entirely different tone to who we value most in our culture. It would have told the wealthy that a significant responsibility for the country's well-being lay with them. It would have said that we don't judge the worth of an individual in monetary terms. It would have sent a message that, if a rich individual felt they had no duty to society and wanted to retreat to a tax haven, then they could fuck right off and we'd be happy to pay for their ticket; that this super-class are due no more respect than a care assistant or street-sweeper.

The word "brave" has been bandied about in relation to this budget, as if cutting other people's benefits and saving the money you promised to save were somehow a laudably selfless act. This cockeyed analysis is the result of our Economism. This budget said, in the clearest of all languages, that the less fortunate should accept burdens that the wealthy and self-interested could not be expected to bear. It said that we don't care about the people, we care about the numbers. It said that the basic unit of society isn't the individual, or even the family, but the revenue they generate. This was an exercise in a distinct form of sociopathy, now so commonplace that we no longer even notice its existence.

Pop. Eating Itself.

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:10:00 +0000

There's something strangely compelling about Lady Gaga.

Now, some readers may remember that this website was largely about popular culture, before it mutated into... um... whatever it is now. If there's a reason, then it's largely that I just lost interest in what pop culture was throwing in my direction. Particularly, that goes for music; slowly, the contents of the charts became inhospitable. Not that I was a big fan of pop music, except for the Sugababes, obviously - however, it did articulate something understandable, something that reflecting the society that gave rise to it.

My only contact with music (of the "popular" variety) these days is through the snatches of it I hear on daytime radio, or videos I see in shite pubs. Certainly, in the last four or five years, pop music has changed drastically. It's now harsh, angular, and unknowable. That unknowability - inscrutability, if you like - is more or less the only interesting thing about it. Certainly, listening to Lady Gaga seems to be the ultimate culmination of this trend. Hence the fascination, which has little or nothing to do with the ugly squawking sounds that she makes.

The music, resplendent in its sheer ugly banality, is more or less impossible to comment on. It would be easy to leave things there, but that misses how pop operates in our culture. These people aren't musicians, not really - they're low-rent video installation artists more than anything, a trend you can trace back to Grace Jones if you're so inclined; similarly self-aggrandising attitude and inscrutability, except that Jones seemed at least vaguely aware that there was a world that didn't include her.

If you watch the two of them on mute (I'm really trying not to talk about music here), you can see a strong parallel. And yet you can also see why the parallel is more or less completely absurd, which is maybe why Lady Gaga is curiously fascinating.

Jones was all personality. Distinctive makeup, harsh angular features, she looked like she could kick the shit out of you if you dared to question her right to be there.

Lady Gaga, on the other hand... having now viewed a frightening amount of her videos (i.e. 5), and even I can see that she ticks the diva boxes. She's got more bling than Mr T's jeweller; her outfits are flamboyant to the point of absurdity, and she changes them more often than Beyoncé but wears them all with panache; the dance routines are impressive, in that "pyramid of women all doing the same angular thing" choreographed way which is now accepted as the "proper" way of dancing.

And yet, I haven't got the faintest idea what she's actually like, to the extent that if I had to spend a week with her, I wouldn't pick her out if she only wore jeans and a t-shirt. Most of the sense of "character" you get from pop stars is artificial anyway, but they certainly bother to put up the front. This is deliberately different; the artifice is designed to look like artifice, and when interviewed (see, I said I found her fascinating) she oscillates between bland aphorisms and plain-speaking common-sense.

Certainly her latest video, for Bad Romance, is shocking because we briefly see her without any make-up at all. It's the first hint of vulnerability we've ever seen from her. Lady Gaga inhabits the all-new pop world, in which vulnerability is frowned upon, and bad-ass sloganeering combined with bullying lyrics is a badge of empowerment. She works in a climate where Janis Joplin would get beaten up by the cool kids, and Dusty Springfield's son of a preacher man would have published her diary on Facebook.

So instead we get Poker Face, which is specifically tailored to show that Gaga is a bad-ass super beeatch who don't take no shit from no man, and is more or less the only song of hers that I actively despise. Bad Romance, where a crap relationship is portrayed as a competition between the man and the woman. Paparazzi, effectively about how the personality of pop stars is irrelevant; we're plastic but we still have fun. Riiiiight.

She also has a voice that's entirely unrecognisable. Synthesised to the last and buried under production, it could literally be anyone singing those songs. I thought that Poker Face was the first Lady Gaga song I'd heard; actually, it was the fourth, but I'd never imagined them to be by the same person. Her style, or tone if you like, something which you just expect to just be there in any singer, is simply absent. We now seem to have come through the era of the boy band, but even those guys were recognisable in their blandness; dammit, you could tell when Boyzone were singing a song without being prompted by the DJ.

So the interest lies in the lack of any personality at all. Somehow, she seems to know this. She buries herself in the artifice, hides in the makeup, and makes sure that we never get near a young woman called Steffani Germanotta. So her most telling song remains Let's Dance; a woman who's off her face, has lost everything, doesn't know where she is, and just keeps dancing because she doesn't know what else to do. Lady Gaga is the personification of a culture where "personality" is reduced to a USP, where "music" is an unimportant facet of a media phenomenon, where the ostentation and opulence of celebrity is all we expect. She looks at us, unflinching, and says "This is what you wanted, all along."

It's not music. It might be art, somehow. More than that, though, it's the essence of the last decade. Gaga is the vengeful face of the culture we inhabit, cavorting as it goes down in flames. Don't tell me that's not something worth looking at.

Delugions

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:17:00 +0000

It's now a couple of days since John Gormley announced new policies as regards half the country being underwater. Quite apart from him being the Minister for the Environment, you'd think that flooding due to crazy weather is sort of a Green Party thing.

To be absolutely fair, conflating the two events is a little unfair; the guidelines have clearly been a long time in the making, and a very thorough document the report is too (you can read it here, if you're so inclined, although "Don't let people build in flood plains" is a decent summary). Credit the Greens where it's due; any documents they have produced as regards planning and building are well-drafted and well-grounded. The revised Building Control Act and Regulations, for example, are excellent pieces of legislation. If they've presented this as a response to the floods, then it's difficult to blame them; when cities and towns are ravaged by rainfall, it must be nice to show you've been thinking about it all along.

Still, if the Guidelines are fine on their own merits, the response has two blinding weaknesses*.

One: the overwhelming majority of buildings in Ireland have, y'know, already been built. Yay for for getting it right in the future, but there's several million buildings in existence with no defence of flooding whatsoever. There's little enough that can be done about that, not without massive public expenditure. Still, an alteration to the Building Regulations, asking that all Buildings be cogniscant of flood risk, wouldn't do any harm at all. Many of the flooded areas in Ireland weren't "flood plains**", as such; it is possible to build in flooding-vulnerable areas, with certain safeguards (it's common in some American states, where houses are habitually raised about a foot off the ground). If there's already houses in an area vulnerable to infrequent flooding, then it seems acceptable to add more, provided they're adequately safeguarded. It also makes sense to put a code of practice into place for when existing houses, in flood plains, are extended or modified. Still, if another flood happens to come along, it's unlikely to benefit that many buildings.

There are also collective methods of protection against flooding, but most of them are massively expensive. At least some of the flooding was due to inadequate or badly-maintained drainage. Dredging lakes, or building artificial levées and flood barriers, does work to an extent, but it's a fair investment and more complex than it sounds. Creating artificial flood plains is theoretically possible, and has been done elsewhere, but the chances of this happening on a large scale are nil; it would be a huge infrastructural project, and you don't get many of them in a recession.

In other words, while this document is pretty well-drafted, it's about twenty years too late. For his next trick, John Gormley will bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.

The second problem, if anything, is more serious; while we live in a system where local councillors can overrule planners, the document means nothing anyway. There are enough loose clauses in the document to allow any unscrupulous councillor to overrule it whenever they see it as convenient. For example, take this sentence:

"Planning authorities will ensure that development is not permitted in areas of flood risk, particularly floodplains, except where there are no suitable alternative sites available in areas at lower risk that are consistent with the objectives of proper planning and sustainable development."

Put Michael Healy-Rae in a room with that, and he'll have permitted a housing estate by a river quicker than you can say "gombeen". The document is written for planners, but planners don't make all the decisions. It's a culture that we've created; we're uncomfortable with the concept of planning in this country, particularly in rural areas. This isn't surprising - land has been important in the national psyche for centuries, and the it's-my-land-I'll-do-what-I-like attitude is a direct descendant from this.

