IT IS a sad indictment of Ireland’s bourgeoisie that a project such as forth, which in times past would have been more readily associated with proletarian politics, is a lone voice in its call a reinvigorated public sphere, something that has heretofore been the creation, and indeed responsibility, of the bourgeoisie.
Indeed, the confusion and hostility with which forth is occasionally met from self-identified liberal and leftist individuals shows how degraded public debate has become in Ireland. One interlocutor publicly referred to forth as “right wing cunts”, apparently unable to understand the nature of a journalistic project, never mind a left-libertarian one.
forth has put people’s backs up because it is asking simple, but fundamental, questions that have gone unasked in Ireland, and because its rejection of Ireland’s historical Catholic conservatism goes hand-in-hand with a similar opposition to the new, lazy liberal consensus that supports austerity and wishes to see ever-greater restrictions placed on human activity.
What is most obviously absent from Irish life today is any sense of a public sphere. Almost nothing of significance, in politics, culture or social life, is up for grabs.
At the risk of shooting my paycheque in the foot, the Irish news media is particularly failing in its duty. The Irish Times continues to publish a daily newsweb paper packed with news but is increasingly advertised on the basis of supplements, magazines and lifestyle material.
Where the Irish Times has succeeded it has been in making mainstream its political hobbyhorses, once described as ‘soft left’ by Fintan O’Toole. (1) Similarly, anticipating the charge of drifting to the right, former editor Conor Brady notes that the Irish Times’s historical positions are now mainstream. (2)
This may be the case but it clouds the fact that in many way Ireland remains a conservative country. Firstly, abortion remains illegal in Irish society – outlawed ‘forever’ by a bizarre constitutional amendment more suited to a totalitarian dictatorship than a liberal democracy.
Moreover, Ireland has also become a model of the new moral authoritarianism in politics. The Republic of Ireland was the first country in Europe to introduce a widespread ban on smoking in public places. Victimhood weighs heavily on the political agenda, particularly in light of clerical sex abuse and the conflict in the North, to the point where questioning whether emotional distress confers any enlightenment is virtually forbidden. Onerous bin taxes have already been implemented and water charges are on the way under the guise of ‘sustainability’, accompanied by hectoring about the environmental damage caused by everyday life. Toll roads are widespread, arguably restricting freedom of movement for those on lower incomes – again excused, at least partially, as a ‘sustainability’ measure. Anti-alcohol measures are regularly trumpeted by health promotion bodies and the Irish are told that their ‘binge drinking’ is a toxic activity.
Most absurdly of all, despite the country’s ‘unsustainable’ urban sprawl, particularly in Greater Dublin, Ireland remains a predominantly rural country with all of the ‘rural idiocy’ that goes with it.
What we might call the ‘Irish Times consensus’ is at the heart of all of the above. This is not to give a mere newspaper, albeit the country’s most important one, undue significance. However, as an elite vehicle, the Irish Times more clearly than any other reflects bourgeois public opinion. Lacking a coherent ideology or even programmatic set of policies, Ireland’s elite has no shortage of criticism, but little positive to offer.
The Irish Examiner, meanwhile, appears to have retreated largely from the national scene to its traditional Munster base. The absence of the Irish Press from the national scene is still felt: no Irish daily newspaper takes a republican political position in any sense of the word though, it must be admitted, that the Press’s close association with Fianna Fáil would likely render it limp and useless today, were it to still exist.
The launch of Daily Ireland in 2005 was a brave attempt to forge a new voice but it was foiled by too close an association with Sinn Féin, a poor business plan that seemingly revolved around getting recruitment advertising from the British administration in the North and a notable lack of resources. The basic proposition, an intelligent, republican-minded and argumentative national daily remains a good one, though.
Where, though, is the voice arguing against the received wisdom that Ireland ‘overdeveloped’ during the boom? Where is the recognition that, for instance, the quality of housing stock improved? Most important of all, where is the voice calling for the politicisation of the economy and prioritisation of productive economic activity over the unproductive financial and other sectors which currently predominate?
It is difficult to blame the press too much for its absence from public life. As a newspaper of record, the Irish Times assiduously covers all of the goings-on in the Dáil – it’s not the Times’s fault that the Dáil is an irrelevance to people’s lives. In addition, the commercial pressures on the newspaper industry are immense, if not quite as bad as whining publishers would have us think.
One major problem is the underestimation of the public’s intelligence. People are simply not credited with having enough brainpower to grapple with complex issues.
We can see this quite clearly in the (untrue) refrain that the people rejected the Lisbon Treaty because they didn’t understand it. In fact, the people rejected the Lisbon Treaty because they object to having intentionally obscurantist political treaties forced on them. The subsequent frog-marching of the electorate into accepting by an all-party consensus in a second referendum was surely one of the most disturbing and anti-democratic spectacles in recent history.
Similarly, as someone outside the news industry mentioned to me today, editorial decisions at newspapers are increasingly taken on the basis of what attracts hits on their web sites. The fact that anyone outside the news business is aware of this is significant in itself. It should be noted that the drive toward following web-use is occurring despite the fact that web browsers have a demonstrable penchant for bizarre but pointless stories as a form of entertainment during work.
It can also be seen in the capitulation of cultural bureaucracies first to the language and then to the logic of ‘inclusion’ and other quasi-political ‘metrics’ entirely unrelated to culture.
It can be seen in the desire for cosy consensus over conflict, the reservation of the term ‘dissident’ for the most backward forces in society and in the utter lack of meaning the goings-on in the Dáil.
The idea that there is no appetite for public discussion is bunk. It is easy to dismiss talk in pubs or at dinner parties as mere moaning but it does suggest an openness to thrashing out the issues of the day. Nama may be an interminably boring subject, but isn’t it all the more remarkable, then, that everyone has an opinion on it?
Public events such as Leviathan are entertainment disguised as politics. There is nothing inherently wrong with attempting to make an evening of a public debate and anything that moves such events away from the ‘backroom of a pub’ Socialist Worker meeting is to be applauded. However, with Leviathan there is always the sense that not only are the panels composed of the same old faces, there is the distinct feeling that nothing is really at stake.
Less well-known is Dublin’s Current Affairs Meet-Up group. The work largely of a single woman, Veronica Walsh (no relation), the Meet-Up indicates a direct engagement in the public sphere. The problem is, she shouldn’t have to do it: the public sphere should be there waiting for participants, not an empty space waiting to be filled.
However, it does clearly demonstrate that while the Irish elite’s loss of faith in its own project has been generalised into a cultural malaise but it has not yet been replicated by the public at large: people have not abandoned politics, politics abandoned them.
Every tiny personality-driven spat is inflated into an affair of national significance, as we have seen in not one, but four resignations in recent weeks – one from the Dáil, one from the Seanad and two from ministerial posts. But when everything matters, nothing does. Ireland today, quite simply, has no politics at all. How could it? Politics is dependent on there being a public sphere to engage with. The privatisation of people’s complaints is an inevitable outcome of the lack of purchase these complaint had in a society that has become entirely managerial in nature.
The collapse of old certainties – popular capitalism, republicanism, socialism, Catholicism – has had a devastating effect on Irish public discourse but it need not result in society being left in an unpolitical daze.
There is a hole at the heart of Irish society. It’s time to fill it with new ideas, to shout loud that we have a stake in society, that culture will resist instrumentalisation, that dissent is necessary, that the exhaustion of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and the Greens does not mean that we are exhausted.
(1) ‘Irish Times’, Harry Browne, the Dubliner magazine, May 2006
(2) Up with the Times, Conor Brady, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 2006, p. 103
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