The Murder Machine of Irish Media

When I was a teenager my first concert was to see the Pogues play at a venue in Dublin. Myself and my friends were right up the front, and at the time it seemed like an honour to have a drunken Shane McGowan spit beer all over us as he spluttered through the half forgotten verses of the Sick Bed of Cuchulain. McGowan is hardly a poster-boy for the Irish Music industry, and I can't imagine him having cucumber sandwiches with Seamus Heany and Michael D. at the Aras, or presenting Mr Obama with a certificate of Irish ancestry. Unlike Bono,or Pat Kenny or Ryan Tubridy etc, Shane Mcgown is representative of a particular type of celebrity, one who isn’t 'squeaky clean', who doesn’t have a full-time make up artist, an editor or a PR consultant. In my experience there is something deep in this shallow little distinction, a profundity that in old money is often referred to as 'honesty'.

 

Sinead O'Connor is perhaps another, and although I don't agree with much of what Sinead tends to go on about, I can't help but feel a sense of admiration for her, simply because she is honest and she truly believes in her convictions. You get what you see, she wears her heart on her sleeve and you can take it or leave it.

 

How much can we say of the private opinions of a Kenny, a Bono, a Gay Byrne or a Joe Duffy? Arguably these celebrities are the weathercocks of public sentiment, they make it their business to be so, and coincidently their opinions (if they are opinions at all?), are rarely out of line with the majority.

 

Imagine Pat Kenny was to say on his morning show that; 'the Olympics was a profligate waste of money, and if a mere fraction of the cost were spent on rape victims or the starving, we would have accomplished more than a wheelbarrow full of gold-plated medals!'? Or if Joe Duffy were to assert that; 'there is something inherently obscene in the sight of two girls (or two supposedly evolved human beings), punching the faces off one another in a ring surrounded by equally evolved humans shouting and applauding at each violent blow.'?

 

Whether you agree or not is not the point here. What is the point is that there is an alternative view out there, one that is no longer heard within Irish media. This reality is perhaps one of the most frightening aspects of life in modern Ireland, where our society has lost it's watch-dog and lacks the capacity for an independent analysis of the real.

 

The media must sell their wares they must appeal to the majority, this is the ideology of the market, it is the reason we heard no alternative voice during the boom and it is the reason we hear no alternative voice during the so called 'recession'. Economics and growth are the only coordinates that can be accommodated by market ideology, and as such it is no wonder that we describe the ills of modernity in terms of 'recession'; despite the reality that we have never been as affluent in the history of our race!

 

Media must sell its wares and to do so it must tell us what we want to hear and not what we need to hear. Some years ago, perhaps around the time the Pogues were in their prime, we began to loose sight of this important distinction.

 

Some might say that Gay Byrne was brave to open a condom on the Late Late show, fifty years ago. However another might argue that the condom would have been put to better use if Mrs Byrne herself had opened it some 50 years previously?  That the act was inevitable, time was right, that Gaybo' s ostensibly rebellious act, ultimately cost him nothing and gained him plenty.

 

Celebrities like Byrne and Kenny will never grow old because in essence thy don't really exist, their opinions are not their own, they are those of the fickle majority. Keeping with the herd is indeed essential to success, to a fame that extends beyond one's sell by date. Unfortunately it is only when the herd have galloped over the cliff, that the voice of the dissident has any real currency. For my part I would rather listen to the honest opinions of a heroin addict from the inner city than the polished predictabilities from the living dead at RTE.

 

McGowan and O'Connor, Luke Kelly, Brendan Behan, Wilde, Beckett, Joyce, Padraig Pearse, Christ, Gandhi and a handful of others some living, most gone, simply don't sit comfortably in the celebrity world, by virtue of a particular type of honesty, one that is endangered and near extinction. It is not just talent ....but not fitting into that celebrity world, that are the makings of a real celebrity.  In history this point is repeatedly made by the Roman Crucifix, the Hangman's noose or assassins bullet. 

 

McGowan, Kelly, and Brendan Behan choose to self destruct through alcohol. Wilde endured prison, whilst Beckett and Joyce fled our nation's intellectual paralysis and lived in exile; Ireland is no country for real celebrities. Try stating something honest on the Pat Kenny show and you will initiate a commercial break or send Pat into a polished panic attack.

 

Outside of this box, beyond the delusions that define today's Ireland, there are alternatives to the ideals of the market, to the notion of 'growth' and 'profits' as being the new Gods, and shopping malls the new Cathedrals. Padraig Pearse had a few of these alternative notions, it was he who referred to our largely unchanged education system as 'The Murder machine'.

