Feckers

by John Waters

  We are nowadays so accustomed to certain types of people complaining they’ve been discriminated against that we think there’s something wrong with discrimination per se. But we discriminate all the time, between shops or places we like to go to and those we don’t, between radio stations and newspapers we like or don’t like to read and listen to, between columnists we read and those we don’t. We also discriminate between people we like to mix with and people we don’t, people we trust and people we don’t, people we like the look of and people we don’t.

  The idea that the Equality Authority exists to eliminate discrimination is a myth. In fact, it exists to enforce certain forms of discrimination. In this case, the Equality Authority representative who initially contacted Mr Tobin was seeking to compel him to discriminate in favour of smokers, even though he dislikes smoking and thinks smokers would be bad for his business. If the logic of this contact had held sway, we would be but a hairsbreadth away from affirmative action in favour of smokers, and legal requirements that employers hire minimum numbers of nicotine addicts. This sounds daft, but it is no more so than most of what the Equality Authority spends its time doing.

  ‘Equality’ in this sense, of course, does not mean what it says in the dictionary. ‘Equality’, as bandied about in latter-day public conversation, is really a concept concerned with acquiring for certain listed categories the rights, entitlements and privileges deemed, by definition, to have been unjustly acquired by others. It is, in other words, a rebalancing process, in an equation deemed by the guiding ideology to have an unjust and immoral configuration as it stands. Thus, there must be a rebalancing between men and women in favour of women, blacks and whites in favour of blacks, homosexuals and heterosexuals in favour of homosexuals, and so forth. There is not, however, any requirement that the exchange work both ways. Men must yield to women on whatever grounds are ordained by the relevant authorities, but there is no question of women ceding anything to men, even where a case is made that the status quo is inequitable and unjust in a way that favours women.

  Since its foundation in 2001, the CEO of the Equality Authority had been Niall Crowley. His tenure ensured that, right through the Noughties, the word ‘equality’, as politically defined in the public realm, became a construct that excluded men. Crowley’s job was to target harmful discrimination, but instead he chose to impose a highly selective definition of the word ‘equality’ and, in effect, to conduct a war against one half of the population, allegedly on behalf of the other half.

  Here is a direct quote from a speech Crowley made while CEO of the Equality Authority: ‘The primary objective for work on men in gender equality must be to strengthen the role and contribution of men in challenging and changing the structures, institutional policies and practices, and culture (including stereotypical attitudes), that generate and sustain the inequalities experienced by women.’ Translation: everyone is entitled to equality, but men are entitled only to ‘share’ in the ‘equality’ of women. Crowley emerged from an ideological heartland in which the word ‘equality’ to been redefined to make it the exclusive preserve of certain listed groups. In his role in the Equality Authority, he went to court to have women made full members of elite golf clubs, and lost significant amounts of taxpayers’ money when the authority’s case was shot down. Under his stewardship the authority was enthusiastically supportive of a demand for adoption rights for gay couples, the right of travellers to become an officially recognized ethnic group, and the right of women to demand a share in everything men were presumed to have without giving up anything. But it seemed to regard itself as having no role in relation to men as men, or to have nothing to say about the injustices men might be suffering by virtue of not belonging to a named victim group.

  The attitude of the ‘equality’ lobby to gay adoption rights is especially instructive. For here is a context in which there exists a clear conflict between what are self-evidently the natural rights of two groups – fathers and children – and another, gays. The ‘equality’ lobby rushed to support not those whose natural rights were being trampled into the dust of history but those who claimed an entitlement not on the basis of reason or nature, but on their status as a favoured ‘listed category’.

  Crowley claimed to have addressed himself to changing structures and systems so as to create ‘a better society for women and men’. This would have been laudable, but he did not do it. Instead, he addressed only those structures and systems that corresponded to his ideological prejudices. The rest he ignored, which means that many, many men, and many of these men’s children, were infinitely unhappier at the end of his term of office than might otherwise have been the case. Like a piano tuner who tuned only the white keys and refused to touch or listen to the black notes, he left the instrument as out of tune as it ever was, only in a different way.

