by John Waters
There was a time, coinciding with the heyday of The Late Late, when it was possible to talk without irony about television having an ‘impact’ on something called ‘Irish society’. Now it is not possible to talk without irony about anything. To retain credibility as a Young Person today, it is essential that you know as little as possible about issues of public importance. Knowing the name of the incumbent Taoiseach, never mind the names of his predecessors, is a complete no-no. Young people today don’t give a blogger’s fart about ‘Irish society’, still less know why they should spend their Friday nights watching it being impacted upon. Neither do they believe television has any business conducting ‘debates’. Television is there to make you laugh, to sell you things, to dull the ache in your left temple, to keep boredom at bay and to sober you up for the next party. This condition, which once we would have called apathy, has been formed largely by the fogeys’ determination to devolve use of the media without devolving power. To maintain fogery in power, the coming generation of fogeys is to be given fame without influence, to be allowed on television but not to put it to any use. And this suits the young fogeys fine.
Ryan Tubridy is the answer to the old fogeys’ wet dreams: a young fogey who is interested in the rewards of television without caring much about its power. He is a kind of postmodern Gaybo in that he has the patter down pat and much better than Pat.
Even before he got the job, Ryan Tubridy talked about not wanting to have ‘long-winded current affairs debates’ on his Late Late. Then, in the next breath, he insisted that he was a serious guy. Tubridy is extremely bright, in the sense that he has a sharp intelligence and a natural curiosity. He is extraordinarily, genuinely, likeable, and this allows him to get away with things almost nobody else could. His personality conceals how hard he has worked to make himself look like a natural. He also knows something about stuff – politics, books, movies, celebrity fluff – but perhaps not enough about anything to be really lethal. On the debit side, he seems far too concerned about what people think of him, especially people of his own generation, most of whom he seems to think brighter than himself. This creates a wariness of depth that causes his hoe more often to merely scratch the surface of things, where Gaybo’s cut deep and sure. This tendency has emerged in his very first programme, in an interview with the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, when Tubridy seemed more interested in asking hard questions than getting interesting answers.
In his very first show as Late Late presenter, in September 2009, he interviewed Brian Cowen, on the defensive after a rough fifteen months as Taoiseach. It was, on the surface, an uncompromising interview. Tubridy asked several are-you-still-beating-your-wife questions. Was he sorry for anything? Would he apologize for his mistakes? Was that an apology or not? Cowen was asked about NAMA and Bertie’s perfect timing and whether he, Cowen, actually enjoyed being Taoiseach. Did he ever wake up and ask, ‘Why me?’
But often it seemed that Tubridy was asking questions for the sake of asking them, rather than for the answers – as though he wanted above all to avoid the accusation that he had dodged putting his man on the spot. A potentially car-crash question about the Taoiseach’s drinking came wrapped up in a standard ‘what-do-you-say-to-those-who . . .?’ formulation, with Tubridy fingering a Sunday newspaper for already raising the issue, and then all but apologizing for asking. Was he, he wondered aloud, annoying Cowen? Maybe, he mused just as Cowen started to answer, it was too personal a question? It was impossible to avoid the suspicion that Tubridy seemed to want to retain Cowen’s affections more than he needed to get real answers. And yet, the ostensible impression was of a tough interview in which Cowen was asked things he hadn’t been asked before.
The core problem with Tubridy is that he seems to be aware mainly of the prestige and celebrity status of his position as Late Late host, as opposed to having a sense of the meaning and importance of the show as a cultural lever. He wants to be an Irish Letterman, but without any sense of what, other than imitation, this might involve. Tubridy always wanted to be a broadcaster, but it is as yet by no means clear what he wanted to be a broadcaster for. There is no sense of a mission, other than to be ‘on the radio’ or ‘on the telly’, saying stuff. He is extremely good at it, at effecting an impersonation of a great broadcaster operating at the centre of his society, but he has yet to discover what he wants to do with that power.
In this he is quintessentially representative of his generation, which is fascinated with the cultural mechanisms it inherited but unable to put them to any use. Tubridy will never become the greatest Irish broadcaster of the twenty-first century by coasting in the slipstream created by the giants who preceded him, never taking anything seriously enough to seem ‘uncool’. He may go on being able to fake it for a while. But unless, while that red light glows, he engages with the stuff of the society – the very things that, glancing towards his gallery, he dismisses as ‘long-winded’ – he will never be anything but a magpie who picks up fascinating thoughts, looks at them in wry wonder and throws them away. And in a while it will show. Nobody will be able to say what the problem is, but one day people will begin to mutter that Ryan Tubridy, who once seemed so promising, has become sooo yesterday.
46 Seanie FitzPatrick
Reviewing the damage done in hard currency, and perceiving the disaster in terms of its final playing out, it would be possible, without attracting much in the way of criticism or dissent, to fill any list of fifty feckers who fecked up Ireland with the names of fifty bankers.
In the case of Seanie FitzPatrick, former Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, the amounts of folding stuff involved are so gargantuan as to make it a plausible proposition that Seanie was single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Irish economy and the pauperizing of at least two generations of Irish people.
