The significance of Joe Duffy (Liveline, June 26, 2023) insisting that Ryan Tubridy (from 12.30) “really is a unique talent” should not be overlooked.
It isn’t simply that Joe and Ryan (along with a host of RTÉ’s household names) share Noel Kelly as an agent. It also reveals Joe’s interest in maintaining a near-feudal pay structure, rewarding “unique talent”.
Notably, Joe is fixated on maintaining high ratings for his show. As he put it in 2017: ‘One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up.’
The Joe Duffy Show is a careful balancing act between heart-rending accounts appealing to an older, pearl-clutching, audience – often sparking moral panic – and outright absurdity or light entertainment (including ‘Funny Fridays’). That is not to say that the show never addresses important issues or even breaks stories, but the formula is clearly calibrated by experienced – and even talented – producers. That’s why other presenters seamlessly ‘take the chair.’
Undoubtedly, the issues they choose to lead on arise from careful consideration. Joe doesn’t simply allow members of the public to have their say. This certainly seemed evident during the June 26 programme, as a succession of callers ‘spoke out’ in favour of Ryan Tubridy. At a point when most of the country was up in arms, wagons were circling.
Joe’s particular skill lies in not offending anyone that matters; this extends to the car company sponsoring his show, but crucially finds him reinforcing key government messages.
For example, during Covid, rather than allowing for a reasoned debate among experts on the thorny question of vaccination policy, Joe chose to platform an individual claiming the vaccine was a ‘mark of the beast.’ Naturally, reasonable Joe rode to the rescue to restore our collective sanity.
Latterly, he has weighed in with belligerent statements on Russia-Ukraine that align with the government’s response. Thus in May, 2023 he opined: ‘War only ends primarily when one side is beaten by the other side.’ As Mick Heaneyput it in the Irish Times: ‘He’s so impassioned that callers with mildly divergent views struggle to get a word in edgeways at times. Talk to Joe? Not when he’s in this form.’
During his 9am radio slot and as presenter of the Late Late Show Ryan was rarely overtly political, although he was happy to endorse a complimentary biography of Leo Varadkar, and chose to interview Micheál Martinon his penultimate outing as Late Late Show host.
Tubridy plays a different role to Joe Duffy, which I have previously arguedis essential to a distinctively Irish propaganda. This is to maintain the feel-good factor. Light entertainment on the airwaves provides a comfort blanket for all sorts of troubles, from Covid to the cost of living. Indeed, Tubridy’s relentless chirpiness recalls the Depression-era song, popularised by Bing Crosby: ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream your Troubles Away)’
Almost uniquely on RTÉ Radio 1 – the Ray D’Arcy show has a similarly vacuous quality – Tubridy’s programmes became an extended commercial: a kind of dream factory or Late Late Toy Show for adults. Rather than engaging in tiresome arguments over our response to climate change, listeners and viewers are subliminally guided into treating themselves to the latest car model. Smile, it’s easy.
In this argument-free zone, the mask occasionally slipped, as where Tubridy suggested on the Late Late Show in 2018 that cyclists who (legally) cycle two abreast should be ‘binned’.
A significant proportion of the Irish public ignore RTÉ, and aren’t in the least bit surprised by the revelations. The real outrage emanated from RTÉ staff who did not take kindly to their highest earner being over-paid in an underhand fashion. This arrived at a time when, presumably, many are feeling the pinch during an extended Cost of Living and Housing Crisis.
RTÉ staff are a formidable and influential body that seem to have gained control of the news rooms, even if the likes of the Joe Duffy Show may be acting in the interest of Tubridy. The sans culottes seemed determined to eviscerate the ancien regime. Whether the defenestrations of Dee Forbes and Ryan Tubridy will be sufficient remains to be seen.
The looming question is whether these RTÉ journalists, who appear to be led by Education Correspondent Emma O’Kelly are committed to a long overdue overhaul of public service broadcasting. This ought to entail an end to programming that serves as a vehicle for so-called ‘talent’. Notably, BBC Radio 4’s schedule does not contain a single programme that takes its name from a presenter.
But RTÉ staff may have to be prepared to cut their cloth further. It is unclear whether public service broadcasting is compatible with selling advertising space.
A fully state-funded model would also bring its own problems – as we witnessed during the Covid-era when RTÉ often became a conduit for government propaganda – but safeguards, as in the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, could be put in place. A slimmed down model – with a primary focus on current affairs and high culture – would surely represent an improvement on the kind of schlock – epitomised by Ryan Tubridy – we have become accustomed to.
A Basic Requirement
In 2017 I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request seeking details of payments by third parties to a number of RTÉ stars, including Ryan Tubridy, approved by RTÉ management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance for 2017.
The officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.
He revealed, however, that ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’
That the vast majority of requests were approved, particularly to independent contractors, demonstrated that the organisation was taking a permissive approach on conflicts of interest.
RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it was impossible to verify this claim. If their work really was benign, why were they withholding the information?
The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy would have been lost to commercial competitors if information entered the public domain. That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he had found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would have represented a career regression.
Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than to listen to the unique talent.
Transparency?
This week I sent in another FOI seeking records (if they exist) of payments or payments-in-kind to the same ‘stars’, approved by RTE management falling under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance since 2017. It will be interesting to find out whether transparency is now given a higher priority than “contractual negotiations”.
Patrick Freyne’s satirical 2020 Irish Times article ‘It is now late-period Dermot Bannon. He is on the verge of losing it’ was an unusually humorous appraisal of the kitsch that state broadcaster RTÉ tends to dollop out.
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Czech author Milan Kundera explains that kitsch is an aesthetic ideal ‘in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist’. This he argues, ‘is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.’ The Montrose cultural bubble has long served a crucial political purpose: denying shit while everyone acts as though it does not exist.
Through no fault of his own, the feel good factor of Dermot Bannon’s show obscures the suffering associated with an enduring and arguably preventable housing crisis, and also, more broadly, provides an insight into how the Irish overreaction to Covid-19 occurred; which has done incalculable damage to the lives of children especially.
It seems that our best, and perhaps only, response in Ireland to these traumas is comedy, but this has clear pitfalls.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
“fronted by classical pillars”
Patrick Freyne reveals:
Dermot Bannon is my muse. I would write about him in every column if I could (God knows I try). If I were the arts editor I would make the arts pages of this paper entirely Dermot Bannon-themed. If I were taoiseach, I would declare a Dermot Bannon day …
He observes that
On every episode of Room to Improve, Dermot Bannon goes into battle with the plain people of Ireland in the cause of justice and light. Mainly light, to be honest. In his philosophy, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by turning a wall into a window. He’d build all of his houses from windows if he could. The man is a martyr to big windows.
Explaining that Bannon:
is creating a metaphorical window into the heart of the Irish people, who are for the most part entirely unco-operative, ungrateful and obsessed with dark holes fronted by classical pillars and filled with Ikea furniture …
He also marvels at how:
Ireland is the only country with a celebrity quantity surveyor. Patricia has no time for any of Dermot’s nonsense, which is why we like her. He wants to double the size of his new house for just €350,000. The nation scoffs at this even before Patricia has a chance to say: “Not a hope.” In fact, we all say it along with her, panto style.
As one of the jesters permitted to ply his trade in the national media, Freyne exposes RTÉ’s consistent denial of shitness – which perhaps accounts for a prevalent uncooperativeness, ingratitude and obsession with dark holes “fronted by classical pillars.”
Much of the Irish landscape bears testament to the tragedy of the commons. It is a sad reality that most of what has been built since independence is inferior to what came before it.
Moreover, a programme such as Room To Improve, and it’s not the only one in this genre, is devoted to the improvement of private dwellings in the possession of a shrinking middle class still transfixed by the ups and downs of the Irish property market. It is instructive that according to the website www.daft.ie at the start of May, 2022 there are just over one thousand properties available to rent in all of Ireland at a point when the Irish government has just committed to welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine. Is it any wonder so many people are disinclined to have children.
In essence Room to Improve translates into: how can someone increase the market value of their property. The lurking presence of the celebrity quantity surveyor ensures that any project is seen in terms of adding financial value to the holding.
It is particularly tone deaf as we reach another high-water mark in an ongoing housing crisis. Missing on RTÉ is serious engagement with the corruption of a planning process, which lies behind enduring inequalities and sprawl, or the financial structures that embed generational inequalities, and permit a creeping dominance of transnational capitalism.
It is not that housing dysfunction is denied on RTÉ – that we are lied to as such – it is that the issues are almost completely ignored amidst the day-to-day mixture of light entertainment and vox pop nonsense that are their mainstays. Room to Improve is a form of kitsch because it denies the shitstorm going on in the society around it.
And like the rest of their programming, it appears to rely to an ordinate extent on advertising from a motor car industry that allows for the trail of bungalows that blight our landscapes. After all, living in one of the detached houses that Bannon mostly works on would be very difficult without a motor car.
It also appears that RTÉ’s longstanding tendency to bury shitness – which is also evident in legacy print media – led to the catastrophic handling of Covid-19 in Ireland.
With Irish media placing unprecedented focus on climate change during #COP26 we recall an unhealthy dependence on advertising revenue from the car industry that appears to influence transport coverage in particular.https://t.co/wXx0LOgPVB@think_or_swim@WilliamsJon@ian_lumley
It will be many years before we come to terms with what happened during Covid-19 around the world, and confront the traumas, especially to children, of living through lockdowns. It is instructive that despite having the youngest population in the EU, Irish children were subjected to among the longest school closures in the world. Simply blaming teaching unions ignores how teachers were subjected to relentless fear messaging that made them reluctant to do their jobs, despite international data from early on showing that their concerns were generally misguided.
