Feckers

by John Waters

  38 Charlie McCreevy

  If they made movies about things as interesting as Irish politics, the story of Charles McCreevy might be among the more emblematic of the age: the Young Turk who blew the whistle on the greybeards who were sabotaging the economy, who was banished to the backbenches, then returned triumphant to become Minister for Finance in what would become the most successful period in his country’s economic history.

  In February 1982, Charlie McCreevy appeared on the cover of Magill, his face adorned by a headline which in its time did not read as overblown: ‘Charlie McCreevy is Right. The Politicians Have Vandalized the Country.’

  ‘Our politicians,’ began Vincent Browne’s article inside, ‘have propelled us towards economic and social calamity in the last decade. Wild, irresponsible election promises and commitments, reckless public expenditure schemes, uncontrolled deficit budgeting and an unprecedented falsification of budget figures have coalesced to create the worst economic crisis the State has ever known. One politician has spoken out against this drift in national politics, Charlie McCreevy, and because he has done so outside the cosy confines of his party rooms he is being chastised.’

  McCreevy, then a tender thirty-two-year-old, had been making his views on the economy known for some time before the ousting of Jack Lynch by Charles Haughey in 1979. The 1977 Fianna Fáil election manifesto, on the crest of which McCreevy was himself swept into the Dáil, had all but bankrupted the economy, and McCreevy had been among those who had voted for Haughey, believing him capable of restoring sanity to the national finances. On 11 January 1980, just three days after Charles Haughey’s landmark ‘We-are-living-beyond-our-means’ TV address, McCreevy raged in public about the recent drift of Irish politics. ‘General elections seem to be developing into an auction in promises,’ he thundered in Newbridge. ‘We are so hell bent on assuming power that we are prepared to do anything for it.’

  In April 1981 McCreevy warned: ‘If political parties continue to disgrace themselves, then democracy itself is at risk.’ This speech began a process that resulted in his temporary expulsion from the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, his long-term political estrangement from Haughey and his exclusion from ministerial office for more than a decade. His banishment continued even as the very prescriptions he had been advocating were gradually adopted by the political establishment and media. When Haughey returned to power in February 1987, he had virtually universal support in pursuing the course McCreevy had been banished for promoting. But, although he remained on good personal terms with Haughey, McCreevy languished on the backbenches for another decade, until Albert Reyolds, on replacing Haughey, promoted him to the cabinet.

  McCreevy was bright, charismatic and street-smart in a peculiarly Irish, small-town way. A highly skilled communicator, he employed language in a manner deceptively unpolished. Even when he became Minister for Finance, he continued to speak in the imprecise way people speak in shops and restaurants and bars and across garden fences. There was a characteristic about his delivery suggestive of an unaccountable breathlessness. When, as a reporter, you wrote down one of his sentences, you nearly always had to reinterpret it, ever so slightly, maybe by adding in words that he had left out, or because he had forgotten the construction he had embarked upon and ended up with two sentences stuck together like two odd socks at the bottom of the laundry basket. McCreevy’s sentences were a wonder of the world. In print, even when edited, they required careful study to decipher. And yet, as he delivered them, they conveyed precisely what he intended.

  There is something in the Irish personality that resists pretension and what passes for cosmopolitanism, a resistance to the false. Sometimes this seems to manifest itself as a kind of anti-intellectualism, which causes clever people to conceal their intelligence behind a façade of come-all-ye simplicity. For a politician with intelligence to become and remain electable, it is necessary to sublimate any traits of personality likely to frighten the post-colonial horses. So it is with Charlie McCreevy. His public persona – the bluster, the waffle, the effortless familiarity, the backslapping good humour – were genuine. But they were also carefully – albeit perhaps unconsciously – constructed disguises that enabled him to limbo-dance his way from oblivion to the heights of political power, a kind of Trojan horse for the qualities of good sense and cop-on that McCreevy had in abundance.