To make it worse, if such were possible, it emerged that Seanie had for years been doctoring the accounts at Anglo Irish Bank to make it appear that the bank was more solvent than it was. Sleights of hand were used to ‘flatter’ the balance sheets, with major customers being encouraged to make short-term lodgements coming up to the end of the financial year. These ‘bed and breakfast’ arrangements gave the impression of a healthy rate of deposits, which kept the regulators and credit agencies happy.
It gradually emerged that this practice of ‘balance sheet management’ was widespread in the Irish banking sector. Seanie, of course, not being a man to do things by halves, had taken the device to the level of high art. He had himself borrowed some €85 million from his own bank, of which €68 million had been written off by the obliging management. Other directors had borrowed a total of €56 million, of which some €40 million had been written off.
It’s known as the ‘Celtic Chernobyl’. The figures, no matter how you cut them, were beyond belief. The banking crisis would cost every family in Ireland something like €2,000 a year for far longer than anyone could foresee, the equivalent of €50,000 added to every mortgage in the land. All Irish banks were disaster areas, but Anglo Irish was the worst, accounting for debts of €40 billion and rising by the day. It was as if nothing that had happened in Ireland for the previous fifteen years – or indeed for the seventy-five years or so before that – had had any purpose or merit at all. Everything had come not just to nothing, but to a lot less than nothing.
And the madness had been facilitated and enabled by those whose job it was to ensure that the banking sector was adequately regulated and monitored. In September 2008, less than a fortnight before the government announced that it would guarantee all debts and deposits in Irish banks, the then Financial Regulator, Mr Patrick Neary, had declared that Irish banks were ‘resilient and well capitalized’.
Nobody could understand why we couldn’t just close down Anglo. It was not as though we could not manage without a bank that was costing us several years’ worth of GDP to keep the doors open. But the Taoiseach and his Minister for Finance patiently explained that it was because of the bond-holders and our international
creditworthiness. Nobody would lend us any more money unless we paid off what we had already borrowed. Still, nobody could understand. What? – we needed to go broke in order to stop ourselves going broke?
Sean FitzPatrick was now a national pariah. Every day, the newspapers carried stories about his €100,000-a-year membership of a golf club in Marbella and his cars and his pension plans and the fact that, as a former director of Aer Lingus, he still got free flights. The people of Ireland became madder and madder until it seemed they would burst. A newspaper carried a front-page picture one day of Seanie and another famous Irish banker, Michael ‘Fingers’ Fingleton, boss of Irish Nationwide, with the headline, ‘They Should be Shot’. A radio show invited people to text in their responses and almost everyone agreed. The editor went on television and said that, of course, it wasn’t meant literally, that it was, of course, a popular colloquialism used to express strong emotions.
Seanie made a plausible scapegoat. His raffish good looks and expensive mode of dress made him easy to hate. When he was brought in for questioning to Bray Garda station, he emerged, after the maximum statutory period allowed for questioning, wearing a smart blazer, shirt and tie. Even in ignominy, he seemed to have lost none of the arrogance that had made him the most beloved of bankers in the Tiger years. No longer plain ‘Sean’, he became ‘Seanie’, the mock-palsy inflection of that ‘e’-sound managing to summon up an immeasurable amount of cultural rage and contempt.
But Seanie had been, in many respects, the epitome of the Celtic Tiger breed. He had pursued, perhaps slightly harder than others, the ethic that had driven the Irish economy from success to triumphalism, simply translating the mindset of the Tiger years into a fit-for-purpose banking model. In 2007, the year before it collapsed, Anglo Irish Bank, with shares peaking at €17.31, was held up as a model for other banks to follow. FitzPatrick was amenable to business people in search of start-up capital – oblivious, it seemed, that this would one day read as ‘reckless lending’. Minimal regulation sang a two-part harmony with a degree of faith in the future that, had the whole thing not been a house of cards, would have made Seanie a candidate for canonization.
It became fashionable, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, for people to begin their remarks about the catastrophe by emphasizing that they did not go in for ‘this “we” business’. By this they meant that they did not accept, for themselves or those for whom they purported to speak, any portion of the blame for the madness that had gripped the country for most of the aptly named Noughties. Of course, most Irish people did not get rich in those years, and many had as much of a struggle as they’d ever had. But there was, none the less, a collective element to the madness that, in retrospect, few seemed willing to own up to. In those years, the Irish people, generally speaking, began to feel that the hand of history, which had hitherto offered them the hind tit in everything, had suddenly changed its attitude. After 800 years of poverty and abuse, they were being offered an opportunity to have a decent life and a comfortable old age. Not alone did nothing or nobody suggest that this perception was fundamentally wrong, but any residual doubts or caution were scoffed away by ‘experts’ speaking daily on the media platforms from which the same experts would later pronounce on the crimes of the bankers, developers and politicians. Money was now ‘cheap’, they assured us, cheaper than it had ever been before. In fact, it was so cheap that someone who had borrowed lots of it was far better off than someone who had borrowed nothing. The same newspapers that would later condemn Seanie, Fingers et al. were daily running graphs showing how much property had gone up since last month/last week/yesterday. The most modest householder was encouraged to think of himself as a shrewd speculator, whose house was ‘earning’ multiples of whatever he himself was bringing home. It therefore followed – did it not? – that said householder could treat his income as pin money, to be thrown around without a second thought? In fact, why not take out a credit card so as not to be hidebound by anything as tedious as earned income?