Yet for RTÉ ‘The deadly virus’ of COVID-19 seemed to arrive as a godsend – and an advertising windfall, or so-called Covid bounce. A slavish devotion allowed the channel to almost completely ignore all other difficult news for the best part of a year-and-a-half. The daily totals of cases and deaths, uncritically conveyed, became the staple of every radio and television news bulletin and headline on their website.
Then, almost overnight, the issue vanished from sight, without any kind of meaningful post-mortem or reflection on the damage inflicted on the patchwork of communities that make up our society.
It gives way to relentless coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – thick on spectacle and almost devoid of critical analysis. Images of wasted buildings now bury discussion of other stories.
A lack of intellectual rigour – albeit their Brainstorm section is a notable exception – that is essential to RTE’s kitsch reaches right to the top it would appear. Thus, RTE’s head of news Jon Williams claims in article ‘For the first time in Europe since the end of World War Two, one country had been invaded by another.’ The mind boggles.
Comedy appears to be the only response available; it’s just that the consequences are quite serious. Simply because political protestors aren’t subjected to imprisonment or torture as under other regimes doesn’t mean that the Irish state isn’t failing its people, and that the state broadcaster isn’t complicit for failing to interrogate our inadequacies that surely begins with a deficient education system.
Nietzsche
In Laughter All Evil is Compacted
Freyne is one of a number of comedic writers and performers – Oliver Callan is another working for RTÉ itself – operating in legacy media who are permitted ‘to take the piss’ out of our national obsessions. Comedy has its advantages but arrives with a health warning.
Theodore Zeldin traces its historical trajectory: ‘since truth cannot be easily swallowed whole or raw, jesters were usually also poets, magicians or singers, able to convey unpalatable insights in an epigram, a witty story or a song.’
But this routinely slips into cynicism, as comedy can reinforce conformity ‘by being its safety valve.’ Zeldin points out that carnivals, such as the medieval festival of fools: ‘have throughout history made fun of authority, and turned hierarchy upside down,’ but ‘did so only for a few days.’ In a sense, comedy normalises the damaging excesses of a culture by turning it into a humorous spectacle.
Jokes can be truly sick, as the history of totalitarianism demonstrates. Jonathan Glover notes that ‘In the death camps the Nazis turned the cold joke into an art form, with increasingly imaginative embellishment on the themes of cruelty and humiliation.’
Friedrich Nietzsche provides a psychological insight into how this occurs when claiming that ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’ The gay release of laughter allows depraved participants to evade consideration of their actions. Thus, humour may confront tyranny, but it may also reinforce it.
A parade of tanks of the ČSLA in Prague on Victory Day, 9 May 1985.
Not Dangerous In Itself
In Kundera’s view political kitsch is not dangerous in itself. Indeed, most democratic politicians cultivate a clean-cut, artificial, image. The real danger lies in totalitarian kitsch such as that encountered by the character of Sabina in the aforementioned novel, who recalls the Communist parades of her youth.
These projected an idealised vision of the worker removed from the corruption, suspicion and cruelty that had by then infected her society. Indeed, it is recalled in Czechia that under Communism love for one’s family required some of form of theft in the course of one’s professional career.
Kundera contrasts totalitarian airbrushing with the plurality of voices that he believed still lay in Western democracies.
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
Prior to Covid-19 RTÉ’s kitsch could largely be avoided, but when the state followed the example of its European partners in imposing undifferentiated house arrest we entered the dangerous territory, as we were subjected to a form of mass formation.
Ireland Inc has returned to business as usual. Room to Improve carries on with an architect that looks suspiciously like Ryan Tubridy, as the housing crisis continues to the benefit of a few, and all we have are tears of laughter for consolation.
We need to sing again. We need to be Irish.
We need to socialise.
We need to be ourselves.
So said Sarah, professional singer and mother from Ballina, County Tipperary, on the Late Late Show, only a few hours after Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin’s address to the nation and his surprise announcement that most of the Irish State’s Covid-19 restrictions were to be lifted with almost immediate effect.
The Late Late Show, for the uninitiated, is one of the world’s longest-running talk shows, gracing Irish television screens, courtesy of state broadcaster RTE, every Friday evening since the 1960s.
Sarah’s comments, coming just after she’d performed a rousing showband style rendition of Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, seemed to capture the official (i.e. state-sanctioned) mood of the nation and prompted host Ryan Tubridy to gush “That is good stuff! Congratulations Sarah!”
Operation Transformation’s Sarah on the Late Late Show.
So why was Sarah from Tipperary opening the Late Late Show on this particularly momentous occasion? Sarah, as it turns out, is one of the ‘leaders’ of this year’s iteration of RTE’s diet and fitness show Operation Transformation (or OT as it is known to cult members). A staple of Irish TV since 2008, OT has become, much like the Late Late Show itself, something of a national institution.
Each year, the programme features five contestants. These are ordinary Irish people who want to lose weight, kick unhealthy habits and get fit. The show refers to these participants as ‘leaders’; the idea being that, through inspirational example, the contestants will ‘lead’ the diet-and-exercise-hesitant Irish public into the promised land of health and fitness.
The leaders are assisted in their endeavours by a panel of four ‘experts’: a dietician, a personal trainer, a clinical psychologist and a GP, who, between them, design individually tailored diet and fitness plans for each leader. The leaders’ homes and fridges are then kitted out with webcams so that we, the audience, gain an intimate view of their struggles.
Even better, every Wednesday evening we see how much progress our leaders have made – if any – or to enjoy the veritable bollocking they will receive from the panel of experts. We can also download the OT app and follow the diet and fitness plans of whichever leader we choose to follow. There are national OT fitness event extravaganzas and ‘partnerships’ with most Irish supermarkets.
2022 Operation Transformation Contestants.
As I said, an institution. Supported by another institution: the Irish State. The Department of Health has spent €230,000 sponsoring Operation Transformation, and its logo is prominently displayed throughout the show.
Sarah is also the first leader whose progress we get to see the following Wednesday. As OT host Kathryn Thomas remarks of Sarah’s performance on The Late Late Show, “You just captured that moment that everybody was feeling! It was a moment of celebration!”
But while four of our leaders are feeling celebratory and enjoying their state-sanctioned return to freedom, things aren’t looking quite so rosy for the fifth, salon-owner Kathleen, who, along with her farmer husband Tony, lives on a farm in Carrignavar, County Cork. Terrifyingly, Kathleen and Tony had both tested positive for covid the previous week.
As Kathleen explains, “One of my main symptoms of covid is that I’ve been completely bored”, while Tony is more philosophical about their predicament, remarking that “Well, I’ve kind of been isolating for the past 40 years anyway.”
Kathleen and Tony are regulars at their local cattle mart but, because of covid restrictions and lockdowns, they have had to make do with virtual visits on their tablets. This is not an entirely satisfactory alternative, however. As Kathleen notes to Tony of one animal they are considering buying, “She’s a much poorer looking cow on your screen than on mine.” The couple also lament that, in the age of virtual cattle-trading, “The human interaction isn’t there.”
Cattle Mart.
OT host Kathryn Thomas uses this as a cue to joke, “But at least one thing wasn’t in short supply in the house….” She’s referring to antigen tests. We are then treated to a montage of Kathleen and Tony shoving nylon-tipped plastic swabs up their nostrils while making squirming faces, all to an R&B soundtrack. This seems to be particularly traumatic for poor Tony, who needs to sit down and have his wife perform the procedure for him each time. And who can blame him? After all, this is no man flu. This is Covid-19.
Later, Kathleen has a video call with OT fitness expert Karl Henry, who wants to find out how she’s doing. “I feel great. I feel fine,” she says, “the only thing is the boredom of it all and the isolation of it all. The feeling is (as) if I nearly have leprosy for some reason!” Karl has a good chuckle at Kathleen’s analogy (even though she doesn’t seem to be joking) and assures her she is not the only one feeling this way, stating that, “What you’re going through, people around the county are going through. It’s a really normal thing!”
Nevertheless, Karl and the other OT experts are taking no chances. When it’s Kathleen’s turn to have her weekly check-in, she has to do it remotely, despite having come out of her required isolation period. “Just to be extra cautious”, she is told.
Remarking again that “This isolation from the outside world hasn’t sat with me very well”, Kathleen is once more reassured by the experts that her feelings of unease and boredom are nothing to be concerned about, with the show’s GP, Sumi Dunne, telling her “that flat effect…is just a reaction to the circumstances.”
Kathleen and Tony looking at cows.
This episode of Operation Transformation is a microcosm of what has been going on, regarding Covid-19, in the rest of the country and indeed the world as a whole: the constant and repetitious normalising of behaviour which only two years ago would have been considered at best neurotic and at worst deeply psychologically problematic.
Remember when we used to joke about somebody having man flu? That curiously culturally acceptable form of sexism which, according to the Harvard Health Blog, describes “a constitutional character flaw of men who, when felled by a cold or flu, embellish the severity of their symptoms.”
Nowadays, the whole world seems to be suffering from man flu. The only difference is that, with a case of Covid-19, you don’t even need any symptoms to embellish; all you need is a positive antigen or lateral flow test, items which have become as much a staple of our weekly supermarket trips as a sliced pan, two litres of milk and a six-pack of cheese and onion crisps.
