Our country has gone to the dogs with sickly spin doctors
While modern politics is obsessed by the optics, an inherited memory stirs deep in our heart, writes Miriam O’Callaghan
EYES glued to Joanna Donnelly and Joan Blackburn, our long hot Irish summer was all about a cool Dutchman and a Swede: Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius. How high could they go?
Proof of their summer soaring might yet be found on our autumn supermarket shelves, as crop failures from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe impact on the cost and availability of ‘real’ food and its ingredient derivatives. In Italy, news of Germany’s failing potato crop was presented in the context of the Irish Famine and the mass migration of Northern Europeans due to agricultural and economic emergency. Along the banks of the river Elbe, the long drought revealed the Hunger Stones, left by previous generations to warn of hard times ahead. In the Czech Republic, a stone dated 1616 read: “If you see me, weep.” In Germany. a sister stone warned: “If you will again see this stone, so you will weep, so shallow was the water in the year 1417.”
Some 601 years after that prophecy, it is lamentable that while our planet is heating up and at an alarming rate, the politics of what we call the developed world has found an alternative, and apparently superior, use for the Dutchman’s and Swede’s science of exact thermometry. The dangerously shallow waters of Europe’s rivers are matched by the dangerously shallow politics that invites potential voters to focus-group suites, stuffs them with pigs-in-blankets and devils-on-horseback, while pollsters grill them on how warm or cold they feel towards a particular politician, a statement they make, a position they take or whenever they encounter the party “brand”.
Such pollster thermometry is packaging politics and politicians as products to be graded, bought, consumed, discarded. A grading that is, in fact, a de-grading of politics and public life. By diminishing voters to the status of passive consumers this degradation occurs at the bio-level of democracy. In Ireland, we see it in how the Department of Social Protection refers to the public as “customers”. This “customer” drivel, imported from the UK, both falsely elevates and flatly reduces the citizen, conferring on them a weird consumer ‘choice’ they do not have, subverting their powerful financial, social and civic relationship with the State, and vice-versa.
In practice, citizens in modern democracies are being diminished even further to the level of what cultural critic Mario Vargas Llosa calls the “spectator”, where we are sometimes slightly horrified, but always entertained. No wonder then, that modern electorates are subjected to the 24-7 social-media barrage of “Here’s Me” by their governments. Justin Trudeau, who has politics in his blood back to his and my many-times great-grandparents Francis Bernard and Mary Freake (there’s a bit of entertainment), is the master.
Perhaps our being inured to this SM onslaught is why there was little enough outcry when the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, took to Twitter to wish his dog Harry a happy birthday — complete with cake, candle and red hipster kerchief. If you missed it, white puffball Harry is a puppyish eight and plain dote. Judging by the 923 ‘likes’ on the minister’s post, Ireland’s pets are safe. Like the minister, many of us see our animal adoptees, or in the case of cats, adopters, as family members.
But unlike the minister’s government, we’re not presiding over a system of health and social care where our actual children — not our ‘pet’ children — are deteriorating dangerously on “urgent” scoliosis-surgery waiting lists. Or where the national medical-appointment waiting list is hitting a million; or families are sleeping in garda stations; or if they are ‘lucky’ consigned to family hubs that are oxymoronic or plain moronic; or nationally the Government scrapes together 15 refurbished properties from a 3,500 promised and achievable; or spends around €30m a month public money on private landlords, with neither standards nor security for tenants; or suicidal children and struggling teens are waiting weeks, months for mental-health services; or where 23 homeless people died in the first 15 months of the Minister for Housing’s tenure; or a mother surviving in “emergency” accommodation for a year carries her stillborn babies to hospital in a booming European capital.
But given our current culture where we are gripped, increasingly, by trash and trivia it is perhaps inevitable that governments and politicians would opt for the frivolous communication route: political presence posing as purpose. Ten minutes on the web can present for our undifferentiated delectation pirouetting kittens, women and children blindfold and executed, singing goats, Isil beheadings, Fortnite builds, epic fails, neo-fascists on the march, a beluga whale in the Thames, knotted-up squirrels, children floating face down in the Med, Alex Jones combusting over secret military bombs “turnin’ our freakin’ frogs gay”. With governments spending massively on polling and communication, and guided increasingly by marketeers, why wouldn’t they want a piece of this easy, tantalisingly unmediated action? If we are, according to critic Neil Postman, “amusing ourselves to death” then in Ireland, the preferred cycling, swimming, running, sock-swapping, climbing, brooding, posing, gazing approach makes spin and marketing sense.
Though written in 1985, Neil Postman’s observations on the dumbing down of culture, society and politics are hyper-relevant today. If we are unhappy or disturbed, he asks a la Huxley and his Brave New World Stability: “What if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture drained by laughter?”
Consider then, how in a time of electoral fraud, sabotage and threat to democracy, a young, ‘progressive’ prime minister of a modern republic is alleged to have “floated” the idea of establishing fake SM accounts to comment favourably on government’s work. Only, he laughs it off — no kidding — to comparative political, public and media silence.
In that same political world, puffball Harry is such a funny little fella with his candle-lit cupcake, only a killjoy wouldn’t want him to enjoy his birthday. And we have a sense of humour. In Louth, Tracy McGinnis Mullins has an excellent sense of humour. And she needs it. She also has a birthday boy. He was 14 on Monday. Brendan Bjorn is Declan’s handsome big brother. He is also profoundly disabled. Unlike puffball Harry, Brendan celebrated his special day in a damp, rented house decorated by stubborn black mould. He is now almost 16 months on the “urgent” scoliosis-surgery waiting list, despite Harry’s owner saying nobody would wait more than four.
The surgery is finally scheduled for tomorrow — but the skin of Brendan’s gullied spine degrades every day, hour he waits. His mother Tracy loves, treats, cleans, emulsifies, watches, emails, writes, rings, lobbies, prays and hopes her special son’s back won’t have deteriorated to the point of its being inoperable.
To keep her fully occupied in her 24/7 care — we wouldn’t want her to be slacking — Tracy is fundraising to buy a small home in Wexford modified for Brendan’s complex needs. A hoist would be heaven. The Wexford house is ideal, being well-priced, within reach of specialists in Dublin, having an excellent special-needs school close by in Enniscorthy.
Despite a personal loan and frantic fundraising, Tracy and Brendan still need €40,900 and urgently.
That €40,900 is likely only a fraction of the legal costs paid by the State last week, defending the indefensible, in the case of Rebecca Carter, also from Wexford. Despite the State’s vindictiveness, and thanks to her own tenacity and the courage of Justice Humphreys to fight for her and so protect other students in the future, Rebecca can now become a vet. Who in the State Examinations Commission will be held to account for this farce, distress and unnecessary cost?
Farce, distress and unnecessary cost describe much of what passes for our public and political life. But at the heart of society — not the vapid political timeline — things are changing. Last week, for the first time, I saw an adult heart beating on an ultrasound screen. Its power and intricate movement were shocking, mesmerising. Each year our hearts beat around 42 million times. The action is entirely involuntary. Without it, we would die. In Ireland, when it comes to housing and homelessness, an inherited memory is stirring our national heart, beyond the boundaries of age, class, politics. At the housing marches, if that heart were on a screen, we would find what is written there. Hunger. Eviction. Home. The beat is strong. The temperature rising.
‘What if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?’ ‘To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?’