  36 Terry Keane

  In the opening chapter of The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics, Breandán Ó hEithir quoted a doughty Cork blacksmith, on the day after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, responding to his parish priest’s assurance that ‘We’re going to have our own gentry now’, with a spirited ‘We will in our arse have our own gentry’.

  The Keane Edge was perhaps independent Ireland’s most determined effort to prove him wrong. Through the early years of the Celtic Tiger, this gossip column on the back of the lifestyle section of the Sunday Independent, with its snippets about the rich and famous, sought to insinuate a new social hierarchy in a nation no longer sure where it should draw its values from. Judging by the Keane Edge, money, glamour, celebrity and brass neck became the most visible characteristics of social significance in this new Ireland.

  Terry Keane, because she was ‘known’ to be conducting a long-term affair with Charles Haughey, was the perfect frontperson for this showcase of Ireland’s emerging ‘gentry’. The facts of this affair were ‘known’ in much the way people ‘know’ about such things in small towns – it was common currency without ever being openly stated. It was hinted at, then denied, again let slip and again withdrawn. Terry Keane was the wife of a man who had been appointed a senior judge by Haughey himself. It was all too fantastic for an Ireland raised on the Catechism to grapple with.

  In the 1990s, this became a meal ticket for Terry Keane, after she moved from the Sunday Press, where she had been a lightweight feature writer, to become a high-profile gossip columnist with the Sunday Independent. The persistent innuendos about Haughey gave her a cachet nobody else could touch, and she was, by all accounts, paid as much for this connection as for any writing talent she possessed.

  Keane’s relationship with Haughey became the subject of persistent references and innuendos in the Keane Edge. There would be mentions of weekends in Paris with this unnamed ‘Sweetie’, or allusions, so barefaced as to seem implausible in their obvious implication, to ‘my Charlie’. It was all exceedingly arch and therefore both titillating and deniable.

  In May 1999, Terry Keane moved from the Sunday Independent to the Sunday Times in a deal which involved her writing three initial articles about her long-time romantic relationship with Charles Haughey and thereafter a gossip column for two years. She received £65,000 for the three initial articles and £50,000 per annum for the next two years. These three articles, based on her putative forthcoming memoirs, were published on three successive Sundays that May.

  In advance of publication of the first instalment, Keane went on The Late Late Show, for the penultimate show of Gay Byrne’s lengthy tenure, and spilled the beans on her relationship with CJH.

  In a fourth, apparently unscheduled piece on 6 June, Keane responded to critics and dealt with the history of her infamous Sunday Independent column. She had left the Sunday Independent without notice and there was now clearly bad blood between herself and editor Aengus Fanning and his deputy editor Anne Harris. Fanning had been quoted in his own newspaper as saying: ‘She was happy to take our money while making no contribution. Her work rate had declined dramatically in th
e last two years.’ Gradually it emerged that Keane had just been one of a team of journalists contributing to the column that bore her name.

  The Sunday Times’ front page lead that morning was entitled ‘Bono story my worst mistake says Terry Keane’. This referred to a notorious Keane Edge story which revealed the sex of one of Bono’s children on the basis of information leaked from the maternity hospital before Bono himself had been told. In this interview, Keane apologized for the episode, describing it as ‘the most indefensible thing I ever did’.

  ‘I was not aware of the story before it was published and when I saw it I was shocked. I should have resigned there and then. It was my worst mistake and my bitterest regret.’

  She described the Keane Edge column as ‘poisonous’, claiming it had been mostly written by other people under the guidance of Anne Harris. Harris, she said, was ‘undoubtedly the cleverest woman I have met. She knew exactly what the readership wanted and however much people used to berate the column, there was no doubt they read it and the circulation soared. I just wish she had used her own name and not mine.