As Kathleen herself said, “I had absolutely none of the symptoms of covid, but at the same time I was aware that I had it because obviously I tested positive. So I was even watching my heart rate increasing, and saying ‘ok, I won’t go too far or even push my body at all’.”
A man embellishing flu symptoms.
There are several more occasions in the episode when Kathleen refers to the abnormality of the situation she finds herself in and how uncomfortable she feels being isolated from other people. Yet, every time her concerns are brushed off by the experts (including, as mentioned, a clinical psychologist and a doctor) who tell her that this is “normal” or that the majority of people in the country are also experiencing something very similar.
When people like me (and by that I simply mean anyone who questions the status quo on covid) talk of the mainstream media, for the most part we are referring to the news media. But of course the flagrant bias and propaganda doesn’t stop there. It has infiltrated all forms of media: it’s there in the soap operas we follow, the chat shows, televised sporting events, health and lifestyle programmes, children’s television, social media platforms, social media influencers, and so on ad nauseum.
As others have pointed out, television programmes and social media do not simply provide entertainment, they also greatly influence our ideas about the world and provide a model for our attitudes and behaviour: certain individuals and their actions are presented approvingly and in a positive light, while others are presented negatively, with disapproval. Some behaviours and opinions are shown to be typical, normal and to be emulated, while others are shown to be strange, problematic and to be avoided. As such, TV shows and social media provide a powerful example of what is acceptable in a society and what is not. And far from simply reflecting reality, these forms of media are instrumental in the building and shaping of it.
If you are somebody who has questioned the mainstream narrative about covid, you’ll no doubt be aware of Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet and his theory of mass formation. This compelling theory is a useful tool for analysing our current situation. If you are unfamiliar with it, I recommend looking at this video in which Professor Desmet explains the idea himself.
In a nutshell, mass formation describes the process whereby a large part of the population subconsciously disengages its rational and critical faculties in order to participate in a form of groupthink, the focus of which is usually one small point or issue. Mass formation is a phenomenon that typically occurs in the emergence of totalitarianism. It can occur spontaneously, as in Nazi Germany, or be intentionally created by the state, as was the case in the Soviet Union. Mass formation can only take place when four very specific conditions are met.
These are as follows: a substantial number of people in the population have to feel socially isolated; a substantial number of people have to feel an essential lack of meaning in their lives; a substantial number of people have to experience what he calls “free-floating anxiety” (in other words, anxiety or stress which is not connected to a mental representation – feeling anxious but not knowing why) and finally, a large percentage of the population has to experience free-floating frustration and aggression.
Professor Mattias Desmet.
The four conditions were already in place, in Desmet’s opinion, when the pandemic was first announced by the WHO back in March 2020. According to one studypublished before the pandemic in The American Sociological Review, 25% of Americans reported they didn’t have a single close friend. A Gallup poll, which included participants from a number of industrialised countries, found that nearly 50% of those questioned stated they didn’t have a single meaningful relationship and that they only connected to other people through the internet or through technology. As Desmet asserts, “A connection through the internet doesn’t make you resonate in the same way with other people.”
This isolation or lack of social bond leads into the second condition: a feeling that life is generally meaningless or senseless. In his 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber states that 50% of people reported that their job was ’not at all meaningful’.” A Gallup poll from 2012, which included people from 142 countries, shows that 63% of respondents, in Desmet’s words, “admitted to being so disengaged at work that they were sleepwalking through their day, putting time but not passion into their work.”
This combination of social isolation and the impression that life has no meaning produces a kind of anxiety which is “free floating.” Unlike a phobia, which pinpoints a specific object of fear (for example spiders or confined spaces), free floating anxiety is not connected to anything tangible. Feeling anxiety without understanding its cause produces profound “psychological discontent.” Desmet notes that each year in Belgium 300 million doses of antidepressants are administered to a population of only 11 million people. This doesn’t even take into account antipsychotics, sleeping tablets or anxiety medication. Indeed, the World Health Organisation has reported that one in five people have an actual anxiety disorder.
The fourth condition, what Desmet calls “free-floating frustration and aggression”, is a result of the isolation, lack of meaning and consequent anxiety. Furthemore, it is extremely problematic because people simply don’t understand what is causing them to feel aggression or frustration.
When these four conditions are in place, all that is needed for mass formation to occur is for the mainstream media to produce a narrative which highlights “an object of anxiety” (in this case, a virus) and to simultaneously provide a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety (lockdowns, masks, vaccination, etc.).
For Desmet, identifying the object of anxiety and participating in a strategy to deal with it gives people both a sense of control and, perhaps more significantly, a sense of connection. And it is this feeling of strong solidarity and connection which enables, “an extraordinary willingness…to participate in the strategy…no matter how absurd the measures or the narrative becomes.”
We now live in a world of absurd contradictions: governments and media assert repeatedly that Covid-19 vaccines are effective, yet many more people have contracted and spread the virus since getting the jab than before the vaccine rollout. We were told that masks and social distancing would curb the spread of Covid-19 but have never been offered unequivocal evidence to that effect. And, of course, the biggest fraud of all: the idea of asymptomatic spread. It is now a commonly held belief that a perfectly healthy individual who feels well and has no symptoms of any illness is a danger to others. Consequently, they must be cordoned off and isolated from the rest of society in order to be approved of or accepted by that same society.
For me, one of the most fascinating elements of Desmet’s theory is how he describes the nature of the social bond that emerges during mass formation. As he says, “this is never a social bond between individuals. It is always a social bond between an individual and the collective.” Furthermore, the longer the mass formation continues, the more “a radically paranoid atmosphere” is established which “destroys the connection between individuals.”
So when Kathleen from Operation Transformation talks about being bored and missing social contact with other people, she is talking about the personal relationships she has with other individuals, whether that be family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances. However, a positive antigen test demands that she must sacrifice these personal connections in order to maintain and participate in the much larger (and faceless) relationship she now has with society as a whole. And the thing that most defines that relationship is to virtue signal, in the most public way possible, that you are keeping others safe by adhering to government guidelines, no matter how absurd or illogical those guidelines may be.
Imagine if, only two years ago, someone you knew told you they had just got a flu shot in order to protect, not just themselves, but you and everyone else from influenza. Or that they were spending 50 to 60 euro a week to test themselves and their family on a daily basis for colds or flu, despite feeling perfectly healthy. Or that, if one of those tests gave a positive result, they would not go into work for 5-10 days and isolate themselves in their home, completely avoiding contact with the outside world. You would have thought your hypochondriac friend had finally lost the plot, and maybe even suggested they get some psychiatric help for that Howard Hughes-style obsessive compulsive disorder.
Antigen testing.
In fact, Desmet suggests that many of the Covid-19 measures put in place by governments around the world “are without pragmatic meaning” and function in a ritualistic way, demanding “a sacrifice from the individual; a sacrifice through which the individual shows that the collective is more important” than his or her own interests. Moreover, “people, without knowing it, will continue to buy into the narrative just because, as a social being, there is nothing more painful than to be profoundly and thoroughly socially isolated.”
And what would the point of a sacrifice be if it were not acknowledged or rewarded in some way? Kathleen’s isolation because of a positive antigen test result is applauded by the experts on the show. Her reward is the public acknowledgment of that sacrifice: she has willingly done everything within her power to keep others safe, despite having absolutely no symptoms of any illness.
Operation Transformation has a huge following in Ireland and it is very clear from watching only a few episodes that one of its main attractions is the sense of belonging and acceptance that both participants and the audience gain from taking part in or following the show. One woman, who planned to get involved in the Operation Transformation 5k run in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, went as far as to remark, “I don’t feel like Mrs Nobody anymore, and I’d encourage anybody not to feel like that.”
Unsurprisingly, considering it is sponsored by the Department of Health and broadcast on RTE, there is an implicit acceptance by Operation Transformation that the State’s removal of our fundamental rights was absolutely necessary, that in doing so the State kept us all safe, and that the reestablishment of some of these rights is something for which we should be grateful. Another talking head on the show, Frank Greally of Athletics Ireland, says, of the recent OT 5k (the first OT event of this nature in nearly two years), that “when you join in something (like this) and participate, it’s an outpouring of gratitude” and that “we’re back on freedom road again!”
So what does being “back on freedom road again” look like in the weeks since Michael Martin’s surprise announcement? When you use public transport or go into a supermarket, most people are still wearing a mask. Many school children continue to be masked up, sitting in freezing classrooms with open windows in the middle of winter. Mentally handicapped adults are still wearing facemasks in their day centres. The elderly in care homes, despite being triple-jabbed, can be locked down at a moment’s notice as soon as any resident or member of staff tests positive for covid. Tens of thousands of people just like Kathleen continue to test themselves on a daily basis.
More worryingly, the State has doubled down on its campaign to vaccinate children despite acknowledged dangers. Other parents, just like this man, will suffer the horror of their child having a heart attack, and then be told by so-called medical experts that it had nothing to do with the experimental gene therapy that was administered shortly beforehand. Furthermore, unconstitutional and draconian legislation that was put in place back in March 2020 remains on the statute book. Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, could decide (using statutory instruments that do not require legislative oversight) to reinstate all restrictions, or add a few more, just as quickly as he removed them.
In recent weeks, there’s also been a state and media pivot. The object of anxiety has shifted with breathtaking rapidity from Covid-19 to war in the Ukraine. And the strategy to deal with this new anxiety is to virtue signal your unconditional support for Ukraine and unquestioningly condemn everything Russian.
The shift in narrative has been seamless. Just as the world’s media, in lockstep, uncritically presented Covid-19 as a simple morality tale, they now do the same with the Ukraine crisis. And the public appears, once more, to be lapping it up.
