by John Waters
33 Tony Blair
Because Tony Blair’s mother came from Ireland, he is, strictly speaking, ‘half-Irish’. Had he, for example, been possessed of football skills at approximately the level of his apparent gift for politics, he might well have made it on to the Irish football team, perhaps ending up as captain. But Blair’s contribution to Irish politics is at a deeper level than anything to do with blood or nationhood. For a decade he came among us, persuaded us that all things were possible, and then went away, leaving us bereft.
Blair’s trick was his deceptive ordinariness, which was actually not a deception. To begin with, he had no talent for politics. Sensibly, he wanted to be a rock star, but he failed to make the grade in that calling, and discovered that politics was easier than it looked and that almost none of those involved in it were particularly good at it. He latched on to Gordon Brown, stole all his best ideas and then wiped his eye.
Most British people have no idea how much we Irish know about them, having watched them and absorbed their popular culture all our lives. Top of the Pops, Bunty, Shakespeare, Enid Blyton, John Peel, Man. U., Agatha Christie, The Hotspur, Whispering Bob Harris – all these are as much part of Irish culture as British. Out of politeness, we invariably acquiesce in their attitude of superiority, but in truth we know everything about them, whereas they know almost nothing about us except U2 and the IRA.
But we, for our part, and for perhaps understandable historical reasons, tend to overlook the profound impact our neighbours’ politics has on ours. Almost unconsciously, we follow trends set ‘across the water’, not so much in the realm of ideas and –isms as in the demeanour of the political animal. We had no equivalent of Thatcher, but nevertheless, from the mid-1980s, Irish politics took on something of her certitude. Charles Haughey (certainly no fan of the Iron Lady), adopted something of her thinking in addressing the mess that he had contributed to making of the Irish economy. We called it ‘monetarism’, a misuse of the term which for years used to drive Irish economists mad.
In the Tiger years, our aesthetic of leadership gathered what it had of inspiration almost entirely from Blair: the matey affability of Bertie and Enda seeming to arise from an unconscious desire to emulate Blair’s successful reworking of the Kennedy brand.
Blair was actually one smart bastard. Politics seemed easy to him not because he was particularly suited to it, but because it had become so predictable and banal. When he turned his attention to the situation in the north of Ireland, for example, the first thing that occurred to him was how stupid it was that nobody had ever been able to sort it out. For him it was simply a matter of flattering a few hick politicians and getting them to feel superior to one another. Within a year of moving into 10 Downing Street, he had engineered the Good Friday Agreement.
The resolution of the conflict was in large part due to the fact that a generation of men who had wasted their lives in this futile war were now prepared to act to stop the disease being passed on to their children. But the magic ingredient was Tony Blair. A born-again 1960s idealist disguised as spin doctor’s puppet, he was able to alter mindsets without frightening the horses with piety, ideology or historical baggage.
The veteran socialist Leo Abse, who later wrote a book about Blair, said that he had an innate desire to place everything in a conflict-free zone. His first instinct was his desire to anticipate objections and to appease objectors even before they spoke. His essential view of life was that all evidence of differences should be minimized. For Abse this was a defect of Blair’s but for us in Ireland, as perhaps for nobody else, these values paid off. Because of his unique psychology, Tony Blair made things happen that otherwise would not have happened.
But the only thing more banal than politics is the culture of the commentary that largely attends it, and this has grown exponentially worse in recent years because of contamination by what is sometimes called ‘citizen journalism’. When the bloggers and their literal-minded equivalents in the ‘old’ media were not spitting at Blair because of his role in the invasion of Iraq, they were dismissing him as the sultan of spin. But although he was undoubtedly a skilful politician of the media age, Blair also exhibited a deep seriousness which counterpointed his superstar image. You only have to look dispassionately at his record to know that here was a politician who used his accidental bounty of charisma to conceal a deeply serious heart, in many ways out of tempo with its time. Blair seemed instinctively to know what was necessary for survival in an age in which charismatic vacuity was prized over everything, and to guard his deeper thoughts and talents until he was able to put them to what he regarded as their proper use – even if this was to lead to an almost terminal unpopularity.