  ‘The Keane Edge gave the impression that I was the sole author, but at any one time, a minimum of five people worked on the column, usually six or seven.

  ‘There is just one burning regret in my fifty-nine years – the hurt and damage I caused to people through the Keane Edge . . . I should have stopped sooner and walked away. Quite simply, I needed the money. Despite the apparent glamour of my life, I have always been financially insecure.

  ‘At the beginning, even though it was written in a very bitchy style, the Keane Edge was not intrusive. Gradually it changed direction. I was partly responsible for that and therefore I take part of the blame. Part, but not all.

  ‘When it started to go too far and I became uncomfortable with it, I was always assured by my superiors that the readers knew the Terry Keane of the Keane Edge was a fantasy character, not the real me. I could see their point. I doubt that readers took it at face value that I was constantly on the phone to Warren Beatty and Brad Pitt, and that I was the world’s most stunning and irresistible redhead sex bomb. So reassured, my disquiet would evaporate.’

  In the same edition, the Sunday Times carried an interview with Terry Keane by another ST journalist, which claimed that Keane had been devastated by the hostile responses to her Sunday Times revelations. ‘It has been like having one’s eyeballs sliced through with razor blades. But this too shall pass.’

  Asked how she could have been unaware of the pain and damage inflicted by the Keane Edge, she replied: ‘It seems to me that I must have been living in a different world. The vehemence with which people react to the Keane Edge . . . shocks me. The fact that I’m unaware of that revulsion means either that I am very dim or completely amoral. That frightens me, as I don’t think I’m dim.’

  In a way, the Keane Edge was like a cultural weathervane, rendering visible the implicit facts of the Celtic Tiger years. Nothing about it, not even the identity of its author, was authentic, and it therefore, in retrospect, acquired the status of metaphor. It was something the Irish public was drawn to, and while they laughed at much of what it contained, they envied, too, the lifestyles depicted there. It invested them with a kind of idealism that fed, in turn, the lesser desires of more humble ambitions. In this, it became a central element of the delusion that enveloped the country in those years. Terry Keane may not have written much of it, but her persona was certainly the grit around which this pearl of pretension and vanity was formed. Her life and personality came to represent, in those years, the idea of classiness, chutzpah and style. Like many things about that Ireland, the Keane Edge was not the product of one mind, nor even of all the minds that contributed to it. In a way, it was the product of an entire society running away with itself, of readers as much as journalists, wannabe celebrities and publicity seekers. And it seemed, in the end, entirely appropriate that the woman named as the author was ‘only doing it for the money’.

  37 Frank Dunlop

  In the early summer of 2009, Frank Dunlop was sent down for eighteen months on a charge of corruption. Because he was a former government press secretary, the culmination of Dunlop’s long-chronicled downfall was a big story. As usual in such circumstances, his incarceration was attended by a spate of vindictive and gloating newspaper headlines, including references to his being taken away handcuffed in a prison van, rather than in the ‘top of the range Mercedes’ in which he had arrived for the sentencing hearing. In a country once famed for its Christian compassion, anything to do with money or politics has recently begun to attract the kind of venom and unpleasantness previously reserved for crimes like paedophilia and premeditated murder.

  Dunlop’s crimes were serious and inexcusable. He was also, to be frank, not the most likeable of men, being burdened with a personality characterized by smugness, superciliousness and an intellectual arrogance without visible means of support. When he first appeared before the Flood planning tribunal, these characteristics were abundantly observable. But, after some initial resistance, Dunlop had begun singing like a nightingale. The nation watched him fade away to a shadow of his former self and saw in his eyes the look of humiliation and disgrace. And yet it was noticeable that he did not hide away, nor seek to justify his behaviour. He stood his ground, told his story and accepted his medicine without complaint. He went on working, writing books and studying for a law degree. He faced the music and still held his head high. Dunlop accepted his wrongdoing yet retained his essential dignity as a human being.

  Yet, there were those who continued to believe that Dunlop was being highly selective in his musical repertoire, which may have gone some way to explaining the vindictiveness that greeted his incarceration.