Leaving the armchair social anthropology aside, the fact remains; a good chunk of the Irish populace, especially in rural areas, will find a friendly councillor as soon as they get a planning refusal. I'm not going to claim that planners are perfect but, when we systematically undermine them at every turn, it's hardly surprising that we've wound up with a system that can't possibly make long term decisions in the public interest. I mean seriously, this article by Fintan O'Toole tells you all you need to know about how it works.

What's Gormley to do? He could have said that the problem with our infrastructure is systemic, endemic, and entirely a problem of our culture. Or he could trot something out about "planning reform" and hope that it plays. We wouldn't forgive the first option.

Would we?

Today's Irish Times editorial is all the proof you need of the attitude. While apparently maintaining a line of righteous anger, it's very clear on blame. "Ultimate responsibility... does not lie even with the Irish hierarchy as a whole. It lies with the Vatican."

It doesn't, of course. It lies with us. We set up the industrial schools. We ignored the victims. Our doctors and gardaí colluded to send them to those places. The lies told by bishops, following the directives of their superiors, bear no comparison to the lies we told ourselves***. And let's not forget that the priests and bishops and Christian Brothers are Irish people, born into Irish families, raised in Irish societies. They aren't cloned bodysnatchers sent by the vatican, they're the sons and daughters of our culture. That's not the way that media comment is working now, however. We'd rather cast them ourselves as the innocent and powerless victims of a great global conspiracy, trapped within the evil machinations of a paedophile church. We don't like to think of ourselves as collaborators.

There isn't much to link the recent flooding with the Dublin and Ryan reports. The only thing they share is the tone of the backlash; the gratuitous fury of a nation shouting loudly for someone to blame. It's got to be someone's fault, and we seem frighteningly secure in the knowledge that it isn't ours.

*That's pretty good, for an Irish Planning Document. No, really.
** The definition's in that document, but I had to read the bloody thing, so make an effort. C'mon.
***Have you ever heard a first-hand horror story about the Christian Brothers? If not, you're in the minority. And yet this is all a shock to us.

Getting Things Done

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 18:15:00 +0000

Mark Thomas is a political activist, protestor, campaigner, agitator, investigative journalist, social commentator, and public practical joker. He's written two books, one about the Arms Trade ("As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela"), and one about Coca Cola ("Belching Out The Devil"). He also happens to be a stand-up comedian, one who performed at Dublin's Laughter Lounge on Wednesday, although you'd be forgiven for thinking that the stand-up element of what he does is the least important part of his ouevre.

You'd be wrong. Thomas is a very skilled operator, and he is funny. His performance mixes energy with control; he's not shy of occupying a moral high-ground, while at the same time being disarmingly self-deprecating; and he spits out his routine at enormous speed, word-perfect, the sort of thing that you can only pull off if you're really comfortable with your material. If a lot of what he says seems like an instinctive broadbrush socialism, his occasional references to the minutae of the law let you know that this is someone who thoroughly understands his subjects. We're not talking Michael Moore here.

Thomas' latest show focuses on his more irreverent work. It's called the Manifesto, in which he invites the audience to come up with policies. This being Dublin, almost of all them were smart-arsed, if funny; hanging Bono by his scrotum end up winning, edging out dusting every thirteenth copy of the Daily Mail with anthrax, replacing the Irish national anthem with Eye of the Tiger, and having the weather report replaced with an old guy sitting in a pub muttering "shite"*. Some of the previous policies were more serious, such as Belfast's choice to have the British 1967 Abortion Act applied to Norn Iron (which, when Thomas mentioned it, was answered by a puzzled silence as everyone in the room thought "what, you mean it doesn't?" Apparently not). Thomas pledged to try and put the winning policy into effect, although I think he'd struggle with the Bono variant.

On the surface, the last bit seems the problematic part. Thomas's protests are often extremely silly and funny, albeit silly with a point. He had stories about kidnapping the bay tree of Margaret Moran MP (she's the MP for Luton who claimed a second home in Southampton, for no good reason at all), holding it to ransom, and sending her a leaf and a photo every week. The funniest was probably the demonstration outside the Bank of England after quantitative easing began, where they campaigned to get it renamed "The Pound Shop". Still, the thought that he could actually get the law changed? Come on now, don't be silly.

And yet, Mark Thomas has made a real difference, and has got the law changed more once. The UK intend to repeal the law where protests within a designated area of London require police permission, for example, as a result of Thomas (and friends) applying for permission for over 2,500 very silly one-man protests. You can no longer avoid paying inheritance tax if you make art, homes or lands available for public viewing, thanks largely to Thomas pursuing anyone who took advantage of the practice and trouping hundreds of people through the houses in question; his work on the Arms Trade was commended by a parliament select committee. In other words, Mark Thomas isn't an angry man, he's a driven one who believes in the possible. He does things. Being in his company just makes you feel incredibly positive; demos look fun, protests seem important, the people seem powerful. He doesn't complain that the establishment don't change anything, he agitates for them to make changes. And, perhaps surprisingly, it can work.

This is relevant now, more than ever. Right now, after the Murphy report, everyone is angry. But then, they were angry after the Ryan Report; a few weeks later the dust settled, everything looked the same. We now have another shitstorm of horror, exclamations of hatred about Them Fecking Baxtards, and how we need to strip all their assets and kick put six-foot high neon banners saying "paedophile" onto every priest's back.

If that anger is understandable, it's just plain wrong. It's partly because this anger is cheap, unearned, and hypocritical; we did this, not just the church. We didn't believe the victimsm initially; we elected the officials who did nothing; we let industrial schools exist, in spite of the regime being an open secret. We have failed to prosecute any of the people involved, for fuck's sake. It gets tiring when people with no concept of their own guilt go on the offensive, time after time after time.

(There are honourable exceptions, of course; here's one.)

And there's the other key point; being angry achieves nothing.

The previous post here wasn't intended to be the standard rage-article at the church, even if it may have come across that way. I highlighted schools partly because of the obvious... irony, if that isn't too light a word. But the real reason I highlighted it was that it's a change that's actually possible**. It wouldn't require a huge amount of funding or management on behalf of the state, and it could be achieved by simple, non-violent direct action. It's not about rage, or inflicting punishment. It's about rationally remedying a situation that was always absurd, and is now grotesque and untenable.

Mark Thomas' gloriously immature protests are, in that sense, tremendously adult. Whereas here, we express our outrage in the Letters page of the Irish Times for a few weeks, then leave it at that, consciences untouched. This society - that's us, the onlookers of a century's crimes - actually has two duties. We should think of ways to remedy the situation as we go into the future, and we should say sorry. This is, ultimately, about children; it's ironic how, with our cartoonish fury and moral outrage, we're reacting in the most childish way possible.

*One of those was mine. If you can guess which one, you win fuck all.

** To that end, I've emailed both National Parents' Councils, and Barnardos Ireland, asking them to consider mounting it as a campaign. It's not exactly world-changing and God knows what response I'll get to that one, but it would be nice if you'd consider doing the same. Or something even more useful, if you know exactly how to do That Sort Of Thing.

Who teaches our kids, again?

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:39:00 +0000

This is a post I've had in mind to write for a while, largely about the situation of how we run our schools. The latest round of what the Catholic Church get up to has rather thrown the issue into sharp relief; and yet, still, it's something that doesn't seem to be discussed.

So let's get this out of the way early; we live in a country where, at a conservative estimate, about 85% of our schools are run - to some extent - by an organisation that two reports have shown to be guilty of the systemic and consistent abuse of children.

Or, if that's not clear enough; 85% of our schools are run, to some extent, by an organisation that routinely protected paedophiles and child abusers. Yeah. That organisation teaches our kids.

Whenever the Ryan Report, or its new unholy cousin the Murphy Report is mentioned, someone seems to bring up the issue of compensation. Now, I can't imagine going through what those people who were buggered and raped as children by priests had been through; ergo, I don't know what my response would be. I just know that none of the victims who I've heard speak on the matter talk about compensation. They talk about justice.