  McCreevy liked to break down his philosophy into lines that might be thrown across a bar or shouted over the roar of a threshing machine. ‘Don’t curse the darkness’, he would say. ‘Turn on the fucking light!’

  ‘I would like to think,’ he said near the end of his time as Finance Minster, ‘that the approach I’ve taken, and my economic philosophy, has been . . . that you’ll do better with the money in your arse pocket, and make better decisions and put it to better use, than to be feckin’ around and goin’ in circles and I funnellin’ it back out to you some other way. That’s a fundamental view of mine. Every other economy that tried any other way of doin’ it fell on top of its head. Whereas the economies that’ve had that particular approach have prospered. So therefore the philosophy of givin’ people back their own money has worked in my view, and has contributed to the growth of the Irish economy.’

  He railed tautologically against ‘left-wing pinkos’, but never dreamt of himself as an ideologue. ‘But like,’ he would say, ‘like I’ve no problem with the socialist system at all, but I’ve decided over the years, is that people, the whole system works best when people have more freedom in everything. In EVERYTHING. In their own personal lives. Everything.

  ‘There’s a core group that . . . and it’s anathema to that core group of people that what they have espoused for forty years, since the ’60s, of a certain approach, that this other approach, from this bogman from County Kildare, seems to have worked somewhat better. Ninety-eight per cent of them never saw a fuckin’ poor day in their lives. They always came from the class that was well privileged, went to the best schools, ate in the best restaurants, and talked to the same people anyway. And people like you and me, and our people, wouldn’t be allowed in there. And we all . . . Like. Like. Like. They philosophize and hypothesize and theorize and drink the wine and talk all the night at all the dinner parties, and have these economic philosophies that we’ll all be equal and everything else. But they’re always more equal than the rest of us. And always could talk down to us about it. And it really kills them that that other type of philosophy has worked.’

  In the flood of accusation and rage that followed the meltdown of the Irish economy in 2008, it seemed to go unremarked that the signs of imminent collapse had been there some six years before that. It was also unremarked that, back in 2002, when Charlie McCreevy announced that the boom was over, he got nothing for his trouble but abuse.

  McCreevy had proposed a series of cutbacks in public expenditure he claimed were necessary to rebalance the economy, which he said was beginning to overheat. The press and public went crazy. For once, McCreevy’s populist instincts seemed to desert him. On The Late Late Show, he was booed by the audience when he tried to justify the measures being taken.

  Back in 1982, it had suited the Irish public to have a hero to say sensible things in the nick of time to prevent national bankruptcy. Now, McCreevy, turned gamekeeper, was again demanding the postponement of short-term gratification for long-term benefit. But this time, cushioned by the tiger-fleece of the early Tiger boom, the Irish public wanted the candy to keep on coming. The media, which for many years had led the clamour for the implementation of fiscal rectitude, abandoned economic pieties in favour of a populist witch-hunt. McCreevy threw in the towel and fecked off, like Ray MacSharry before him, to Brussels.

  Had he stuck around, would he have repeated his trick of the early 1980s and blown the whistle on a spiralling economy, a spendthrift government, a banking sector out of control? The very idea is almost too tragic to contemplate.

  39 Paddy O’Blog

  All the time nowadays you meet peo
ple, usually males, who tell you there is about to be a revolution. When you do not, in response, begin to nod aggressively in agreement, they then tend to peer at you earnestly. No, they stress, there really is going to be a revolution. Don’t you know?

  What you know, immediately and with certainty, is that yer man is a blogger. He spends every spare minute, and many minutes that he cannot really spare from his personal hygiene routine, thumping aggressively at a keyboard and imagining that he is doing something to change political reality.