The yellow and blue of Covid-19 public health advertising has given way to the yellow and blue of Ukraine’s national colours. Significant buildings in most European cities are now lit up yellow and blue, and you see the Ukrainian flag everywhere. In Dublin, a member of the public, to much applause, deliberately drove his lorry through the gate of the Russian embassy; soon afterwards, local councillors announced their intention to change the name of the street in which the embassy is located from Orwell Road to Free Ukraine Road.
Protestors outside the Russian embassy in Dubln.
At the centre of this new object of anxiety is evil incarnate Vladimir Putin and his dastardly plan to destroy Ukraine, and democracy more generally. In less than a week the number of Irish households offering accommodation to Ukrainian refugees has leapt from 5,000 to 14,500, with the State pledging that Ireland will offer sanctuary to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their country. That’s nearly a 2% increase in population for a country already facing a housing crisis and spiralling homelessness.
But if you dare question any of this, then just like those that dared to question the covid narrative, you will be roundly condemned and ridiculed. Any form of critical thinking will have you branded, once again, as some kind of far-right, bigoted, conspiracy nutjob.
All of Ukraine’s well-documentedhuman rights abuses in the Donbas, and the distubing presence of neo-Nazimilitia groups in that country’s armed forces, have not just been forgiven, but have, in fact, been whitewashed by the new media narrative. And despite his severely limited political experience, former comedian and current president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been hailed as the new Churchill.
Operation Transformation has become Operation Mass Formation, and this most recent manipulation of public opinion over the Ukraine crisis shows that we are still in the thick of a very problematic and unyielding kind of groupthink.
So yes, Sarah from Operation Transformation, it may well be the case that Irish people need to sing and dance again, socialise and be themselves, but it was never the business or prerogative of the State to tell us that we couldn’t, and no matter what nonsense the government has come out with about ‘covid bonuses’ and ‘dividends’ for our obedience, it is certainly not their business to tell us that we can now.
Until all the legislation that underpins the mandates is repealed, and until we make sure that such measures can never be inflicted on the population again, we are deluding ourselves if we think we are free. The current mono-narrative being presented to the public about war in Ukraine should be a red flag to us all that we no longer live in functioning democracies.
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Mr Gradgrind from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).
These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1955).
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that ‘facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.’ The term is derived from the Latin ‘factum,’ meaning ‘a deed, an action and sometimes in scholastic Latin an event or occasion.’ MacIntyre was not dismissing the importance of gleaning evidence from sources, or deriving conclusions from scientific studies, but asserting that no fact is ever ‘independent of judgment.’[i]
Over the course of the current pandemic, as a recent opinion piece in the British Medical Journal puts it:
uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive. Most decisions must be based on information that is flawed (imperfectly measured, with missing data), uncertain (contested, perhaps with low sensitivity or specificity), proximate (relating to something one stage removed from the real phenomenon of interest) or sparse (only available for some aspects of the problem).
Similarly, the historian E. H. Carr considered facts to be ‘like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them.’ Thus partisan outlooks have always coloured understandings of historic events. Carr recalls: ‘Our picture of Greece in the 5th century BC is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens.’
Journalists and editors in writing ‘the first rough draft of history’ therefore make judgments in determining facts. Unsurprisingly, during a global pandemic Covid-19 deaths and diagnoses are given greater factual weight than the equivalent statistics for heart disease, cancer or influenza. This is quite apart from deaths in developing countries from tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, which are set to double this year in part owing to the intense focus on Covid-19 – particularly in Africa which by mid-August had experienced just 23,000 deaths from Covid-19.
Any journalist’s judgment in determining facts is not necessarily a product of sinister machinations, but orthodoxies and received opinions are easily enshrined in news organisations that are patronised, or owned outright, by vested interests, which throughout history have ‘manufactured’ consent.
Moreover, as Noam Chomsky put it in a famous interview with Andrew Marr, there is ‘a filtering system’ that starts in kindergarten which ‘selects for obedience and subordination.’ Chomsky intimates that most journalists that rise to the top of major news organisations are conformists, including Marr.
The pandemic has exposed the fragility of contemporary journalism in the era of the Internet, which, arguably, has exhibited over-deference to scientific authority, even where those authorities have proffered accounts that have proved wildly inaccurate, or contradictory. This passivity seems to be a feature of what Nick Davies has described as ‘churnalism’, whereby journalists become passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’
Fake News
In the Internet era we have witnessed an onslaught of so-called ‘fake news,’ which are accounts departing from journalistic convention that enter the realm of fiction and outright distortion.
This is not, however, entirely novel. It is axiomatic that truth is the first casualty of war, a metaphor constantly applied to this pandemic. Journalists embedded in power structures have long spun outright falsehoods. We need only cast our mind back to uncritical coverage of claims around Weapons of the Mass Destruction prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the misleading accounts of Cuba in the U.S. press.
Nonetheless, in this context such claims have become more outrageous, and even comical, with social media – Facebook in particular – acting as a conduit for misinformation from non-mainstream outlets, granting individuals unprecedented platforms to project fears, fantasies and delusions that are often manipulated by shadowy agencies, such as Cambridge Analytica.
An apparent antidote to fake news has arrived in the form of fact-checking websites. While these may succeed in exposing outright falsehoods – which is undoubtedly important in an era of climate change – we should also examine which facts are being checked and also, why there are discrepancies in mainstream accounts. The funding for such sites also merits scrutiny. The facts do not speak for themselves.
That global alliance was launched in January by the Poynter Institute:
when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally. The World Health Organization now classifies this issue as an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.
This global response is in line with a war-gaming exercise for a global pandemic (coincidentally a fictional coronavirus: Coronavirus Associated Pulmonary Syndrome) called Event 201 organised by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this exercise where no one has immunity from that virus, the model predicts the pandemic will only end when 80 percent of the world’s population has been infected, which takes 18 months and results in 65 million deaths.
The participants addressed the issue of disinformation and misinformation from ‘state sponsored groups’ and specifically pointed to the importance of ‘fact-checking efforts.’
Notably, the Poynter Institute has received charitable donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of $382,000 in 2015, earmarked for improving ‘the accuracy in worldwide media of claims related to global health and development.’ The organisation now receives donations from, among others, Facebook, Google News Initiative and climate-change denying Charles Koch.
More relevantly to Ireland, in carrying out its fact-checking remit www.journal.ie has bolstered the Irish government’s emphasis on the serious danger posed by Covid-19 to all age groups. Consolidating government messaging during a pandemic may be considered a civic duty, but it can also over-simplify “elusive” facts that merit revisiting.
On July 24th, Radio DJ Niall Boylan’s tweet from July 14th claiming just eight people under the age of sixty-five had died from Covid-19 became the subject of a fact-checking inquiry.
It’s shocking that only 8 people under 65 in Ireland died from Covid 19 and we destroyed & continue to destroy the economy. Every one of the 1700 deaths matter but most did not die from Covid 19 and just happened to have a positive test.We need logical responses & not hysteria
The relevant fact checker, Rónán Duffy, recalled that the Health Protection Surveillance Centre had recorded a total of 1,763 deaths related to Covid-19, of which 113 related to people under the age of 65. Duffy thus concluded that ‘At the time that Boylan shared the original tweet on 14 July, the number of Covid-19 deaths among people under 65 was 113, not eight’
In response to a request for clarification, however, Boylan said he specifically used the term ‘from Covid-19,′ not ‘with Covid-19′. He went on to argue that it was important to distinguish deaths among people with and without underlying health conditions, ‘in other words people who had died from coronavirus.’ He claimed the figure of eight people was a direct quote from a statement made by Independent T.D. Michael McNamara, who said at a sitting of the Special Committee on Covid-19 that only eight of those under the age of sixty-five who died did not have an underlying condition.
Duffy concluded the claim was ‘misleading because it omits crucial details that may lead to readers forming an incorrect conclusion.’
Boylan’s tweet may indeed have been unsatisfactory, but the original death toll was itself a simplification: a bald statistic that omitted to mention that the vast majority of those who died were afflicted with underlying conditions. Perhaps some of these were patients would have succumbed to a respiratory infection in an ‘ordinary’ year, considering influenza or pneumonia are the cause of up to a thousand deaths a year in Ireland.
A Covid-19 infection may not have been the primary cause of death; or an infection could have accelerated by a short time that mortality. Any death comes as a shock to those left behind, and all reasonable efforts should be undertaken to preserve life, but it is not uncommon for patients weakened by long-term illness to succumb to respiratory infections, such as Covid-19, rather than the chronic degenerative disease to which the cause of death is ordinarily ascribed. Members of the public unacquainted with medical science may not be aware of this. According to one G.P. consulted in researching this article attributing cause of death is never an exact science.
A more thorough fact-checking exercise might examine the nature of comorbidities or underlying conditions. Conditions are described in papers, but a loose definition can easily yield to wild claims around the number of those in the Irish population who are at risk of death from the virus.
Yet a recent article in Nature emphasises that age is by by far the strongest predictor of an infected person’s risk of dying :
For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die. For people in their fifties and early sixties, about five will die — more men than women. The risk then climbs steeply as the years accrue.
The suggestion that 1.5 million among an Irish population of less than five million that is the youngest in the E.U. are susceptible to death from Covid-19 is a wild exaggeration.