Just to be clear about this: the church owns the vast bulk of our National Schools and Community Schools. It didn't build them; the Irish government, or British government before them, did that. It doesn't fund them; the Irish Government does that (the Church makes a nominal contribution of - supposedly - 5% or so, but in a number of cases that figure is zero). No, it just has a huge hand in determining what those schools can or cannot do, and is referred to as a "Patron" of these schools, without doing a great deal to justify the title.

National Schools, or Community Schools, are run by their Board of Management. This consists of the Principal, one other teacher, two parents, and two people nominated by the estimable Patron (the Patron, remember, being an organisation that harbours paedophiles). This bunch, between them, pick another two people. In general, the Board is chaired by the Parish Priest.

Now, even if you forget the issue of abuse, even if you accept the "bad apples" rationale that Church apologists are putting forward, this is fucking absurd. Only two of the eight people running a school need have any educational qualifications (or, indeed, any qualifications whatsoever), and none of them receive training in some of the skills required.

(Works to the building, for example, are decided and administered by the School Principal. A School Principal is trained to teach children and organise other teachers. They don't know anything about sustainability, or Building Regulations, or contract administration; bluntly, it isn't their job. And yet we seem constantly shocked at the fact that our school buildings are often close to being derelict, even though their upkeep is left in the hands of well-intentioned amateurs.)

So, the chairman the Board of Management? It's literally some guy. A guy who consults his invisible friend for advice.

That's merely stupid and counterproductive. But now factor in the organisation he represents, and the line hardens. It's intolerable; it's shameful; it can't continue. I'm sure there are plenty of capable, intelligent priests who are doing a good job of helping to run schools, but frankly, that no longer matters. Their organisation has forfeited its right to be involved in education.

There is something that could be done about this. The National Parents' Council is annoyingly vocal, and seems to spend most of their time warbling on the radio about the dangers of underage drinking. Well, finally they can do something constructive.

- They can encourage every parent to take their child out of any church-run school.
- They can ask that every teacher stop teaching those children who do attend.
- They can state that this situation will continue until the Church hands back the title deed of every state-funded school to the people, and all its representatives resign from all Boards of Management.

Anything less than that is an insult to the victims of the Catholic Church. What they've endured is beyond imagining. Let's at least begin to make amends going forward.

The Right To Not Work

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:12:00 +0000

It's easy, too easy, to link a consumer society with the fact that we no longer how to deal with strikes.

That's a broad statement, but I'm fairly comfortable with it. You don't have to look too hard to hear people saying that "strikes should be banned" or "trade unions are pointless". Neither of those things are right, but we now have a fairly huge culture gap between the rights of the worker (as espoused by unions, and... well, no-one else, really) and the all-powerful rights of the consumer.

Still, it's a long time since Ireland has been comfortable with the notion of workers going on strike. There isn't the explicitly striated class system here that exists in Britain, and the process of Social Partnership has lead to Ireland's Trade Unions being tarred with the same viscous corruption that permeates throughout the establishment. If the Irish Trade Union movement isn't corrupt exactly, then it's certainly corrupted; any Trade Union that fails to separate its badly-paid lower orders and its well-paid upper echelons is failing the job description pretty much straight off the bat. Today's strike was, for those people at any rate, more a cynical exercise in sabre-rattling than anything else.

Still, the reaction of people complaining bitterly about the inconvenience is as difficult to listen to as the usual Trade Union rhetoric. Inconvenience is, bluntly, what strikes are for; you withdraw your labour, and thereby show its value. Teachers absenting themselves from work to highlight the value of the job they do. And yet, there have been no voices reflecting on the necessity to stay at home and mind their kid, or pay for a babysitter, and thought to themselves "Wow, teachers provide an important service, without which my life would cease to function." The reaction is to complain.

It's hardly surprising. If the last ten or fifteen years have encouraged us to do anything, it's not to look beyond our own horizons, and to view the privileges of Western culture with the non-stop sense of entitlement usually seen in spoiled four year-olds. Nobody is heard being grateful for the support that the state provides; you either complain that you don't get enough, or you complain that someone else gets too much. Teachers not showing up to work is, in todays' culture, almost indistinguishable from a waiter bringing a cold bowl of soup. Talk of "pay cuts" and "fairness" is about as relevant as the waiter telling you that the cooker's broken. At best, it's not our problem. At worst, They Should Be Glad To Have A Job and We Pay Their Wages, you know the drill. Nurses, teachers, Gardaí... ultimately these are well-trained, professional people, but our ownership of their professions seems to be a licence to treat them with contempt*.

(And if you want an example of that, then the holier-than-thou reaction to public sector workers - shock! horror! spending their day on strike going shopping in Norn Iron is the best example. These people had withdrawn their labour, which is all a striking worker is compelled to do; whether they joined the pickets or not was entirely up to them, and as the pickets ran in rotation it was possible to do both. As for criticism for them spending money outside the Republic, it's another fine example of the double-standard - plenty of people go North to shop, and if you tried to hold them to account for it, they'd throw "my rights as a consumer" back in your face pretty damn quick.)

It's difficult to blame people for being hostile to Trade Unions, who have shown exactly the same sense of entitlement, albeit in the other direction. The continuous references to the "vulnerable sectors of society" rankle - public sector workers aren't the most vulnerable members of society, not unless the homeless have all vanished and those floods are a media hallucination. The shallow comparison to How We Bailed Out Dem Bankers is so broadbrush that it seems designed to infuriate; the steadfast refusal to apparently acknowledge budget problems, or indeed to accept that there are huge structural problems within of the larger government departments, makes it seem like the Unions are lead by small children, sticking their fingers in their ears and singing "la la la, I'm not listening."

But.

Public workers are right to be shouting Stop, even if many of them are so shite at communicating their objections that they'd be better off sewing their own mouths shut. The amount of money being wasted by the government on other projects, on reports and consultancies and throwing good money on bad projects, dwarfs anything that public sector pay inefficiencies can throw at you. I could go on about this angle, but this isn't a rigorous economics blog, so I'll just say "Public Private Partnerships" and leave it there. The last time the government took money out of the public sector they made a complete mess of it, with all the bludgeoning incompetence you've come to expect, and there's bugger-all indication that they'll be any fairer this time round. The pensions levy was grotesque; it hit the lowest-paid the hardest to a shocking degree**, it insulted the intelligence by pretending it wasn't a pay cut when it so clearly was, and it didn't put a dent in the inexorable rise of Ireland's budget deficit. This one will almost certainly hit the lower-paid members yet again, and - as before - it will save us next to nothing***.

Irish politicians' ability to blend idiocy with low cunning is pretty damn special. It doesn't take much effort to see that they're pissing on the wrong bonfire; the public sector didn't get ten times the size in the last two years. We're fucked because social welfare has rocketed and tax receipts have collapsed, but talk about creating jobs is conspicuous by its absence. When it comes to job creation, or any form of invention at all, they're bereft of ideas; however, the ease with which they have made us all focus on the sideshow of public sector pay is breathtaking. It achieves nothing, in the overall scheme of things, but it panders to the gaze of our vengeful consumer-culture.

Really, that's all it's designed to do.

There's certainly a discussion to be had over the size of our public sector, but the government have yet to suggest any way of restructuring it. Instead they'll just insist on more blanket pay cuts, to which our tame, oh-so-part of the establishment Unions will eventually agree, once they're done flexing their muscles.

And so, if today's palaver won't make any difference in the long term, it's wrong to begrudge it. We forget the idea of social capital, of some jobs having more worth than market values suggest. Yes, the thought of overpaid administrative civil-servants feeling aggrieved at their lot is irredeemably ugly, but it's not entirely about them.

The people on strike were also nurses, teachers, and firemen; these people certainly aren't conspicuously well-off, and they've already taken a cut once. Yes, they have a relatively privileged position. But then, they're responsible for caring for our sick, educating our children, and running into burning buildings when we're running out; if they're paid more than a marketing analyst or IT guy, then maybe that's as it should be. Withdrawing their labour made them feel important; it made them feel like they mattered, in a country that no longer seems to give a shit what they do. If that's all that the Day of Action achieved, it's not nothing.

*Which is clearly unjustifiable. Except for the Gardaí, obviously.

** Someone earning €36,000 lost more money - in absolute terms, not percentages - from their take home pay than someone earning €45,000. Someone on €38,000 paid the same percentage as someone on €120,000. If you earned €26,500, you had to pay twice as much as someone earning €500 more. Don't parrot "Share the pain" or tell me that's not appalling.