As his period of leadership rolled out, the clichés about Blair were that he was cunning and ruthless; that he was consumed with presentation over substance; that he was not ‘real’, but the product of the spells of unelected spin doctors charged, above all, with getting his government re-elected. There is a name for this syndrome: ‘politics’. Blair’s personality and methodology were problematic only for those who had failed to reflect upon the change that has occurred in modern politics since the introduction of opinion polling, which had caused the thought process of politics to become like an air-con unit, endlessly recycling the same banal ideas and periodically re-presenting them in a new way.
For Blair, there was never an issue about whether or not he should concentrate on image and presentation, only about whether he could become sufficiently adept at these dark arts to win. Pandering to ‘public opinion’ was, as he immediately intuited, the name of the game. Once he was elected, the issue was not whether he would, could or should engage in the politics of perception, but whether he could do so and manage to achieve anything worthwhile in spite of the culture of the sample poll, that elusive unit of public opinion which all modern political parties must struggle to decipher and understand.
What is interpreted as ‘public opinion’ from these surveys is not the perspective of real people, but the cybernetic response of quota-controlled samples. These deliver not so much a reflection of the views of society as of the debased unit of public opinion created by a circular process involving pseudo-moralistic hectoring on the part of the media, choreographed posturing on the part of politicians, and political correctness on the part of the polled public, resulting in a currency that is further debased with each cycle of the machine. This means that it is necessary for the modern politician to speak at all times with forked tongue: simultaneously in the language of idealism to those who make things happen in the economy and society, and in the languages of piety and sentimentality for the benefit of statistics. The challenge is maintaining the correct balance between these conflicting imperatives to allow important things to be done while still holding the stage.
The problem for the political culture he left behind is that Blair was an outsider in politics, whom the insiders immediately started to imitate. By succeeding in the ways he did, he bequeathed us an entire generation of Blair clones from within that stupid, hopeless world, who think they can achieve all the good things he did while avoiding all the pitfalls.
In the UK, David Cameron and Nick Clegg thought they could fill his shoes by wearing the right suit and a smile. In Ireland, Bertie Ahern managed to bask and share in the Blair magic for a decade while maintaining something of his own identity. Then, George Lee became so intoxicated with what you could do with a suit and a smile that he briefly gave up his good job in RTE in an attempt to save the nation.
Next, the Irish people watched in apprehension as Simon Coveny and Leo Varadkar warmed up in the wings.
What they all missed about Blair was that he wasn’t really a politician at all. He was a superior intelligence, a Man from Mars who decided to play at being a politician because he could see how stupid and hopeless it all was and how easy it might be to achieve things if you just applied common sense and reason to processes usually governed by tribalism, sanctimony and pretence. Unfortuna
tely, his imitators, who have the suits and the smiles but not the sense or the smarts, will be with us verily unto the end of time.
34 Charlie Bird
In the months and then, God help us, years after the flight of the Celtic Tiger, the media became the highest court in the land. With politicians determined to take the ‘respectable’ option at all costs, and, ultimately, to require the citizen to carry the can, it soon became clear that there was no real possibility that many of those who had pauperized the country would be brought to anything resembling justice. The important thing, from the politicians’ perspective, was getting everything up and running again. Sure, a couple of retired bankers could be thrown to the pack, but it remained a refrain of governmental rhetoric that the survival of the banking system was essential to a revival of national fortunes. For this to work, the government needed to direct public anger towards a handful of targets that were no longer central to the plans for reconstructing the banking system.