  Blogging brings out of the cultural undergrowth and into the light the ‘bah!’ of those whose investment in public action is confined to the hours they spend jerking off in front of computer screens, usually anonymous and always in a disposition of rage and spite. Politically without content and intellectually brain-dead, this cyberspace cornerboyism imagines itself to be hugely sophisticated and threatening to the status quo. Its sense of self-importance is nourished by elements in the mainstream media which have become alert to the possibilities of slipstreaming on the popularity of the web among ‘the youth’. In truth, these virtual Don Quixotes do nothing but compete with one another to utter the most immediate and banal opinions in the most poisonous way, but this does nothing to dilute their sense of themselves as plucky and beleaguered dissidents in some repressive dictatorship. In their heart-of-hearts, they long for some totalitarian tyrant to persecute them.

  Paddy O’Blog, the Hibernian sub-species of an international phenomenon, is even nastier and more stupid than most of the foreign variations. Pasty-faced and under-sexed, he sits in his darkened room waiting for someone to say or do something, and then he gets to work. He spits fury and indignation like a neurotic Kalashnikov with a jammed trigger mechanism. Everything comes from the top of his head, which is as flat as the earth he inhabits. No inanity is too asinine, no banality too boring for him to hammer vigorously into his keyboard. His first thought on anything becomes his settled opinion, and usually this is received from some other blogger, who just happened to get up a bit earlier and, having nobody to slavishly imitate, delivered himself of the scintillating opinion that George W. Bush is a ‘moron’ or that Christianity, the civilization which to its sorrow begat him, is ‘mumbo jumbo’.

  Paddy O’Blog has a limited vocabulary. His compositions are studded with words like ‘crap’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘arsehole’. He does not think beyond the obvious, but taps out the obvious as though it is the most interesting thing he has ever thought, which very often it is. He is a coward: almost always hiding behind some ridiculous sobriquet, like ‘Slugger’ or ‘Nemesis’. Nobody knows where he lives or anything much about him, other than the opinions he expresses about other people. He is a parasite. He is jealous, mean-spirited, malevolent and petty. He is full of rage and spite. He knows nothing of beauty or love, but only what he hates and whom he envies. No, let us cut to the chase: he knows nothing. He communicates with nobody other than his blogging mates, who are just as ignorant as he is. He considers himself on the same level as journalists who must go out into the world every day, gather information, collect facts, submit themselves to editorial and legal processes, and ultimately take responsibility for every word they write. In fact, a regular theme of his contributions is the idea that he is in the process of supplanting conventional media and making journalists redundant.

  This is the only thing he is right about. Because the mainstream media have insisted on seeing the Internet as a cultural as well as a technological ‘development’ and are afraid of seeming ‘out of touch’, conventional journalism has been extending an extraordinary level of deference towards O’Blog and his chums. It is a part of the daily cant of journalism that ‘citizen journalism’, blogging, interactivity and other ‘new’ forms of communication are changing our democracies, in radical and, it is implied, positive ways. Journalists, terrified of seeming unhip, declare that the bloggers do essentially the same thing as themselves. It does not appear to occur to any of them that the relationship of bloggers to newspapers, for example, is that of a flea to a dog, that the blogger is a parasite who leeches off the ‘old’ media, especially the printed category, feeding off what the newspapers produce and giving nothing back, but gradually squeezing the life out of that which he subsists on. Newspapers, instead of holding back and allowing the bloggers to choke on their own spite, have opened up their publications, inviting O’Blog to ‘comment’ on their content – largely unedited and for free!

  It is ‘interesting’, though for dubious reasons, to study the ‘threads’ which nowadays are attached to many newspaper articles on web editions, like dingleberries from a sheep’s arse. These are not neutral conduits for spontaneous opinions, but channels dedicated to forms of mob disgruntlement which has, for perhaps good reasons, no other outlet. Contributors appear to come to the process with a mindset possibly symptomatic of the isolationism involved in Internet communications generally, and anticipating a certain group dynamic. Most contributors appear mostly to want to draw attention to themselves, seeking to convey an impression of strength, cleverness, cynicism or aggressiveness, while pre-empting the possibility of hostility or ridicule by pushing these responses in front like spears. It is often difficult to perceive any intellectual or democratic distinction between most of what they write and the ancient rite of public urination.