*** 1.3 billion has been bandied around, almost certainly as a gross figure. Half of that (say) would have gone back to the government in income tax and levies anyway, so actual savings are €650,000. Take into account the resultant fall in spending, the fall in VAT receipts, and the multiplier effect and all that malarkey, and you can probably (at least) cut that in half again. You're looking at about €300m saving, which is more or less the amount thrown away in the average Public Private Partnership.

Oh look, that's twice I've mentioned PPPs. Funny that.

Hand Up

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:02:00 +0000

The difficulty with writing sentences like "Have the FAI lost their marbles?" is that it implies they had any marbles to begin with, but you understand the sentiment. Whatever it was they were given instead of marbles - I dunno, little balls of mála or something - have gone west. They're officially petitioning FIFA to have the Ireland v France match replayed. Because, apparently, this is the first match in the history of time where the winning goal was due to bad refereeing.

Oh, and Dermot Ahern has called for it an' all. On CNN. Fair enough. He's Minister for Justice, and Ireland didn't get justice last night, I tell ya ("Justice" to be pronounce "Jeee-yustice", like how Christy Moore does it*).

Insert heavy sigh and eye-rolling here.

- Edit: OK, everything take everything I'm about to say and multiply by two. I'm sorry, but this is just fucking ridiculous.

Where do you begin?

Well, let's be clear; Ireland were astonishing against France. They played incredibly; they bullied France off the pitch, a French team dripping with world-class players. At ninety minutes, they could easily have been three up. They didn't take their chances, but that aside, they gave everything you could ask for; left every ounce of themselves on the pitch, played the game how it's meant to be played, cut the French apart for their goal, and spent time throwing their shirts to the fans afterwards. Éamon Dunphy may be a gobshite, but occasionally he gets it right; "We shouldn't be too downhearted when we've got people like that... when we can produce people of that kind of character, we should be happy." It's the best Ireland performance I've seen. Robbie Keane mouthed off to the ref a few too many times, maybe; but it was devoid of cynicism, or ego, or any of the things that are so... crap about football, so often.

In other words, it reminded you what was so great about sport. It's difficult to talk about sport without lapsing into cliché, so I'm not going to try; I'll just say that sport, at its best, teaches you so many important things about life. It teaches you honesty, and effort, and teamwork, and dedication. Football, one of the most corrupted of sports, doesn't often hit those heights; still, it's not half exhilarating when it does.

It's hard not to remember Damien Duff weeping at the end. Duff is probably the best Republic of Ireland winger of all time. He is 30 now, and has shipped countless injuries. He certainly won't make the 2014 World Cup, he'll be 33 (and possibly finished) for the European Championships. Wept, having left every ounce of himself on the pitch. Then the players picked themselves up and went to their fans. That's the other thing you learn from sport - how to lose, with dignity. Even when you're the victim of unfairness, or injustice, as you often will be in life.

None of the "replay the game" calls have come from the players. Certainly, the obvious injustice needs addressing. Bringing in a form of video referral system would be a start. As for Henry, he should get what every other player adjudged to have cheated gets - a walloping great suspension, at the very least three competitive matches (i.e. all of France's World Cup group games). Get sent off, or make a bad tackle, or punch someone on the pitch, and you get suspended. Diving and deliberate handballs should be treated the same way. They aren't.

If we wanted to do something about the Henry situation, then these are the things we should be saying. Instead, we're the FAI and politicians are calling for the game to be replayed. It will not, cannot happen, just as Man Utd v Chelsea (equally referee-influenced) won't be replayed; if games are replayed because of bad decisions, referees mean nothing. Ireland conducted themselves like champions tonight, were cheated of the result they deserved, and bore it with dignity. But calling for replays makes us look silly. It makes us losers.

*That's not my joke, it's Willy Robinson's. Just so he doesn't moan about it in the comments or anything.

**American sports and Formula 1 don't actually count as sports, since you're asking.

Only Human

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:11:00 +0000

For some time, I've wanted to write something about Martin Bromiley.

I've never met or seen Martin Bromiley (well, I don't think I have - I've got no idea what he looks like); the only reason I know of his existence is a combination of good fortune, Phil Hammond, and a thirty-minute programme on BBC Radio 4. Still, if anyone should know about anyone, it's Martin Bromiley.

Martin Bromiley is an English father-of-two. In 2005 he drove his 37 year-old wife, Elaine, into hospital for a routine operation. He brought their children, too; the couple wanted to emphasise that hospitals are good places, where people go to get better. They dropped her off, and went home.

To shorten the account for a moment, the operation went wrong. The hospital told Martin Bromiley a few hours later that there had been a problem. Elaine was already on life-support; she remained on it for a further 13 days, after which the machine was turned off.

It transpired that Elaine's airways had collapsed shortly after she was anaesthetised. Initial attempts to ventilate her lungs with an oxygen mask didn't work, and an unexpected blockage meant they failed to insert a tube into her lungs. In what was a fairly spectacular level of stoicism, Martin Bromiley accepted that his wife's death was a tragic freak occurrence, that it was "just one of those things". And things would probably have ended there.

However, during a conversation with the ICU specialist, he said that he hoped some lessons would be learned from the investigation. The ICU specialist told him that there wouldn't be one, unless a complaint was made.

But here's the thing. Martin Bromiley was a pilot, and was involved in "Human Factor" training. This is standard procedure for an airline; 75% of all incidents in air travel are due to human error, as a result of which they allow for it in their training. They manage human error, they put procedures in place to minimise its effects. A systematic series of investigations follows every single incident, as part of the ongoing procedures to prevent errors from occurring; when something goes wrong, airlines find out why. Bromiley assumed this would be standard procedure for a hospital, and was shocked to discover that it wasn't. So, he did what he was trained to do. He asked questions. An investigation did - eventually - take place.

It transpired that three consultants had been present, all of whom attempted to intubate, all of whom failed for unknown reasons. Of the four nurses present, two could see there was a problem. One booked a bed in intensive care, but was instructed to cancel it because she was overreacting. The other brought the equipment for a tracheotomy, but was ignored. The culture within British hospitals was - is - one of not questioning superiors. It was obvious to people within the operating room what was going wrong, and what should be done to stop it, they didn't feel able to intervene.

To put it another way; when his wife died, Martin Bromiley was shocked to find that no-one asked questions. And as it turned out, she died because she was in an environment where asking questions was not the done thing.

He could have sued, or written a letter to Gordon Brown, or sold his story to a tabloid newspaper; you wouldn't have blamed him for doing so. However, having realised that the system was corrupted, Martin Bromiley began trying to change it. He met, and cajoled, as many healthcare professionals as he could. He tried to unite the many people within the profession that thought the same way as him, but weren't aware of each other's existence. He became involved in a ridiculous number of organisations (here's one. And another. And another. There's more). He made videos, gave powerpoint presentations.

This is someone who could have been vindictive, or bitter. Instead, he tried to correct a system, and he might even win. He began by going wherever he could, asking questions. In the radio show I heard (To Err is Human, a great piece of work by Dr Phil Hammond, sadly no longer available online) the humbling thing about him was the lack of bitterness, or vindictiveness. He knew there was no benefit in apportioning blame. He just wanted to put things right.

If ever we needed a reminder of the value of questioning others - even more importantly, of questioning ourselves - then you can't do much better. Martin Bromiley's wife is just one person who died because people didn't ask questions. So at least, in the middle of all this, there's someone doing something important. It's a softly-spoken, modest man who just wants to tell his kids that their mother's death has changed things. That's the thing about heroes; they're usually the quietest people in the room.

De-Socialising Medicine

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:25:00 +0000

Why is the Co-Located Hospital project so evil?

Yeah, OK, so that's not the most open-ended phraseology ever; a bit like asking someone if they're still beating their wife. It's a bit hypothetical in any case, since the Co-Located Hospitals are, to my knowledge, residing somewhere in limbo. The agreements stipulated that, if the companies running the things go out of business, the hospitals revert to the government. As you might imagine, the banks loaning the companies the money weren't wildly keen about that prospect*, even before they discovered that they owed 64 trillion non-existent quid to each other.

But anyway, let's put all that to one side, and ask ourselves; what is/was so bad about the idea?