This is what happened, whether we like to admit it or not. Not everyone was equally ‘guilty’. Perhaps nobody, in truth, was as ‘guilty’ as Seanie Fitz. But Seanie’s sins were not purely his own. They were the sins of a culture out of control.
In a culture gone clean out of its mind, there was always going to be someone slightly, or even considerably, more barefaced than everyone else. The Anglo figures were spectacular, but, had this particular atrocity not happened, everyone would have been just as outraged by what, thanks to Seanie, seemed the more modest craziness of AIB or Bank of Ireland.
There was always going to be a villain, and Seanie, to give him his due, made for a good one – well turned out and unrepentant to the end.
47 George Lee
In early May 2009, when George Lee announced that he was leaving RTE to run for Fine Gael, the idea began to take root in the Irish consciousness that George could become the answer to all our problems. This being just four months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the notion of finding a fresh young hero was something to get carried away by. The fact that George wasn’t black was just the beginning of the problem.
George was already a national icon from his frequent reports on the state of the economy on radio and television. These were always clear and factual, and frequently offered devastating indictments of the government’s stewardship of the national fortunes. George was the bespectacled boy who had a dream about the emperor’s Finance Minister with no backside in his trousers, and shouted it out on the six o’clock news. This made George a good economics reporter, but not necessarily a good national saviour.
Having George join its ranks might have been enough to suggest that Fine Gael was the answer to all our problems, which, for all the awfulness of the incumbent government, would have been stretching things. But by then, the Irish people were so desperate for answers they would have pulled the arm off anyone who seemed to know anything and was prepared to talk intelligently about it.
Apart from his undoubted capability as an economic analyst, there was something endearing about George. He had fire in his belly. He appeared to be sincere in his belief that the Cowen administration was the worst in the history of the State. His declaration that he wanted to be able to tell his children that when his country was in trouble he ‘got involved and tried to fix things’ resonated with many of his fellow citizens, despite the growing cynicism of the times.
In newspaper articles shortly after he announced that he would be a candidate for Fine Gael in an upcoming by-election in Dublin South, George outlined his manifesto for saving Ireland. He attacked the government for its record, just as he had when he was Economics Editor of RTE, but did not seem to realize that, as a politician, he would need to go further than criticism. George said that unemployment had doubled in the previous year and predicted that it might approach 600,000 by the end of 2009. But he offered no plan to create jobs. He said the government had offered no hope, but he did not have any hopeful thoughts of his own. With an election to fight and a half-page in a national newspaper to play with, you might have expected George to come right out and say what he proposed to do differently. But he didn’t. He just said we needed an energetic new government, ‘capable of fresh thinking’ and ‘strong enough to drive change’. But what kind of fresh thinking seemed unclear and he didn’t seem to be thinking many fresh thoughts.
George criticized a recent emergency Budget, with its savage tax hikes, cuts in welfare and mortgage relief and its promise of a property tax. ‘This is not acceptable,’ George emphatically declared. But he did not say what he would accept. People might have been forgiven for thinking that, if George had a realistic alternative to all this misery, he should not go on keeping it to himself, but should spit it out so we could all get back to the party.
Then, briefly, it seemed that George might be about to suggest something concrete. While the rest of the world was engaged in expanding public investment and cutting taxes,
the government was doing the opposite and was therefore making things worse, he explained. This was taking billions of euros out of the economy at the wrong time, and would ensure the downturn lasted much longer than anything we had seen until then. It would stifle hope, discourage enterprise and could ‘easily turn a recession into a depression’.
You didn’t need to have been the Economics Editor of RTE to know this. For nearly a year, the dogs in the street had been barking about Brian Lenihan going around like a demented DIY enthusiast, sawing in turn at each of the legs of the bockety table in an effort to stop it wobbling. And the cats on the other side of the street had been gleefully screeching back that soon the table would have no legs at all.
So George, once in power, would – what? – cancel the levies and restore the Christmas bonus? George didn’t say. He merely went on to remind everyone that he had been the boy who said that the emperor had no clothes. He had ‘spoken directly and impartially’ to people as clearly as he could. As danger loomed, he had ‘consistently highlighted the risks of inaction and complacency’. But his warnings were ignored. Actually, no, George decided, the government had chosen to portray his impartial and clear messages as ‘an effort to talk down the economy’. It sounded as if George wanted to get them all back for being mean about him.
George seemed clear in his mind that we needed to get the country ‘back on track’ and that this could not be done with the present lot in power. That is why he wanted to offer ‘in a small way’ the change and the leadership the country needed.