 

Despite a patently commercial agenda the equally murderous machine of modern media cannot entirely stamp out our appreciation for honesty. Despite our national predilection for the polished superficial analysis of RTE, deep down we retain a little sympathy for the underdog, for his genuine passion or her challenge to the establishment. These are the ingredients that can jolt us from of our stupor, shock us out of the mundane routine of daily life. A routine that moves to the rhythms of our national media like Athenian slaves pounding their oars into the surf in time with the pilots drum.

Many of us can as yet, still recognise a spark of truth when we see or hear it. Some of us even retain the capacity to enjoy its brief exposure; like the sun on our skin after a month of rain and cloud. It is part of the reason for the allure of a young Irish rogue who sneaks to the upper decks to win the heart of a society girl before the ship sinks. It is the fact that the young rogue does not wish to be there that makes him more entitled to be their than all of empty aristocrats. Yet it is also the reason he must ultimately slip beneath the icy depths. It is the reason real celebrities must flee, drink themselves to obscurity, or put their brains to the wall like Hemingway did with a shotgun. We like our heroes but we don’t want to have to listen to them for too long, we must close the book of fantasy and and return to the real of 'the daily grind'.

 

The real crises of modern Ireland is not entirely economic; it is that our national and personal philosophies have become entirely defined by the ideals of the market, the Gods of growth and profit. This ideology, this national philosophy is reflected back to us by the very institution that might have offered us a vaccine. In taking €160 from each household in the country and countless millions from hotels and businesses, RTE has an obligation to the people of this country, an obligation that it has repeatedly and profoundly failed to meet. The Irish irony here is that RTE should derive such an enormous revenue from licence fees and yet, unlike the BBC, or NPR it also, sells advertising and numbs its viewers with endless hours of it. On the other hand private media with zero public funding must compete with RTE and its enormous public purse. What country but ours would flout fair competition so blatantly? Yet why should we be surprised, this is the same country that insists upon treating private patients ahead of the queues at Public hospitals. What is most interesting about life in Ireland is not that it should be so corrupt but that there still remain a few who think it should be otherwise. What is almost funny in the Irish context is the additional irony that we have a multiplicity of quangos who's function it is to protect the public from this sort of duplicity and inequality. Where are the Competition Authority, Patient Representatives, Equality and Law Reform, Consumer's Rights, and all the omnibusmen etc etc, whilst RTE sells advertising and derives its second massive income from the mandatory tax that is the TV licence? Why must I wait at the bottom of the list to be treated at a public hospital whilst those with health insurance can skip the queue? This is the duplicity that defines our nation.

 

Two hundred years ago there were two classes of people in Ireland there were the masses and the rulers of the masses. For both classes there were distinct laws, different laws, penal laws. Our rulers dwelt in castles and manors, they paid little or no taxes, gave lengthy speeches in the parliament, preached austerity, and were by and large listed amongst the bankrupt in the equivalent of Stubbs Gazette. One must question evolution and ask what has really changed?

 

Irish democracy has failed utterly, because it has become no different to Facism or any totalitarian regime, in that it has no tolerance for dissent. It has lost the essential counterbalance of an independent and truly free press. Nowhere is this new Facism more obvious than amongst the living dead at RTE. Here the ideology of the market, of profits and growth reigns supreme. Here national news is merely a preamble to the reading of the lottery numbers. In its subservience to profits, the national media has no space for what we might need to hear, for the voice of dissent. It has allowed democracy to be undermined by capitalism, to the point that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the two.

 

Democracy without freedom of the press, is a sham. Yet Irish media is by no means free, it is the humble servant of market ideology. It's deeper philosophy is personified by the late Gerry Ryan, the surface being entirely different to the undercoat. RTE must sell its wares to the majority, it must keep its costs down and profits up; hence the cheap entertainment and recent dangerously sloppy journalism that earned them a ministerial slap on the wrist. It's presenters (that untouchable inner circle) must remain subservient to mass sentiment rather than challenge that sentiment when it becomes corrosive as it did during the Celtic Tiger.

 

After reading these lines turn on your radio, tune into RTE and ask yourself; Is there anything truly different here? Are these the same old songs? Are the same old condoms still being opened by the same exhausted celebrities? Listen to the music, to the news, the lottery numbers.... and ask yourself, Is there anything different here? If you arrive at the same answer that I always do then go a little further than anyone at RTE ever does, and ask why this might be so? Ask it not for the sake of an answer, (this is Ireland after all) ask it just for practice. Just to make sure that you are still alive, that you have not forgotten how to ask, and joined the living dead.