The theory was simple; give away chunks of land to a private developer, and get them to build a private hospital on the thing. Firstly, let's put the ideological objections to two-tier health systems to one side, just for a moment. There's a lot of denial about this, but we already live in a two-tier health system. VHI relief has been available on income tax for decades; once the government did this, it accepted that private health insurance was not a frivolous luxury but something people should be encouraged to have. It's shit, and it weakens the very notion of a health service, and it effectively says that the best care should only go to people who can afford it. However, the Co-Located Hospital project is a product of that climate; it didn't generate it.

The general tone of the objections, back when this was being widely discussed, was that we were giving away public land / money to private developers, in order that they could provide top-class care to the wealthiest members of society. And... yes. That was exactly what we were doing. However, it's not exactly that simple; the Co-Located Hospitals would have taken private patients out of the public hospitals, freeing up more and more public beds, and stopping the situation where the state was more or less subsidising privately provided healthcare. Yes, there would be an initial cost, and the thought of giving away public land to companies like Beacon remains unconscionably ugly. However, the maths do add up. Whatever the government give away, it's dwarfed by the interest payments they would be looking at for building a new hospital. It makes accountancy sense to stop wasting electricity on private patients.

So, my objection is this, and it's very basic.

Our hospitals are shit.

This sounds like a truism, but think about it for a moment. At a rough guess, about 85% of the hospital buildings in the country are dumps. That's no reflection on the people who work there, or the efficiency of the HSE, or any manner of professional healthcare stuff about which I know bugger-all. It's a simple statement that our hospitals are dated, outmoded, miserable, grim, and painted in that shade of green that makes you want to gnaw your own arms off. I don't even care about MRSA or how well-equipped they are, I just know that I've never been in a hospital building that wasn't crap. James'; dump. Vincent's; shithole. Beaumont; miserable. The Mater; actually worse than all the others combined, which takes some doing.

If that sounds frivolous, it isn't. Hospitals don't have to be shitholes, we've just been conditioned into expecting them to be like that. They're places where people go to be healed. This isn't happy-clappy artschool bollocks; there's been several studies carried out that show that the quality of the environment is a huge factor in patient health. Once you read anything about placebos this seems obvious, but the magnitude of the effect is astonishing. Patient recovery times in decent environments fall by 80%, and drug use falls by a half**. If a ward is looking over a flat roof, then it even has a huge effect to plant it.

I could get it into all sorts of technical chat about hospital design, if I was so inclined. I could talk about how hospital design is constantly changing for the better, and how the designs of twenty years ago are already outmoded. But suffice it to say that we don't have many hospitals in Ireland that look like this or this. Our hospitals look the way they do because, when they were built, there wasn't really an alternative to 98 miles of corridor. If you don't believe that it might be a culturally great thing to actually have hospitals that aren't mazes of linoed corridors, or that it might effect our perception of the health service in all sorts of beneficial ways, then here's a basic one; patients will be there for less time, and will need less drugs. It will save money.

And yet we keep modifying the same old buildings, adding extensions to buildings that no longer work, and expecting people to get treated in crap, crap buildings. People in hospitals are, in a very way, as vulnerable as a member of our society can be. Stop pissing about with the old hospitals, stop pouring money into modifications to shit buildings, and build something new***.

We didn't. We could afford it, of course, but it was too much bother.

When the Co-Located Hospitals project finally happens - when, if - the government can point to state of the art facilities. They can point to the increased efficiency of the new hospitals, and use it to justify more private sector involvement. And people who can afford health insurance can go to good quality buildings, while the rest get treated in outmoded facilities and portacabins. And they'll know, just as they've always known, how little we really care about them.

*Important note: this information is based on something I heard someone say that they thought they'd heard someone else say. I make no apologies for the possibility that it could all be lies.

**There's a report here, if you're so inclined. Or, actually, even if you're not. I read it, plus another even longer that I can't find again on google.

***Some maths, for those who care. A hospital would cost maybe €300m, at the very most. Given that there's a recession on, all the employment this generates (increased tax take, people not on the dole etc) means that you can probably cut that figure in half. That's €150m, split over two years. In other words, slightly less than John O'Donoghue's expenses.

Isolated, insulated

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:08:00 +0000

Of all the people in Ireland of whose existence I am aware, there are none as influential as Mary O'Rourke. Mary O'Rourke is one of the few people who has, on a number of occasions, entirely changed the way I look at a particular issue or problem. This is essentially because, in the rare occasions that she says something I agree with, I will immediately reverse my opinions so that I disagree with her. If this seems capricious, then you don't understand the scale of Mary O'Rourke's idiocy. It's one of the worlds natural, elementary truths. The sun will rise. The tides will flow. Mary O'Rourke is a daft old bat who is always wrong about everything.

Most recently, Mary O'Rourke DOB has voiced her opposition to a new Oireachtas report recommending that political parties should have a quota of female candidates. O'Rourke's response is straightforward; “I think it’s discrimination of another kind. You just have to have a big brass neck and go out there and do it. There’s no other way.”

This, of course, is always what people say about any sort of affirmative action; that it's just another form of discrimination. This is obviously true, but it misses the point; if you reach a status quo that is, in some way, inequitable, then it's more or less impossible to change it without employing some form of discriminatory measure. It's why I always preferred the term "positive discrimination", because at least it's honest about that reality, while "affirmative action" sounds like the Newspeak that it is.

The issue is that we live in a world that tips its hat to various squeaky-sounding concepts, but doesn't do anything to actually further them. "Equality" is one of the best examples. You might remember the mini-shitstorm that erupted when Michael McDowell* stated, in a fairly uncontroversial manner, that a measure of inequality was necessary to drive a society. Even as someone who would happily drive nails into the back of McDowell's spinal column as a retribution for his very existence, I couldn't really see that he had done anything particularly terrible; he'd just stated what was obviously government policy**.

The problem with loosely referring to these words is that people forget what they mean. It's now not uncommon to hear people refer to equality and universality as if they're the same thing, when in fact they're anything but. Universality does nothing to redistribute wealth - that's sort of the point of it. Equality is, by its nature, a corrective measure and it will fuck some people over; however, it's designed to fuck over people who, frankly, can take it. This is why we have a progressive tax system, and medical cards.

(Incidentally, this is pretty much the difference between liberalism and actual left-wing thinking. Left-wing politics accept the idea of collateral damage, and wrestles very much with the question of what's acceptable. Conversely, that's something liberalism flinches from; the reason I hate self-proclaimed liberals is that they believe in saving the world by being very nice to everyone. This sounds like a rather nice idea, but we don't all live in Traken***.)

The concept of universality probably sits better with us, if we look upon it instinctively. Much as we like the sound of the word, "equality" isn't all that appealing in the long run. The problem lies in the fact that universality makes a society more unequal, because people in better economic situations tend to be better at taking advantage of whatever scheme may or may not be going. To take an obvious example, the grants available to insulate your home / change your boiler / grow watercress in your sink from the SEI are overwhelmingly taken up by the middle-classes. Someone in a freezing cold flat with fuck-all money is exactly the type of person who would benefit from a bit of insulation on the walls, but they're also the type of person who probably doesn't even know the grants exist.

There's an obvious response to this, which is "Well, that's their problem." The fact remains that universal measures don't promote equality. Much as we try to eradicate poverty-

Ah, there's an instructive phrase. Eradicate poverty. Forget "helping the poor", we're eradicating poverty. Nobody minds fighting a war against something bad. We've long since accepted that you can fight a war against inanimate objects (anyone for "on drugs"?), but it's a recent development that you can fight a war against abstract concepts. Terror? Bring it on! Poverty? Yeah, we can kick the shit out of poverty. And its dad.

Unfortunately, engaging with the poor and vulnerable is a tedious business, and that's exactly what "equality" requires us to do - whereas universality is passive, and doesn't require any meaningful engagement at all. If you work in a dole office, you come face-to-face every day with people who are long-term unemployed****. Many of those people are just fucking awful, and the fact that they've been socially trained to be aggressive isn't much of a comfort when you're being sworn at. Making grants available on a website is an easy thing to do, because it ensures that you only have to deal with the sort of people who actually want to improve their homes. Nobody's prepared to go to Tallaght with a clipboard and actually sell the idea to people who aren't really interested in it. Good god, we'd have to talk to poor people. We'd have to leave our comfort zone.