  Sentencing Dunlop, Judge Frank O’Donnell said the public interest required a custodial sentence, not just a rap on the knuckles. ‘The word must go out from this court that the corruption of politicians, or anyone in public life, must attract significant penalties,’ he told Dunlop. He said that, although there was no readily identifiable victim in this case, Dunlop had actively undermined the confidence of the public in the democratic system and had been motivated by gain.

  Dunlop was by now clearly not a well man. He was into his 60s, his life-expectancy radically foreshortened by recent experiences. Contrary to what the judge implied in sentencing, Dunlop had already been grievously punished for his sins. He had been humiliated and disgraced, albeit as a consequence of his own actions. He had, by all accounts, lost his friends. As a national figure, he had become the target of public rage and vindictiveness in a way ‘ordinary’ criminals do not.

  Nobody could have suggested that Judge O’Donnell was a man lacking in compassion. Just a few days beforehand, he had suspended the entirety of a sentence of three years’ imprisonment he handed down to a man who was before him on charges of robbing a pharmacy, apparently by demanding money with menaces. The man had twenty-three previous convictions, including a number of counts relating to drugs and robbery. Judge O’Donnell said it was a ‘stupid’ robbery, but accepted that all the cash had been recovered.

  Judge O’Donnell pointed out that the charges against Frank Dunlop related to separate acts of corruption in 1992 and 1997, and noted that Dunlop had shown no hesitation in renewing his corrupt practices after a long gap. He had had every opportunity to reflect on what he was doing. The Judge added: ‘Some people who come before me knowingly commit crimes through a haze of addiction. What you did, you did with a long-range, focused, criminal intent.’

  It was an odd thing to interject, as though the Judge felt a need to justify himself. What possible connection could there be between Frank Dunlop and the kinds of people Judge O’Donnell was referring to? Indeed, it might be argued that Dunlop, too, was an addict: addicted, like so many of his countrymen, to money and power, and therefore perhaps just as worthy of compassion and mercy as an addict who endangered public safety in order to get his fix.

  It is interesting how w
hat is called justice often seems to follow the contours of public piety. Dunlop, with his not entirely attractive personality, made rather a good scapegoat. His jailing at this point went some little way towards appeasing a public seemingly insatiable in its need to see people walk the plank and climb the scaffold. Judge O’Donnell’s words therefore caused a great outpouring of satisfaction in the land.

  But the idea that Dunlop’s incarceration would do anything to restore the public’s faith in the planning process was a bit much. Planning in most parts of Ireland is opaque, arbitrary and shot through with a culture of ideological obstructionism. Anyone seeking to use the system soon discovers that it appears to be set up to create a context for people to find unorthodox ways around it. Or, perhaps you might say that it is set up to render necessary some extra-curricular assistance in finding ways around it. One planning authority in the west of the country, for example, requires members of the public who are seeking an appointment with a planner to call immediately after 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, in order to arrange an appointment for the following Monday week. All the available appointments are allocated within a few minutes, and, unless you can get through immediately after nine, you have no chance of getting to see a planner.

  Most people seem to think this a normal way of doing business – whether through naïveté, righteousness or poverty, wearily and expensively trudging their way through the myriad of obstacles placed in the way of anyone seeking to get anything done. And when they were told to disapprove of ‘corruption’, most people did that as well, shaking their heads sadly at the criminality of Frank Dunlop and making no connection with their own experiences of bureaucracy and official obstructionism. And Frank, of course, duly obliged by looking the part of a once promising apparatchik gone to the bad. It did not seem to occur to anyone that it was perhaps the most natural thing in the world that businessmen in a hurry might see the need to pursue a different approach – that they might see the benefit of having a man with a brown envelope going around to grease the system’s wheels a little. To suggest that this began or ended with Frank Dunlop was worthy of the constitution of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But somehow this was a lot easier than actually doing anything about it.