  Yet, newspapers seem to believe that offering space to P. O’Blog & Co. is a contribution to democracy requiring all conventions and inhibitions to be laid aside. Loyal readers, who carefully consider every aspect of an issue before taking out a writing pad and fountain pen and composing a careful and balanced letter to the editor, are expected to shell out €2 or more for the newspaper, and requested to keep their letters short. But O’Blog can rant and rave at the newspaper’s expense for as long as he likes, leeching off its content, insulting its journalists and predicting its imminent demise. If a reader includes in his letter what is euphemistically called a ‘four-letter word’, it is either excised or disabled by asterisks before publication, yet, on the free website of the same newspaper, O’Blog can refer to ‘cock’, ‘cunts’ and ‘fuckers’ as if he were sitting on a high stool at the bar of his local pub.

  As a result, there is now a major crisis in the global newspaper industry. Arising from the complacency and stupidity of the commercial media, bloggers have been enabled to create, for next to nothing, sites in which the content of the professional writer is regurgitated and offered up to the malevolent attentions of O’Blog and his ilk.

  Within a short time, this crisis will claim its first casualties in the Irish newspaper industry. It seems not to have occurred to anyone that, if this process runs its projected course, the world will before long be left to the tender mercies of O’Blog and his mates. But, without the ‘old’ media to leech off, Paddy O’Blog will have nothing to blog about. The ‘conventional’ media, having been obliterated, will have to be resurrected in an entirely new form, and the old standards and values restored. The public will have to come to realize that, if they want to have decent professional communications, they will have to pay for them. Media organizations will have to find ways to make this work. It would be too much, one supposes, to ask that they and the profession of journalism might find ways of dealing with the problem before it is too late.

  40 The Begrudger

  For a long time, through good times and bad, perhaps the most maligned species in Irish society was the Begrudger. The case for the prosecution was comprehensively laid out some years ago by Professor J. J. Lee, in his excellent volume, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Lee credited the Irish with coining the word ‘begrudger’, but he also argued, in the course of a brilliant mini-essay on the subject, that the documentary evidence of begrudging Irish behaviour was pretty thin on the ground. While noting that it was a tradition of Irish society that ‘immense amounts of time were devoted to spiting the other fellow’, he also observed that ‘the begrudger mentality did derive fairly rationally from a mercantilist concep
t of the size of the status cake’, and that since the size of that cake was more or less fixed, ‘one man’s gain did tend to be another man’s loss’.

  It was noticeable that, during the Tiger years, members of the Irish entrepreneurial community employed the concept of begrudgery almost in the manner of a club to beat down even the most tentative hint of criticism concerning the boom and its benefits. Even the merest hint of questioning of their motives, methods or manoeuvrings immediately invited the taunt of ‘begrudger’, which proved a handy way of discouraging all scrutiny of their activities. To listen to a particular brand of entrepreneur, one would think that the only thing standing between the Irish people and boundless wealth and happiness was this unfortunate tendency to ‘begrudge’ those who got up at the first burr of the alarm clock and went out to lay two blocks where only one lay before. Those who did not wholeheartedly endorse the entrepreneur’s breathtaking path to glory, his savoir faire, intelligence and wit, his hale and uninhibited enjoyment of the fruits of his endeavours, were portrayed as malevolent and small-minded, carping sneeringly out of the sides of their mouths about the achievements of their betters. For years, while the Tiger thrived, it was impossible to say a ‘bad word’ about the handling of the economy without being savaged as a ‘begrudger’.

  Something interesting happened to journalism also. It’s an odd feature of Irish newspapers that, whereas what you might call the engine and chassis of the vehicle is provided by solid economic commentary of an orthodox, market-centred nature, the bodywork is of an entirely different cast. Most of these so-called ‘stars’ are people who in the old days would have described themselves as socialists and who remain, in spite of improving personal circumstances, of a left-leaning disposition.