In terms of O'Rourke, her objection is rooted in the same terms. There might be two or three victims of positive discrimination, an able councillor or two who sees a less-capable woman get to run for the Dáil instead of him. That's still a small price to pay for the massive benefits that would accrue from having more women involved in one of our most destructively masculine institutions. However, it would also mean that O'Rourke would find herself operating in a very different - and probably less comfortable - environment.

If we're talking about universality and the poor, then it's worth making the point that our neoliberal society is entirely about universality. Everyone, nominally, has exactly the same opportunities. People from well-off backgrounds are just better-positioned to take advantage of those opportunities, and the corrective measures we put in place are minimal. A universal society doesn't take account of huge swathes of our culture who are terminally disengaged, disenfranchised, and ignored. If you watch The Wire, you'll know exactly what I mean, although this superb interview between David Simon and Bill Moyers makes it crystal-clear.

To borrow Simon's rhetoric; these are people we don't economically need, and they aren't stupid, they get it. That's fundamentally what abandonment is all about, and why it can lead to self-destructive behaviour by an entire social class.

If you want an example closer-to-home, you just need to look at the rise of the BNP in England*****. What was surprising about Griffin's long-awaited appearance was just how pathetic he was, a slimy toad of a man who seemed completely incapable of any sort of coherency. He wasn't representing a tiny, insignificant party; if the UK had a similar PR system to Ireland, then those boys would have an MP or two to their name. The people who vote for Griffin, though, are ordinary working class white families. They haven't been victimised, they've simply been ignored; forgotten, disenfranchised, written off as an economic dead-end.

Yeah. They aren't stupid. They get it. The grand point that the high-and-mighty politicians missed was that these people are so desperate, so unwanted, and so disenfranchised, that they'll cling to any ideology that makes them seem, in some small way, important. Even if it means voting for that fucking loser.

If there's any picture that should be adorning the walls of every MP and TD in the UK and Ireland collectively, it's of the faces of those disenfranchised people. Ugly, hate-filled, bitter, defeated, and so tragically ignored. The caption below the faces should read "If you like to talk about equality, then that also includes me."

* Yeah, sorry, I know it's nice that you don't have to think about him any more.
** And hasn't it worked out well?
*** If you don't recognise the reference, then you win no point for guessing where it come from.
**** Until about a year ago, anyway, until all the marketing executives started having to go there too. Now the dole offices are full of people try desperately to blend in, dressed in paint-spattered tracksuit bottoms, their eyes desperately screaming "I don't belong here. I've got an iPhone."
***** Which is usually about eleven years ahead of us in social trends, so the INP should come into existence around 2014.

Unravelling Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:13:00 +0000

If there's a good reason to go and see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, it's that you get to see everything that Terry Gilliam can do very badly, as well as a lot of things he can do very well indeed.

A lot of people would say that isn't a particularly good reason to go and see and film, and in most cases they're about right. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is as baggy as its title, and has all sorts of problems. The fact that its star died half-way through the filming didn't help, and if anything it's astonishing that the film saw the light of day at all. It does so using a particularly clever conceit which doesn't really damage the narrative in any obvious way, although the scars probably run deeper than it might seem on first viewing.

It's set in contemporary London, albeit a twisted and gothicised version that showcases muddy alleys rather than shiny dildo-shaped buildings. Christopher Plummer is Doctor Parnassus, an old bloke who wanders around with a circus-in-a-van, accompanied by ludicrously hot daughter*, that bloke who was a college student in Lions for Lambs, and Mini-Me. Mini-Me and Peter Dinklage are the only small actors who anyone casts in anything these days, but Mini-Me gets the nod here 'cos he's weirder looking. Anyway, people step through his magical mirror into a warped thing-that-I-refuse-to-call-a-dreamscape; as it turns out, Christopher Plummer is in the middle of a warped bet with the Devil, played (although one suspects the actual acting required is minimal) by Tom Waits, and the stakes are-

Well look, you get the picture. It's all over the place. This apparent confusion isn't unusual for a Gilliam film; his worlds are deceptively well-drawn but his narrative has always been ramshackle. The problem is that there's way too much of weird-looking people glugging on bottles of non-specific drink in a caravan, and not enough plot development. The film goes pretty well until they find an amnesiac Heath Ledger hanging off a bridge, and then just seems to lose momentum. One suspects that, due to his star's death and a need to increase his presence, Gilliam has included scenes that would otherwise have been cut. There are scenes that feel like offcuts, to the extent that Heath Ledger's generally-pretty-good cockney gives way to Australian for entire sections; it feels like a cast rehearsing. Meanwhile, there's a great amount of emphasis to the mystery of what Plummer's deal with the Devil is, but it's cock-obvious from ten minutes in.

Still; the scenes in The Imaginarium do work. There's heavy use of CGI, obviously, but Gilliam (as an animator) knows how to do that shit in a way that very few directors do. It's heavily stylised, and not a million miles away from a 3-D rendition of his old Python cartoons. Don't tell me that doesn't interest you.

The decision to cast three actors as Ledger in different aspects works surprisingly well; it would seem Ledger died in the gap between location work and the green-screen stuff, so at least it's neat. All three are actors who aren't averse to showing up and doing a turn, which is exactly what's required of them here. Johnny Depp does a more urbane, yuppified take on his Cap'n Jack Sparrow shtick - but it works here, and doesn't make you want to shout "Johnny Depp is an utter cunt" at parties**. Jude Law is very very poor, and it's easy to forget that he used to be as good a character actor as Britland has produced; too many romcoms have blunted him to prettyboy status, and he's plain awful. Colin Farrell gets the meatier stuff and does it superbly; it's a cracking cameo, and while his accent wanders from London to Dublin via Australia, he's so at home that it barely seems to matter. For all that, you can't help what Ledger would have made of the opportunity to overact like this - his performance is generally solid, and he does keep you guessing about motivations.

If nothing else, though, Terry Gilliam does demonstrate that ability to create a world that we so sorely miss. His London is identifiably contemporary, but the way he's created a London where magic might happen is reminiscent (if not quite as good) as his portrayal of New York in The Fisher King. There's a scene in an upmarket shopping arcade that is recognisably real, yet like something you'd imagine in Alice in Wonderland. He also goes for a warped circus aesthetic - so yeah, casting Tom Waits as the devil was a bit of a no-brainer - and does pull it off. Gilliam can do soiled beauty like no-one else, and the effortless way he blends it with a world of bored urbanites congregating outside Tesco and clutching milk-bottles to their hearts is a thing of beauty. Way too many eggs vanish into the pudding at the conclusion - there's a subplot about charities that looks daringly satirical at one point, then vanishes into sensationalism - the thing looks so damn weird that it just rolls over your objections.

This is certainly not when of his better films, but it has flashes of his brilliance, and the production nightmare means it's a bit much to ask for anything more. Terry Gilliam is the only filmmaker around that makes warped fairytales for adults that want to be children, the only filmmaker who successfully and repeatedly makes magic realism work in a cinematic environment. You'd be mad to hold this up as anything other than a fascinating failure, but you'd be equally mad not to go and see it.

*If you keep wondering where you've seen her, she appears on lots of posters for make up and shampoo and stuff. She also looks a bit like a strangely attractive Chupa-Chup.

**No, of course I've never done that. If "never" means "not often".

Did The Guardian Fool The Lot Of Us?

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:35:00 +0000

This is a follow-up to my previous post, so if you want some background then go and read that; I should probably credit all the commenters who provided my with some dang interesting links, but I think y'all know who you are. Anyway, now that the dust has settled on the whole Trafigura / Carter-Ruck / Guardian gagging affair, it's actually not too difficult to make an educated guess at what happened.

There are accounts from either side here and here. Interestingly, they don't really contradict each other to any great degree, so it's just a question of working out a course of events which satisfies both criteria. I don't want to particularly focus on who's right and who's wrong here, but suffice it to say; I don't take that long to choose my sympathies when the choices are "occasionally-annoying left-of-centre liberal newspaper" and "multinational corporation who let toxic shit be dumped in the Cote d'Ivoire*".

So: the Guardian got hold of the Minton Report, a pretty damning (but confidential) internal Trafigura document about the aforementioned dumping of toxic slime; and, as any newspaper would, rang Trafigura to ask about it. Trafigura didn't answer the questions, and instead applied for a High Court injunction to prevent the Guardian reporting on the contents of the document. They also asked that they be prevent from reporting on the injunction.