Excess mortality was found to be 1,072 (95% CI: 851 to 1,290) between 11 March 2020 and 16 June 2020 inclusive. The officially reported number of COVID-19 deaths for the same period was 1,709. Therefore, the estimated excess mortality is less than the officially reported COVID-19-related mortality by 637 cases.
Similarly in the U.K. Dr Jason Oke of the Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford has found that almost one third of Covid-19 deaths in July and August were ‘primarily caused by other conditions’. There is therefore significant doubt over whether the virus was the primary factor in all 1,777 of these deaths.
Also, the coroner’s office was not conducting post-mortems on suspected cases and testing was pulled from the entire care home sector for three weeks at the height of the pandemic, meaning in many cases doctors were making educated guesses that Covid-19 was the cause of death.
Some people find it hard to believe that when Care Home residents were in the greatest need for testing and diagnostics, testing service was pulled from the entire sector for 3 weeks, to preserve test supplies for the general public. Most died in Homes many/most were not tested. pic.twitter.com/EFi8XsRqER
Then CMO Tony Houlihan also acknowledged: ‘Clinically, the “index of suspicion” for the disease would be “a good deal higher” than would normally be the case for flu.’
RTÉ’s Feargal Bowers
The Irish public service broadcaster RTÉ says that ‘nine out of ten people in Ireland say RTÉ has been their main media source for accessing information on Covid-19.’ The broadcaster recently launched an initiative against fake news entitled: ‘The truth matters at RTÉ – here’s why,’ claiming:
Now that society is grappling with the challenges of a pandemic, and the inescapable anxiety that comes with it, the potential for manipulation of the facts is huge.
But RTÉ has at times provided an unreliable account of the danger posed by Covid-19 to the Irish public. Throughout the pandemic RTÉ’s health correspondent Feargal Bowers has pointed to the exceptional danger posed by Covid-19, which fits within what Nancy Tomes has called the “killer germ genre of journalism”.[ii]
This virus could visit any of us, at any time, in our homes, or in work.
It does not make an appointment.
Going outside involves a certain roll of the dice.
Inside you may also encounter this intruder.
Like any lottery, there are things people can do to improve their chances.
And hold onto the most valuable prize of all – your life.
In fact, we are dealing with a virus with an infection fatality rate below 1% according to Nature magazine, or ‘possibly as low as 0.2% or 0.3%,’ according to Lone Simonsen, a professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark who has worked at the CDC and National Institutes of Health in the U.S.; others such as Professor Johan Gisecke, a member of the WHO’s Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards (STAG-IH) previously suggested a figure as low as 0.1%. The IFR has varied from region to region, with New York, Madrid, London and Lombardy particularly badly hit, but in Africa, as indicated, the IFR appears to be exceptionally low.
With better treatments – especially the use of the generic drug Dexamethasone – and protection of vulnerable groups, chances of survival have improved since the early stages of the pandemic. This seems evident from the relatively low death toll currently witnessed across Europe, including in Ireland, despite rising case numbers. Many of us also harbour T-cell immunity from other coronaviruses, as we will see.
Yet Bowers has continued to make factually incorrect claims in a succession of articles, including on September 5th, which stated: ‘The World Health Organization says data to date suggests 80% of Covid-19 infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical, requiring ventilation.’
Remarkably, Bowers seems to have copy and pasted that information from a WHO Situation Report from March 6th, stating ‘data to date suggest that 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.’[iii]
The continued use of data from March undermines RTÉ’s credibility and should be a source of embarrassment.
IFR or CFR?
In a widely circulated tweet at the height of the pandemic then Minister for Health and current Minister for Higher Education, Simon Harris confounded the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the percentage of deaths from diagnosed cases, with the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), which is the percentage who die after contracting the virus. This surely elevated fears around the ‘deadly’ virus.
Our world is now full of statistics and numbers. I wanted to share an important one with you – our latest figures show 19,470 people have recovered from #COVIDー19. That is 84.3% of those who have contracted this virus.
More recently Fianna Fáil TD Cathal Crowe displayed the same confusion when he called a TikTok video ‘almost treasonous’ and ‘only a step or two away from being culpable for manslaughter.’
He added:
And at a time when those who contract Covid – there’s a fatality rate at the moment in this country of 6.2% of those who contract Covid – I think their actions in trying to draw the Covid virus onto themselves and pass it onto others, I think it’s only a step or two away from being culpable for manslaughter.
Reference to the CFR may give the impression the virus is more lethal than we now know it is. Raising alarm bells may serve a short term end of confining people to their homes, but will ultimately only lead to distrust as reliable scientific information is now easily accessible.
A similar caution should apply to emphasis by the current Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly on so-called ‘Long Covid.’ In June the UK’s Covid Symptom Study indicated that ‘one in ten people may still have symptoms after three weeks, and some may suffer for months.’ But the study fails to distinguish between asymptomatic and symptomatic cases, implying this is a reference to only confirmed symptomatic cases. Anecdotally, one Dublin GP consulted said he had not encountered a single case in his practice.
Long Covid appears to fit into the category of a post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue which ‘refers to a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.’ The prevalence at this stage is unclear.
Mortality Projections
The medical historian Mark Honigsbaum writes: ‘by alerting us to new sources of infection and framing particular behaviours as “risky,” it is medical science – and the science of epidemiology in particular – that is often the source of … irrational and often prejudicial judgments … knowledge is constantly giving birth to new fears and anxieties.’[iv]
Epidemiology cannot be an exact science as it projects into an uncertain future. Michael Levitt has claimed that epidemiologists see their function, ‘not as getting things correct, but as preventing an epidemic. So therefore if they say it is 100-times worse than it’s going to be, then it’s ok.’ This approach may explain why a senior Irish health official told the Sunday Business Post in March that ‘1.9 million could be infected and become sick with the new coronavirus.’
But crying wolf with claims that prove wildly inaccurate over the course of a long pandemic cannot easily be repeated. It corrodes trust in scientific authority, which is an important consideration in an era of climate change.
Among the scientists that have risen to prominence over the course of the pandemic is Professor Sam McConkey. On March 11thhe predicted ‘there could be between 80,000 and 120,000 deaths in Ireland from coronavirus.’ McConkey has not been adequately held to account for the inaccuracy of this prediction, yet his projections continue to be circulated:
Higgins recalls the country went into lockdown in two stages. ‘The “first measures” were on March 12th with school closures, social distancing and a ban on large gatherings …. Then on March 28th, we began the ‘full lockdown,’ with non-essential workplaces shut and the 2km rule.’
Higgins worked from the assumption that symptoms manifest after five days, and that deaths, on average, occur after twenty. He calculated that ‘the March 28th lockdown should have led to a peak in deaths taking place over 20 days later, any date after April 17th,’ which he said is ‘pretty much what the headline data shows. April 20th saw the largest number of new deaths.’
‘However’, he added, ‘we know that the date of death being announced is several days *after* the death actually took place,’ which, he reckoned, was typically about two days. Therefore, ‘the peak is more likely around April 15th.’
‘The problem is’ he said ‘that’s 2 days before the March 28th “full lockdown” should have had an effect.’ His conclusion was that ‘the full lockdown wasn’t the main cause for peak deaths!’, the implications of this were ‘profound’ he argued. He argued that ‘the social distancing alone (between March 12th and 28th) was the main driver of #FlattenTheCurve.’
Based on Higgins’s assessment, the laws introduced on March 12th provided sufficient space for hospitals to handle a surge in cases that could have led to avoidable deaths from hospitals being overstretched. One may question O’Higgins’s assessment, but at least he has crunched the numbers, unlike O’Neill it would appear, who has offered no proof for his claim.
Forming Memories…
Another scientist to have gained a platform has been, Dr Tomás Ryan, a Trinity colleague of O’Neill’s, who is widely touted asan expert authority on this pandemic, despite being a neuroscientist, with no publications listed on Google Scholar related to contagious diseases or public health. Nor does he have a medical background. A recent paper, from June 2020 is entitled: ‘Memory: It’s Not a Lie if You Believe It.’
Advocating a suppression of the virus in ‘the paper of record’ on June 10th, Ryan claimed that a strategy of ‘living with the virus,’ would involve:
a cycle of successive lockdowns [which] would need to continue four to seven times until we reach a stage of herd immunity, with at least 60 per cent of the population infected. The health cost of this approach would be about 50,000 deaths.
On March 17th, 2020, Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in the New York Times wrote: ‘It wasn’t so much the numbers themselves, frightening though they were, as who reported them: Imperial College London.’ Due to the professor’s WHO ties, the authors noted, Imperial was ‘treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.’ Yet despite a chaotic response from the Federal authorities, the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 remains below two hundred thousand, with daily deaths decreasing according to the New York Times.
Contrary to Ryan’s stark warning, Ireland has registered just over fifty deaths, as of September 20th, since the start of July.
A More Nuanced Approach
One-sided reporting of ‘facts’ around Covid-19 in Ireland is consistent with a concerted global effort emphasising the unprecedented danger posed by Covid-19. This account is predicated on the assumption that a reliable vaccine is the only way to bring the pandemic under control.
As mentioned, however, the pessimistic projections of Professor Niall Ferguson and others have proved unfounded, and recently the WHO’s Mike Ryan warned there is no guarantee that a vaccine will ever be found.
This leaves us in a position of zugzwang, a term which Emeritus Professor of Public Health at Edinburgh University Raj Bhopal borrows from the game of chess, meaning when the obligation to make a move in one’s turn leaves one in a serious, often decisive, disadvantage. He concludes:
The balance between the damage caused by COVID-19 and that caused by lockdowns needs quantifying. Public debate, including on population immunity, informed by epidemiological data, is now urgent.