In this climate, the media became the Supreme Court of a kind of national desire to kick the miscreants in the shins. But, instead of pursuing politicians on why they were unprepared to pursue radical options, journalists went for the easy option of chasing scapegoats wearing their jackets on their heads. Those who sought to outline the cultural context to the crisis were sidelined as the frontline reporters pursued incidentals like pension top-ups for retiring banking executives. This fuelled public anger but also reduced its focus to the peripheral symptoms of the problem. In this environment, Charlie Bird became the Chief Prosecutor of Easy Targets.
If there was a retired banker or a failed developer to be pursued, Charlie was your man. There was no hiding place. Charlie, in his resumed capacity as RTE’s Very Important Big Chief Head of No Ordinary Reporting, would tiptoe to the wrongdoer’s door, whisperingly confiding to viewers his intention to ask some serious questions. He would knock and wait. The viewer would be enabled to observe a Mercedes in the driveway, or any sign of Georgian splendour about the residence. Silence would ensue. Charlie would knock again. A voice inside might say, ‘Go away’, or words to that effect, or ‘I have nothing to say’. Charlie would hold his ground. ‘What about such ’n’ such?’, he would demand through the letterbox. ‘What about the missing money, Mr So ’n’ So?’ ‘I have nothing to say’, Mr So ’n’ so would say.
On, perhaps appropriately, 1 April 2010, Charlie Bird, in his capacity as RTE Chief of All Washington Correspondents, sought to doorstep the former Anglo Irish Chief Executive David Drumm at his $4.5 million home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
As our hero made his way up the driveway, Charlie’s voiceover set the scene: ‘As we approached the house, it had all the appearance as if there was no one at home.’
He reached the front door and looked through the glass.
‘Oh, he’s there,’ Charlie exclaimed to no one in particular. ‘They’re there!’
A voice could be heard shouting indistinctly from inside.
‘Mr Drumm. It’s Charlie Bird from RTE.’
The Voice again.
‘Why are you ducking down?’ Charlie continued.
The Voice said something about whether Charlie had seen what it said on the gate.
Charlie became just a little irate. His voice went up an octave, which made him sound peevish. ‘I WANT TO TALK TO YOU,’ he said.
The voice said something about its family being there.
‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘can I talk to you outside?’
The Voice seemed to say no.
‘There are taxpayers at home in Ireland who would like some answers,’ said Charlie, now fully into his stride.
The Voice was having none of it.
Charlie started again and then thought better of it. ‘There’s some taxpayers . . . Okay. Thank you very much.’
This was regarded as the height of journalistic endeavour. Charlie Bird, long a hero of the Irish public, again became the object of widespread gratitude and respect. ‘At least we have Charlie Bird,’ people would reflect, ‘to ask the hard questions.’
It has often been observed that the first response of most Irish people to the mention of Charlie Bird is a broad smile. It is a smile containing elements of condescension and amusement, but also of intense affection. In the massive cultural changes that have swept through Irish life in recent decades, Charlie Bird has become a kind of avenging angel. To emphasize his importance to Irish life, his title has been extended, making it longer and more important-sounding with every passing year. First he was a mere Reporter; then he became a Correspondent; then a Special Correspondent; then a Chief Special Correspondent.
There was a time when tax evasion and white-collar crime were part of the fabric of Irish life, the subject of discreet nods and winks, indulgent smiles and shaking of heads. Nowadays they are regarded, at the level of public conversation at least, much in the way a parish priest might once have regarded the phenomenon of auto-eroticism. Charlie Bird has become the national chronicler of previously unspoken sins. His postbag has for years been by far the largest of any RTE news and current affairs reporter, presumably divided between outraged citizens selling out their neighbours for tax evasion and contrite wrongdoers unburdening themselves of their own sins. His is the voice of the national conscience, the facilitator of the collective confession. When a scandal breaks in the corridors of power or high finance, it is Charlie who guides the wrongdoer towards a tearful blurt of remorse, though always on camera, with Charlie standing by to express the hurt and incomprehension of the man in the street. ‘But do you not think,’ he might probe, ‘that you owe the Irish people an explanation?’ ‘Mr So ’n’ So,’ he would earnestly demand, ‘do you accept that what you’ve done is very, very wrong?’