The High Court granted the injunction. Cue several weeks of boring legal fighting, and articles in the Guardian along the lines of "ooh aren't super-injunctions terrible, we could be under one right now and you wouldn't know, wink wink nudge nudge".

After 5 weeks, an MP (who just happens to be a former Observer employee, and it's not uncommon journalistic practice to get an MP to ask a question for you in these circumstances) asked a question about it in the House of Commons. The Guardian faxed the question to Carter-Ruck and asked if the existing injunction prevented them from reporting the question. Carter-Ruck said it was.

If there's any doubt about the chain of events, it's here. Carter-Ruck's press release states that they "would take further instructions on their request to vary the Order and respond to them as soon as possible today". In other words, they'd ask Trafigura if they were allowed to vary the Order or not. There's nothing in the Guardian's version of events that says this didn't happen - although they don't mention it happening either. The statement that Carter-Ruck "emphatically" said that the existing order prevented them from reporting on parliament isn't at all relevant, if Carter-Ruck said they would try and get the Order changed to allow the question to be reported.

The fact is that, even assuming that they did say this... well, there's a million different ways to say "we'll ask our client if we can change it". So, either:-

a: The Guardian used this exchange as an excuse to publish their rather hyperbolic "Guardian Gagged from reporting on Parliament" article

or b: Carter-Ruck subtly implied they could Fuck Right Off, and the Guardian published their piece in desperation.

Delete as you prefer.

The rest is pretty straightforward. The Guardian certainly allowed everybody to think that the High Court Injunction was specifically related to the parliamentary question; to the extent that Charlie Brooker's opinion piece in Monday's Guardian referred to there being two injunctions (a pretty serious error that was corrected the following day). The only real question is whether they did so out of opportunism or desperation.

Cue outrage, Twitter, blah blah you know the rest.

Conclusions?

No-one would dispute that the Guardian played a PR blinder here (see Sarah Ditum's blog post for a sharp analysis), whatever the circumstances. If you view this purely as a struggle between two rival factions, then hooray; the good guys won, and won convincingly. They've also highlighted the existence of "super-injunctions", and created debate about Britain's libel laws and press freedom - this excellent piece by George Monbiot** is a good example. Tea and cakes all round, then.

And yet it neglects a key point. The Guardian is often seen as some form of civilised liberal-left bulwark; as the only genuinely left-of-centre mainstream paper in the UK, that's probably understandable. The phrase "Guardian Reader" doesn't exist for nothing; to many it's a badge of political leaning, almost tantamount to being a political party. If you could vote for The Guardian, many of its readers would***.

However, the Guardian isn't a political magazine. It's not the New Statesman. And it's certainly not a bunch of reputation-management lawyers.

It's a newspaper.

And if this newspaper - just repeat that to yourself, remember what the word means - didn't actually lie to its readers, then it certainly encouraged a false impression to develop. The headline "Guardian gagged from reporting parliament" isn't false, exactly, but there are a dozen ways of formulating the headline that don't give the impression that their gagging order specifically related to parliament. They created that impression and then put it out there into Twitterworld; and because the Guardian - unlike every other mainstream newspaper - actually understands the tinternet and social media, it must have been aware that #guardiangagged was going to trend like a motherfucker.

In other words, they manipulated their readers, and did so by giving a false impression of a story. And that's two things that a newspaper should never, ever do.

The result? Nice and all as it is to see Trafigura get a good old kicking, I trust my favourite newspaper less than I did this time last week. The very fact that, in piecing together an account of the battle I've had to ask myself whether or not the Guardian's account can be trusted, is an indication that their victory has carried a cost.

*Not to be confused with Carte d'Or. Except if it's funny.
** Who's actually very good, when he's not boring my tits off about carbon footprints and TIDOE (The Imminent Death Of Everything).
*** And yes, I am one of them. I even buy the actual physical paper. Which must leave George Monbiot... conflicted. Think of the rainforests.
**** This doesn't relate to anything, except that I'm sorry about all the hyperlinks.

Mass Appeal

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:07:00 +0000

Blimey, Twitter has been in the news this week. First of all it strikes the greatest blow ever for freedom of speech, thereby annoying Trafigura and their pesky toxic waste dumpin' antics. Then, after Friday's "spiteful bitch writes homophobic article in the Daily Mail" shocker, Twitter burst into action; it article about which the Press Complaints Commission received the most complaints, advertisements started to vanish from the page, and Jan Moir issued a graceless non-apology.

The result is that the papers are talking about the power of Twitter again, although whenever a newspaper mentions Twitter my heart sinks. They don't seem to be able to mention Twitter without mentioning Stephen fucking Fry, the World's Most Boring Man? Apparently he was at the core of both movements; weird, since I haven't seen a single re-tweet of his. If Fry really was the king of Twitter, I wouldn't be on it; unless maybe I'm pissing quietly in the corner of a Fry-less rogue state, which will be annihilated if it ever comes to His attention.

Anyway; the Trafigura affair is really rather heart-warming. If anything, it's difficult not to feel sorry for Carter Ruck; they actually thought that, by preventing the Guardian reporting on parliamentary questions (in which an MP asked whether it was a good idea to let Carter Ruck go around gagging the media on behalf of Trafigura), they would actually make the story go away. The response was predictable and glorious; a few bloggers went through the parliamentary questions for the day, the offending question was posted, and before you could say "140 characters or less" more or less everyone knew what the story was and Carter-Ruck and Trafigura had managed to publicise their presence in a way they couldn't have dreamed of.

The point is this: nice and all as the Twitter action was, it really wasn't the most important factor. The Guardian had been injuncted as early as September 11th, after it had received a copy of the damning Minton Report. The Guardian, and the BBC, had been using their considerable resources to fight a legal action for weeks. By far the most important part of the whole affair was a pretty old standard - if you can't publish, get an MP to ask about it under Parliamentary Privilege and then report on that. Trafigura's gagging order on reporting parliament was a bizarre and stupid action; even if the Guardian hadn't run with its "we can't report parliament on Thursday, and we can't say what it is we're not reporting on, and we can't tell you who's stopping us from doing it (P.S. maybe you kids can work it out)," then the story would - in all likelihood - have come out anyway. Private Eye went ahead and published the question in any case, because that's the sort of thing Private Eye does.

There are links to the (vile, shocking, appalling) Minton Report here (gu'on, read it, it's only 8 pages long). It has been on the Wikileaks site since mid-September. Nobody knew about it then, and Twitter didn't make a blind bit of difference.

This isn't to say that the Twitter campaign wasn't vastly more public than anything that could have been achieved were Twitter not in existence, and that it wasn't a tremendous thing to see; just that attempts to characterise it as a new weapon in the campaign for freedom of speech is a slightly shallow understanding of what happened. It was only when a law firm made a ludicrous and unsustainable attempt to gag parliament that Twitter sprang into action. Would a link to the report itself have gone viral? The real victims in this affair aren't "freedom of speech" but 30,000 innocent people, and there doesn't seem to be much talk on Twitter because of them.

As for Jan Moir's Daily Mail article; it was a nasty piece of journalism. Speculating about Stephen Gately's death was ghoulish and distasteful. Extrapolating your guessed causes-of-causes-of-death and using it to make some sort of point about civil partnerships is plain vile, and she undobtedly deserved the shame and approbrium that she got.

But: what has this really achieved? As David Simon once said: "One guy who was an asshole hhas had his hand slapped. Congratu-fucking-lations." Moir's home address was posted on Twitter; she became a hate-figure, a cardboard cut-out homophobic beeatch. Just because Twitter was right in these circumstances, it was difficult not to see it as a mob. The fact is that one person writing bollocks in a paper isn't what's wrong with the world. What's wrong is:-

a: that making shit up in a UK newspaper is still possible. Moir cast doubt on the coroner's report without any evidence at all, but this is by no means the worst example that has appeared in print. The Press Complaints Commission, which received tens of thousands of complaints, is still a lame duck that can't police the most blatant contraventions of journalistic standards. Read Nick Davies' Flat Earth News - everyone should read Flat Earth News - and you get a spectacular portrayal of their uselessness.

b: That people still listen. This is a broad social problem with god knows how many causes and no easy answers. Yes, it's true that mass appeals now carry more weight than ever before. One of the benefits of a consumer society (oh good god, I can't believe I typed that) is that companies are hyper-sensitive to their public profile. The adverts disappearing from Moir's page was the most powerful thing that happened... still, even if Moir is sacked and never works again, it's of no real benefit. It's not possible, or right, to silence all the Clarksons and Littlejohns and Myerses; another will appear, and will have yet another rant about Political Correctness and The Left Wing Conspiracy. Yesterday, after a bout of mass self-congratulation on Twitter, it didn't seem to occur to Twitter what those who agreed with Moir would be thinking. You see, you can't say anything in this country. You can't open your mouth without the PC brigade jumping down your throat. It's censorship, that's what it is.