Hearteningly, after a relatively heavy death toll in the spring, having avoided lockdown, Sweden’s case numbers have remained below the European average throughout September – lower even than its high-performing Scandinavian neighbour Norway.
This supports an hypothesis that a herd immunity threshold could lie at around 10-20%, ‘considerably lower than the minimum coverage needed to interrupt transmission by random vaccination,’ according to the University of Strathclyde’s Professor Gabriela M. Gomes et al. Professor Sunetra Gupta’s group at Oxford University have put the figure as low as 10%.
The scale of pre-existing immunity to Covid-19 is discussed in a recent article in the British Medical Journal. The authors remind us that the ‘research offers a powerful reminder that very little in immunology is cut and dried.’ Yet there has been little debate on the crucial question of herd or population immunity in the Irish media. This would involve an age-targeted strategy that takes account of the significant health impacts of lockdowns, especially on younger age groups.
Yes, my impression is also that most infectious disease epidemiologist favor an age-targeted strategy over general lockdowns. Among other scientists, most are silent, for obvious reasons, while almost all the vocal ones favor general age-wide lockdowns.
We are now beginning to witness the emergence of a recognisably left-wing opposition to lockdowns as herd immunity ceases to be a dirty word; while Bill Gates has acknowledged: ‘the initial vaccine won’t be ideal in terms of its effectiveness against sickness and transmission. It may not have a long duration.’
Lack of ICU Capacity
Facts around Covid-19 remain keenly contested among scientists. It may well be that the extreme precaution advocated by the Irish government is indeed justified, but it is incumbent on the Irish media to validate carefully all claims, and permit frank debate to occur. Politicians can be forgiven for erring in not giving an accurate picture at the height of a pandemic, but more honest conversations are necessary as we move forward. It is incumbent on journalists to hold politicians, and scientists, to account.
Unfortunately Ireland’s dysfunctional system of public health creates additional risks that discourages any change in approach, and perhaps explains an apparent faith in a reliable vaccine being produced.
At the start of the pandemic Ireland had half the number of ICU beds and staffing compared to other E.U. countries. By the start of May, however, according to Feargal Bowers (who presumably can be relied on in this instance) there were 417 units; but by the start of June, that figure was 381; July 252; August 276. At the start of September it was 356. But, as of mid-September the number of ICU beds open and staffed is 278. Under questioning from Michael McNamara in the Dáil, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that just twenty-three had been added since the start of the pandemic.
Under-resourcing of the health system might best explain the ultra-cautious and draconian approach adopted by the Irish government, which is increasingly out of step with most its European partners,where social life has been permitted to resume under restrictions.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
[i] MacIntyre, Whose Justice: Which Rationality?, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1988, p.357.
[ii] Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris, C Hurst, London, 2020, p.75.
Trudie Fursey, a 7th century Irish saint, was born on Lough Corrib in Co. Galway. He had a church named after him and like many others expanded his missionary operations to Britain and the Continent, dying in 652 in a village called Mezzerolles which was renamed Forsheim and eventually became Pforzheim.
Looking across the Lough towards Inishlannaun/Inis Fhlannain from the churchyard of Our Lady of the Valley Church. Image: Trish Steel.
We Irish were always wanderers. Ending up as a teacher in Fursey’s adoptive town brought my tally of successive occupations to seventeen.
The advertisement in The Guardian resulted in an interview in Manchester University, where a laconic man showed no interest in my previous teaching experience. This was fortunate because I had none.
It seemed sufficient that I could distinguish between standard English and say, Urdu. It was a bonus to actually speak one of the King’s dialects – even without a Home Counties accent. The fact that my contemporary, Ronnie Drew, was also teaching Dublinese in Spain gave me confidence, at least enough to satisfy my interrogator.
I travelled back to Dublin to collect a couple of books and inform my parents. They had meantime taken note, on my behalf, of a quite different job opportunity.
I had time to fit in an interview with some men who were recruiting for a brand new Irish television service. I greatly enjoyed the interview, cared little for the result and assured them that with people of their good humour in charge, the service was sure to be a success. Promptly dismissing the matter from my mind I headed for the promised land, Germany.
Berlitz teaching techniques
Happily en route on the long train and boat journey and still daydreaming, I fell asleep, and did not awaken until the train stopped in Stuttgart, many miles beyond my destination. I had to wait on a cold platform until sheepishly boarding the next train back to Pforzheim. The unsmiling head teacher, the Frau Oberst who met me, was not impressed.
Pforzheim: View from Horse Bridge (Rossbruecke) along the Enz river.
I was given a month of learning Berlitz teaching techniques. My companion on the introductory course was also Irish. Her name was Colleen and she had just graduated as Miss Elegance, Trinity College in that same year, 1961.
Ours was a short and innocent interlude (a repressed Irish background ensured that). The reason Colleen and I were accepted for training was the sudden erection of The Wall. It had caused many expatriate English teachers to scurry back to Blighty.
A Third World War seemed possible. Being Irish, and innocent of world politics, Colleen and I had no bone to pick with the East Germans nor with the real villains, the Russians.
Our xenophobia was confined to the traditional Anglo-Saxon foe and sprang from a more ancient quarrel than that of the Cold War. Although she and I were doused in competing versions of Christianity, we shared the vague bond of Irish neutrality, such as it was.
We wandered contentedly by the river Enz, footloose because we were unshackled from the tight reins of culture and family, free to discuss anything we liked. Alas, once we had completed our short training course in Karlsruhe and were considered to be qualified Berlitz teachers, our fraternising was judged to be pedagogically unsound and she was retained in Karlsruhe while I was stuck in Pforzheim. Once we were separated I never saw Colleen again, one of the themes of my life.
Herr Dinkelbaum
That weekend I spent my entire week’s food allowance in the Goldene Adler pub and was consequently reduced to a diet of a single apple over three days. Hunger encouraged the hallucination that my life was over and food superfluous.
What was needed was an anaesthetic. The Goldene Adler supplied this in litres. Countless other hostelries have since been equally generous to me. I also came across Heinrich Boll’s ‘Irish Journal’ and its penetrating picture of 1950s Ireland made me homesick.
The interval of gloom was relieved by the arrival of a new student in my classroom. Her name was Trudie and she helped me forget. To relieve the earnestness of the classes I bought a yellow hand puppet which I called Herr Dinkelbaum and introduced him as a proxy teacher. I like to think Wittgenstein gave me the idea: think for yourself and trust your instincts. They’ll often get you into trouble but you’ll have a lot more fun.
Herr Dinkelbaum lightened the Teutonic gloom. One evening a student brought in a case of Coca Cola and a bottle of Vodka and the lesson became even more raucous.
But my Berlitz training course had omitted the vital detail that there would be a concealed microphone in each classroom. Despite my defence that to educate you must first entertain – which is an impeccable formula for television – my supervisor, the same Frau Oberst was unconvinced.
The subsequent rap on the knuckles – a deduction from my paltry pay – was, I felt, unduly harsh and I protested. Making a vague reference to Gestapo surveillance practices was also not a good idea. Only the scarcity of English teachers saved my bacon.
lovers’ corner
Trudy had a Botticelli shape, thoroughbred ankles, had lost her father in the war and clearly needed a father figure. Six years her senior, I seemed to fit the bill.
We spent many happy hours in the Goldene Adler pub/restaurant where in lovers’ corner there was a sign in German saying, ‘Here it is permitted to tell lies’.
After a couple of delightful months, however, a letter from Ireland reminded me of that long forgotten interview in Dublin. The new TV service was offering me a job, to start immediately.
In no hurry, I wrote back saying my contract would not allow me to leave yet. I lingered for a month in Pforzheim to enjoy Trudie, consider my options and save up the train fare. Would I stay in Pforzheim with Trudie and become a penniless would-be writer or would I please my parents by taking this job?
For once I decided they deserved a break, bade Trudie a tearful farewell and returned home. A month later I got an even more tearful letter claiming that she was pregnant and I must return, otherwise she would set her GI brother-in-law on me.
I ignored the letter and dived into the exciting world of television. But the past was always on my mind. Exactly thirty years after that parting I diverted from a filming expedition in Germany and paid a flying visit to Pforzheim.
With some basic research in the basement of the town hall I was given Trudie’s present married status, address and telephone number – a tribute to German thoroughness as well as their weakness for my elaborately romantic cover story.
Is that Robert?
I rang the number and in my half-remembered German said: ‘Is that Trudie Bopp?” She replied in German: ‘That was once my name.’ ‘Do you remember Herr Dinkelbaum?’ I asked. After a long silence, Trudie replied: ‘Is that Robert?’
Over coffee in the Goldene Adler which still existed (although the Berlitz school did not), I noticed she was still beautiful and spoke no English – a reflection on my teaching talents. She was clearly taking no chances with this blast from the past: she had arranged for her daughter to pick her up in one hour. They were going shopping for the girl’s imminent wedding.
Trudie remembered everything, even her threatening letter of three decades ago, to wit: if I did not return and face my responsibilities I would die. I asked her how old the daughter was now. Just twenty eight, she said. A quick exercise in mental arithmetic whetted my interest. Was it possible that I might have a half-German offspring?
There was not time to press the matter as the daughter duly arrived to whisk her mother away. I could hardly interrogate the girl or study her features for a resemblance. I felt a little disappointed, and not convinced either way.
The following morning, just before departing my hotel, curiosity overcame me. I rang the number again and asked Trudie to tell me the truth about her old letter. Now, decades later, she laughed and dismissed her white lie and the empty threat: ‘You must know what a young girl in love will say to keep her man.’