The Irish people are delighted with all this. Most of them would have been shocked to discover that Charlie Bird was once a militant left-winger, and that he was photographed at the graveside of a dead comrade giving a clenched-fist salute alongside the notorious left-wing agitator Tariq Ali. Nowadays Charlie gives few hints of such a colourful past.
His full name is Charles Brown Bird, although he spent a brief period in the 1960s as Cathal Mac an Ein, and another as Cathal Mac Einigh after someone pointed out that ‘Son of the Bird’ was a daft name for a serious reporter. The ‘Brown’ part derived from the fact that, on emerging from his mother’s womb, Charlie was a deep brown, the consequence of the iodine tablets taken for a thyroid condition Mother Bird had developed during pregnancy. Another brother was named ‘Dickie’.
Perhaps this initial colouring was by way of a prophecy concerning Charlie’s future role as the National Pursuer of Brown Envelopes. For three decades, Bird has been the People’s Witness to disaster. Following Hurricane Charlie in the 1980s, he took to the street in a gondola. In one memorable sequence, he approached a man who was sitting on the roof of his house, with the water lapping at the gutters. Before Charlie could speak, the man declared, ‘You’re too late, Charlie. Go away or I’ll put your head under the water!’
One time, when he was Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, a keen sportsman, sent his Christian-namesake a brace of duck as a gesture of admiration. Bird, however, saw it as a Mafia-style warning. Although personally a gracious and charming individual, in his public demeanour he comes across as humourless and even priggish. Charlie seems to embody some deep, brooding piety in the national imagination that, while buried deep under cute-hoorism and ‘the Crack’, emerges every so often to launch literalized, projected accusations at anyone who happens to get caught.
Charlie Bird undertakes journalism as though every day were a movie. He is, as one journalist memorably put it, ‘a Lois Lane who shaves’. His nightly pantomimes have added greatly to the gaiety of the nation and made him into a national figure. But the question must be asked: does knocking on front doors and demanding that bankers submit themselves to interrogation by Charlie really achieve anything beyond creating diversion and entertainment for the viewers of the nine o’clock news? The
Charlie Bird brand of slapstick investigation probably attracts far more viewers than a thorough, and tedious, exposition and analysis of the facts, and in this sense it might be called more influential. But it also results in the consolidation of a national mindset whereby public rage and indignation is channelled into a kind of sadistic glee at the discomfiture of Charlie’s latest ‘subject’, and then allowed to hiss harmlessly into the stratosphere.
35 Niall Crowley
A few years ago, one Philip Tobin, Managing Director of DotCom Directories, a Dublin-based e-commerce business, advertised some positions in his company with the proviso ‘no smokers need apply’. After the ad first appeared in a freesheet newspaper, Mr Tobin received a call from someone at the Equality Authority who told him that his advert was against the law because it discriminated against smokers and he would have to withdraw it. Mr Tobin said that the ad had fulfilled its function and so the question of withdrawing it did not arise. It soon turned out that the Equality Authority was wrong – there was nothing in the legislation governing its operation to say that smokers cannot be discriminated against.
Nor, any sensible person would say, should there be. The Equality Authority was, after all, a state body. A couple of years before this, to the most tremendous fanfare, the government had introduced a ban on smoking in the workplace because smoking is bad for people’s health. Yet, another branch of government saw fit to ring up a businessman who has come to the same conclusion to accuse him of breaking the law.
The Equality Authority sat down with itself and had a rethink. It then issued a statement explaining that, in fact, there had been ‘no question of discrimination’.
In fact, there had been a distinct question of discrimination. Mr Tobin had been on every radio programme in the state for the previous week telling the nation how much he disliked smoking and what he thought of smokers. He said they were smelly, stupid, unhealthy time-wasters, and he did not want them working for him.