Moir ventured an opinion. It was hateful and shameful and wrong, but she's quite entitled to do it. People are also free to orchestrate a campaign of complaints to a hopelessly ineffectual governing body, and good luck to them. However, more and more people across the UK will be using that campaign to sustain their cockeyed world-view. They aren't cartoon Nazis or oh-so-English tally-ho bigots, they are low-income families who feel that the world doesn't need them, have been culturally trained to hate anything different, and feel that they haven't been listened to. Now they've got one more tale to prop up their belief-system; they have one more reason to see themselves as a demonised people. If Twitter achieved anything, it was in strengthening the line between orthodoxy and those left behind.

On the Offensive

noreply@blogger.com (Nyder O'Leary) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:32:00 +0000

Note: the first version of this post was shite, not least because I managed to delete the important bit when I posted it. This is a rewrite, which is better, and actually has a reason for taking up memory. Probably.

So here's the scene; in a tent at the Electric Picnic, a comedian has a Q&A session with a raucous crowd of his fans (the sort of people who shout "we love you" or "you're a legend" - y'know, basically all right if a bit stupid / pilled-up / pissed).

At one stage a balck guy puts up his hand and starts asking a question. He gets as far as "I wanted to ask you," then pauses. "What did you want to ask me?" says the comedian in his best comedy-African accent; he doesn't quite put "Massah" or "Young Bahss" on the end, but it's definitely that sort of African accent.

The room's inhabitants draw a collective breath; it's not quite like that scene in the South Park Movie where Cartman tells Mr Garrison to suck his balls, but there's definitely a moment of disquiet.

"Ah c'mon, if he was Cork you'd all be laughing," says the comedian; he's grinning, friendly, charismatic; he certainly wasn't being malicious. The black guy doesn't seem to mind, and the room relaxes. He asks his question and the moment's forgotten.

Obviously, that's Tommy Tiernan at the Electric Picnic, except that the Sunday Tribune didn't bother to pick up on that bit. Instead, weeks after the even, they printed Tommy Tiernan's now-infamous Holocaust rant. Not only that, they suggested he should be investigated for incitement for hatred. There have been more finely-judged bursts of moral outrage, but not by anyone who isn't a sanctimonious twat.

Presented with the baldness of Tiernan's anti-semitic rant, various public figures went on the offensive and expressed their disgust. It was hardly unpredictable, and it's easy (if correct) to blame them for pronouncing on the affair without being fully aware of the facts. They probably decided to take a relatively well-respected newspaper's story in good faith, which is understandable if lazy.

The reality, of course, is quite different. Tiernan was making a clear and quite separate point, specifically about remarks being taken out of context; the irony makes his bemusement fair enough. If you watched the 30-minute interview his remarks read very differently; they're intended as a cartoonish, self-evidently absurd parody of anti-semitism, and takes a fair dollop of obtuseness to see them any other way. There might be an argument over whether Tiernan was insensitive to frame his argument in this way, but it's not a very interesting one. It's as much a non-story as Jeremy Clarkson's "black Muslim lesbian" comment - various Brit papers tried to stir that one into a controversy, but found a massively disinterested audience.

The Tiernan nonsense would be best described as clinically uninteresting, although it did come in a flurry of similar stories: that annoying bloke off of Strictly Come Dancing told his dance partner she looked "like a Paki", and down in Oztrighlia there was a pretty jaw-dropping blackface routine.

What this does throw up, though, is a broader question; who decides when something becomes offensive? Our brand new Blasphemy Law (not quite applicable in this case, which would have been gloriously funny) states that something "causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion" can be prosecuted; in other words, whoever is under attack is the arbiter of what is or isn't acceptable.

In law, that's clearly bananas; like giving a robbery victim the right to decide what constitutes G.B.H.. However, in the more polite realm of manners, that's pretty much what we already do. When tedious old bigots like Jimmy Hill / Ron Atkinson / Bruce Forsyth / insert dickhead here start ranting about being "PC", that's more or less what bugs them so; the fact that, whoever was making a good-humoured jibe about nig-nogs, no longer has the right to say "oh, lighten uuuup, that's not what I really meant." The notion of "trying not to be gratuitously offensive" is neither new nor a lefty conspiracy, and Political Correctness has always been a bullying term to discredit people who don't think using the word "wog" on airport departure announcements is acceptable.

The idea that others set the threshold of offensiveness isn't a terrible guideline, even if it doesn't always work. No matter how fervent an atheist you might be, you'll tend to avoid your anti-religion rant when your churchgoing auntie comes round for dinner. Anton du Beke was crass and insensitive, he apologised immediately when he realised he'd caused offence; that's how we know he's not a complete wanker. Similarly, the Aussie blackface routine was apologised for, humbly, on the programme itself; it seemed that it genuinely hadn't occurred to them that this would be offensive, but when confronted, they rapidly backed down. This, really, is all "Political Correctness" means; it means modifying your behaviour according to the viewpoint of other people, and the fact that this even has to be given a name is the most damning thing about the whole tedious debate.

This doesn't always work, however, and Tiernan's Picnic interview gives two examples in either direction. Talking to an African in a comedy African accent is just stupid and moronic and crass; his "if he was Cork" justification is idiotic. Cork people don't have a long history of oppression, haven't had to endure monkey-noises to make them appear subhuman, haven't been dehumanised by a portrayal as moronic willing slaves with silly voices. And yet this hasn't been brought up, possibly because the person present didn't seem to mind all that much (albeit under a large amount of social pressure not to make a fuss), which seems to have somehow cleansed the remark into acceptable. There was someone there who didn't seem to be offended, ergo the comments aren't offensive. Thus goes the logic. I don't buy it.

Meanwhile, the rant that clearly wasn't offensive is the one that has caused a furore, and it shows up another clear fact; the opinion of the offendee might decide what's offensive, but it means nothing when the truth has been distorted. The Sunday Tribune must be delighted with themselves. Take a bow, lads. Why not print a comedian's statement to a very small number of people, entirely out of context, and then wave it under the nose of anyone who'll listen? Why not get on the blower to Alan Shatter, read him a few sentences down the phone, and then present it as a picture of Jewish outrage? Yeah, where's the harm there? Obviously, within a few days the whole thing will be on the internet, but by that stage relatively few people will view it with an unjaundiced eye. Ireland (and the UK) have almost no problems with anti-semitism when compared with the America and the rest of Europe, and we forget what how sensitive an issue it can be. If Canadian Jewish groups also weighed in with condemnation, in advance of Tiernan being booted off the Just For Laughs festival, it's difficult to see how they wouldn't.

It ends up with this sort of article, and the Irish Times accusing Tiernan of deliberately courting controversy. This is an extraordinary level of chutzpah. The article refers to "reports" or "according to the Sunday Tribune" - like Alan Shatter, Ruairí Quinn, and more or less any other commenter you could care to name - which is code for "well I haven't actually listened to the interview." By this time the audio was freely available on the internet, and for a journalist to go on a rant without bothering to do the most rudimentary research is just shameful. In pre-empting the publication of the full article, the Tribune effectively ensured outrage - a similar technique to, say, the english newspapers implying the cervical cancer vaccine might be a killer before anything of the sort was proven. Hysteria sells papers.

The Tiernan controversy isn't mob rule, or political correctness gone mad, or any other kind of middle-class conspiracy. It's a simple, carefully-orchestrated manipulation of public opinion by a newspaper, who wanted to bump their circulation figures; and, in jumping so willingly on the bandwagon, the rest of Ireland's news output becomes complicit in this misrepresentation. It's a hunger for controversy where there is none; it's a willingness to change the substance of a story, regardless of consequences. In short, it's pathetic, and a disgrace to journalism.