The realisation that she remembered our romance as clearly as myself was consolation. The Arab mantra ‘Man is the animal with the short memory’ is quite mistaken. I now remember ancient, significant things with more clarity than my breakfast this morning.
Now, where did I leave my coffee?
Feature Image is of the so-called Venus of Willendorf an an 11.1-centimetre-tall (4.4 in) figurine estimated to have been made c. 30,000 BCE.
In 1967, the fidgets struck again. That was the year my mother died, rapidly following my father.
I confess now that I was not obviously upset by the deaths of my parents. In the culture of my generation and class, love, certainly any public expression of it, was an embarrassment. Such namby-pamby language was confined to the worship of film stars, sentimental songs, Jesus Christ and drink. This lack I often regret, having, in the area of emotional expression a limited palette.
Affection, attachment, addiction, obsession, sentiment, desire, lust, liking, fondness – I am familiar with them all. But love itself is awkward territory, partly because the language of its expression is so inadequate, so debased that I have come to believe that, ‘whereof man cannot speak, let him be silent.’ Predictably, when I am confronted by the technicolour emotions of a funeral, however tragic, what usually comes to mind is a black and white war etching by Goya whose chilling caption is: ‘Shut up and bury your dead.’
But this is merely a defence, a carapace adopted because I have a dread of being caught weeping, which weakness I am occasionally prone to, especially on occasions musical. Only an embarrassed few have ever been allowed to witness this, my Achilles heel.
Besides, there is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘Goldengrove’, in which a young girl, Margaret, grieves over the fall of Autumn leaves. Hopkins gently points out to her that as she ‘grows older she will come to sights colder’ and realise that it is actually her own demise she mourns. This applies to all funerals.
I have no doubt that my parents – from their astral heights, of course – now understand the convolutions of my career. Including, for instance, why I declined to have my own children baptised in any faith, and why I have sung in both Catholic and Protestant choirs with no residue of belief in either of their dogmas – except as a useful social glue. I also admire the Semitic cultures of both Islam and Judaism and wish they would return to their pre-colonial mutual tolerance. My bets are therefore hedged. Music is my sole spiritual sustainer and default position on religion.
What else could one expect from a flibbertigibbet?
Decision Time
Finally in 1967 I had had enough of the commercial dimension of television corrupting the concept of public broadcasting. Brilliant people in advertising were conspiring with TV managers, using reason to control the irrationalism of the masses and turn them into numbered consumers. But vestiges of common sense told me I needed to learn more about how the real world worked.
A friendly philosopher, the late Jack Dowling, advised me to study Shakespeare. That was not drastic enough for me. I went to the RTÉ Programme Controller, said I had developed mental indigestion and was leaving television. That aesthetic man with a cigarette holder, the late Michael Garvey, said ‘stay brave’ and told me he would treat it as a sabbatical and pay my salary for three months. In retrospect it felt like compassionate leave. I got character references from people like Professor Ivor Browne and Mother Mary Nicholas and other sane people with whom I had made films. I then persuaded Tomás Roseingrave to get me into the University of Antigonish as an auditor in sociology. That’s when I really woke up.
The philosopher, poet and ex-Jesuit Philip McShane once wrote to me: ‘Happy the man who preserves his illusions’. In Nova Scotia all of my more naïve illusions were demolished. I met Philip again, at a New Year’s party in Antigonish. Our pleasure at renewing acquaintance, expressed in the normal Irish epithets that hide affection e.g. ‘howiya, you old bollocks’, was overheard by our host, an old-fashioned Belfast Catholic immigrant. This stocky little man exploded, shouted that he would not tolerate ‘such fackin language in my house,’ and summarily evicted us into the snow and sub-zero temperature. We started walking, Philip forgetting his new young wife in the excitement. Loyally she followed in her car and saved us both from hypothermia.
Through lectures in sociology, especially from Italian-American Vito Signorile, I learned about the relativity of all cultural concepts, including religion, even knowledge itself. Vito was married to a feisty woman from Northern Ireland and he warned me about women: ‘When she has her period, she’s a monster.’ I learned that lesson too late.
The last absolute I vainly clung to was a simplistic version of Marxism, even contradicting a young lecturer who derided that ideology as one which had never caught on. I sharply reminded him that Marx had not set a time limit for the self-destruction of Capitalism. That marvellous event did not happen for another forty years, in 2007, not too long after Socialism itself had self-destructed.
Peace Outbreak
My innocence of political reality also received a cold douche. To acquaint the Canadian students with their democratic system the youngsters were encouraged to imitate the national parties – Labour, Conservative and Liberal – by organising elections and establishing a mock parliament.
We on the Left won in a coalition with the Liberals. On the first day of ‘Parliament’ we heard shots outside and a bunch of rifle-toting students on the defeated Conservative side burst into the formal Assembly. They were shouting that it was illegally constituted. Prudence suggested we leave with dignity.
One of the young gunmen, barring our way out, had his jaw broken by my closest friend there, Deets Kennedy, son of a tough Cape Breton miner. As I nursed a hangover on the following day I ruminated on life imitating art and thought hard about democracy. In case the vote didn’t work in your favour, you carried a blackthorn stick or a gun. What an effective system was democracy! At least in Ireland we merely forced the people to vote again and again until they got a referendum result right. I know what Deets Kennedy’s father would do in such a situation.
I met Mr. Kennedy for the first and only time at a family wedding up in Sydney, Cape Breton. I felt honoured to be invited. On the way back from the formal nuptials Deets drove the car and entrusted his father to me, saying that no matter what happened I must keep his father beside me in the back seat. The earnestness of his request suggested to me that there were tribal tensions abroad.
There had, of course, been drink taken. On the way, Mr. Kennedy behaved like a lamb, singing softly in my honour ‘Shall My soul pass through oul Ireland’ to the tune of Kevin Barry. The convoy stopped outside our party destination, Deets got out with a curt ‘You two stay there.’ Some altercation developed in front of the car. I leaned forward to try to identify the cause of the melee. When I turned to inquire of Mr. Kennedy as to the cause, he had vanished from my care. I soon recognised him on the footpath ahead, delivering a haymaker to one of the disputants.
Deets later told me that the recipient was another son, always a troublemaker. Peace broke out and we had a wonderful party. I could only think: it is a devoted father who can identify and instantly defuse the one psychopath in the family, thus restoring equilibrium to the celebrations.
I was a slow learner in every respect, trying to work things out rather than learn them by rote as I had once done with the penny catechism.
Star-Gazer
In December of that year I came home to assist in burying my mother and stayed for Christmas. At the wake in Hazelbrook Road, Terenure, I revealed to five grieving siblings and in-laws that each of the countless zillions of stars in the cosmos consisted of at least one departed human soul. It was, if not a metaphysical, then certainly a mathematical, possibility. Therefore our mother still existed. Despite my siblings’ reluctance to accept this consolation, I persisted.
I told them that no matter how simple and blameless a life such as our mother’s might seem, each human personality was so complex as to be beyond our ken and could not vanish into nothingness. The brain itself was a miracle of billions of electro-chemical processes. As it was largely unused during a person’s life, the reality of death must focus it wonderfully. In the final micro-second into which a life such as our mother’s was frantically compressed, there must be a surge of energy imaginable as no less than nuclear fusion. This process must transform the soul into an eternal incandescence. Simply put, the soul turns into a star.
They should therefore not grieve for the dear departed but enjoy the astronomy.
A tidy arrangement, I felt, having just read Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of the Noosphere.
This Jesuit palaeontologist had daringly suggested that the human capacity for reflex thought must evolve into a girdle of consciousness enveloping the planet. He called it the Pleroma and his religious superiors were not happy about his invention. I now suspect that members of my extended family also took my soul-stirring ideas with a pinch of salt. They guessed that my peroration was a front for grief.
Thinking back, my speculation required no more a leap of faith than the incredible religion in which we were reared and which I abandoned long ago. In my ripe old age I still believe my invention to be as reliable an explanation of life’s ultimate mystery as anything Aquinas or Avicenna, Darwin or Hawkins or Dawkins, Ibn Sina or even De Chardin invented. And for a practical reason: human consciousness is a form of energy and as such, if we are to believe Einstein, cannot die or decay; it can only transform itself – exactly as water gaily does from liquid to ice to vapour. There can be no limit to the transformation of us bundles of energy.
Around that time too, I ceremonially flung an old copy of the same penny catechism into a fire. Jack Dowling reminded me quietly that people who burned books were capable of burning people. That pulled me up short.
In January 1968 I returned to Nova Scotia to complete my ‘studies’ and at term’s end to have a look around North America. For three months another friendly Dominican monk named Luke Dempsey and I drove around that mighty continent, staying buckshee in his Order’s monasteries.
We called on Chicago, New Mexico, Death Valley, San Francisco, even visited Las Vegas for an overnight. The highlight of that was a breakfast where we perched at a bar and the waitress shimmied along behind it. Her walkway was so elevated that her magnificent thighs moved directly at our eye level. To notice Luke’s eyes modestly concentrating on his empty plate was a hilarious reminder of how fortunate I was not to have had a call to the religious life.
When we finally came back to Nova Scotia I had a lovely reunion with a sensitive mother of two, named Zane whom I had met in Montreal months before. Skinny-dipping in the local river was delightfully involved. When I returned to Ireland I wrote a poem about our encounter which fortunately I have mislaid. It could never compete with Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, astonishing love poems which I encountered at the back of the Catholic Sunday missal when I was an adolescent. They carried me through many a boring Mass service and subsequently came in useful in the business of wooing maidens.
”B e h o l d , t h o u a r t f a i r , m y l o v e ; b e h o l d , t h o u a r t f a i r ; t h o u h a s t d o v e s ‘ e y e s w i t h i n t h y l o c k s.
T h y l i p s a r e l i k e a t h r e a d o f s c a r l e t , a n d t h y s p e e c h i s c o m e l y : t h y t e m p l e s a r e l i k e a p i e c e o f a p o m e g r a n a t e w i t h i n t h y l o c k s .
T h y t w o b r e a s t s a r e l i k e t w o y o u n g r o e s t h a t a r e t w i n s , w h i c h f e e d a m o n g t h e l i l i e s .”
They may have been intended as paeans of praise to the Creator but I found them pleasantly erotic. My course was fixed.
‘Spitting blood’
One night in 1968, having returned from Canada to resume my job in RTÉ, I saw darkness in the pale face of a man at the bar of Kiely’s pub near the RTÉ studios. I recognised him as Ed, the ex-husband of Zane. What was he doing in Ireland and especially in my neck of the woods? The old antennae of guilt immediately told me this was no coincidence, that there was something awry. My instinct was to clarify matters. I approached the bar and engaged him in as light a conversation as one can have with a brooding man. He was very pale, spoke in grim monosyllables and said he was staying in a nearby B&B. He told me he had hitched a lift from Montreal on a Canadian Air Force plane. I had never known he was a military man.
Ignoring his clear hostility, I put on a show of welcome and resolved to keep him in my sights. I warmly insisted he come home for a drink in the house in which I was staying. After the short, wordless drive to mine host Dinno’s place, the latter – normally a sociable figure – excused himself and left the house. He told me later: ‘One look at that man’s face and I decided I wasn’t going to sleep under the same roof’.
I didn’t sleep much that night, either.
Next morning I boiled eggs for Ed and, as casually as possible, asked had he any particular schedule. ‘I came to kill you,’ he quietly said. So that was clear. I learned that he held me responsible for the break-up of his marriage. It was post-facto revenge because I had been given to understand by his wife that their marriage was long ended.
‘You really want to have a go at me?’ I asked. He nodded grimly. There was no getting away from it. What could I say except: ‘I know the very place.’
On the way to the wide open spaces of the Phoenix park he explained in detail that the Canadian Air Force had trained him in unarmed killing. He so worried me that I called in to my production assistant in the TV station, explained the situation and told her that, if I had not returned before lunch, she should send out a search party
In a secluded spot in the Park we faced each other. By now I was more than nervous about his deadly skills. I had not had a fistfight since I played rugby but strict rules had governed that form of barbarism. Neither had the Marquis of Queensbury legislated for this circumstance. Ed ordered me ‘Take off your glasses.’ I reluctantly removed them, placed them carefully on my jacket and prepared for the worst. As I turned to meet my fate I was barely in time to dodge a sucker punch from Ed. Fright made me go slightly berserk. I probably had the advantage in weight and after some minutes of my wild pummelling at him he held up his hands in submission.
I drove him down to the nearest pub in Islandbridge where he vomited up the reviving brandy with which I plied him. As I deposited him at his B&B in Donnybrook I volunteered to meet him again that evening and show him the sights.
He looked puzzled: this was no way to treat a sworn enemy. I pointed out that he was, after all, the son of Dublin emigrants to Canada but knew nothing of their city. The truth was, I felt sorry for him. When I later met him in the Scotch House on Burgh Quay he confessed to spitting blood since our altercation.
I whisked him off to St. Vincent’s Hospital, then in Leeson St., where they decided to keep him overnight. He knew no-one in Dublin except myself, who dutifully called to the hospital the following day. A nurse reported that Ed was suffering from kidney damage but had already signed himself out of the hospital, presumably to hitch an airlift back to Canada. I never heard from him again.
Last year, in an email from his daughter – she found me on Facebook, where else? – I learned that Ed’s curtains had recently been closed by cancer and that our ancient encounter was now part of their family history.
His daughter wanted the truth. I wrote a short hagiography of her father, stressing the honourable way he had tried to exact satisfaction from me. This was true. I had not realised that Ed was actually a mild-mannered dentist in the Air Force; he had probably never engaged in anything more violent than extracting a tooth. Apart from his pre-emptive, sabre-rattling about unarmed combat which had incited my overkill, the only other detail worth remembering is that, in Ed’s report of the encounter with me, he said ‘the old man was fitter than I thought.’ This ‘old man’ was thirty-three years of age at the time.
Everything is relative.
Resignation and Return
‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind’, quoteth the tearful lady herself when she landed on my doorstep some weeks later. She and Ed had physically fought for possession of their two young children in the mud of their farmyard. She had lost the grim struggle and got the next plane to Ireland. I had not the indelicacy to respond: ‘It never rains but it pours’. We spent a short while seeing the sights that Ed never had. She returned to Canada and married a sculptor.
Not long afterwards I resigned from my permanent, pensionable post in RTÉ, bought an old Volkswagen and drove to Tehran and back with my first wife-to-be. That is quite another story. Alone on the return journey home at Christmas I developed a mild but uncomfortable form of tuberculosis called epididymitis which related to the testicles.
It meant a short stay in hospital where, besides telling me I had various similar lesions on my lungs which had cured themselves, a specialist said I could never father a child. Recovering fast, but having spent all my pension contributions on the trip, poverty forced me to crawl back and ask for contract work with RTE.
Compassionate as ever, the organisation welcomed me and set me to the unexpected task of making a history series for children. I knew this new job was a prudent test of my boredom threshold but I persevered for four months. Then one day on a filming excursion to Belfast I had a discussion with Pat Kavanagh, the solid cameraman.
It was 1969, one of the years when there was a questioning of all certainties.
‘Never trust anyone over thirty’ was one mantra. Another was ‘selling out to the system’. Yet another was: ‘If you’re going to commit suicide, take one with you.’
Over a liquid lunch in Newry I stoutly maintained to Pat that there was a single unique point in every life when the decision to ‘sell out’ was made. Or not. He disagreed and perceptively said that capitulation to the system just crept up on a person gradually – usually accompanied by a mortgage. I agreed: we were mere puppets on strings. But it was time we looked up and noticed who was pulling the strings.
I had no mortgage, nor any other responsibilities. I declared that here and now was one of those points of decision and ordered him and the crew to follow me to the West of Ireland. Reluctantly they followed because in those hierarchical times the crew accepted a producer/director as the unchallengeable boss. I would never get away with it now.
I led the convoy all the way across Ireland to Roonagh pier in Mayo where we boarded the ferry for Clare Island. Then I wrote a letter for my female assistant to bring back to the station. Its intention was to exonerate the crew from any accusation of being willing accessories to my solo flight of fancy.
A day later my immediate Head of Department, Maeve Piskorski, arrived on the island to persuade her prodigal protege to return to work. After twenty-four hours of pleasantly lubricated argument she departed without me, shaking her head in bewilderment. And that was the end of my RTE career and, I vowed, the end of my involvement with film and TV. I stayed on Clare Island for a couple of months, the guest and labourer of Michael Joe O’Malley, sheep farmer and philosopher.
Back in Dublin again, I was one of thirty, all-male trainees destined to become the camera, lighting and sound operators with the new television service. I started late, in November 1961 and found the first work ambience I had ever enjoyed. We were based in the hall of a school near Ringsend and then in a warehouse on Lower Middle Abbey Street, where we pre-recorded dramas and musical programmes for broadcast when the station would go on air.
So began a love/hate relationship with RTÉ which, though I have been a free spirit since 1969, has endured to the present day. My early attempts to become a writer, lover, lieder singer, piano player, actor, writer, travel agent all faded away like the morning dew, sublimated into this exciting new medium. My flibbertigibbet nature – as my father described it – had paid off. He had also described it as ‘divine discontent’, which I quite liked.
As I write, the TV station and I are sharing over a half-century of uneasy co-existence.
I spent the first two years as a sound operator, a job whose initial glamour soon wore off. Kevin McClory, producer of the early James Bond movies, once told me that it was as a lowly microphone boom operator he first learned how to produce films. He had regularly and stealthily let his boom microphone linger above the producers’ conversations. He learned their Machiavellian ways by eavesdropping.
However, for me, RTÉ was far from James Bond and after two years the old demon of boredom raised its fickle head. How much longer could I endure days of cable-bashing, boom-swinging, disc-playing, the only functions for which I was qualified, having no technical insight into the mysteries of sound?
Frustration was not alleviated by my occasional writing, which included devising and presenting a couple of radio programmes. Only concern at my parents’ likely final disillusionment postponed my certain departure.
In the new year of 1962 we moved into Montrose, the Michael Scott-designed television studios in Donnybrook. The place was soon named ‘fairyhouse’ after the alleged number of homosexuals employed. The term ‘gay’ had not yet been appropriated by that lobby. I could identify only a very few, among them Hilton Edwards, Head of Drama and Alpho O’Reilly, Head of Design. Alpho made no secret of his revulsion at the first appearance of finely-contoured mini-skirts in the canteen and corridors. I am still acquainted with the two first, magnificently-thighed girls who bravely wore them. Alpho disappeared one day and neither he nor his car were ever found.
There was also a popular young floor manager named J. whose wit was legendary. Once he was unlucky enough to hire a taxi driver who was openly ‘homophobic’ – years before that word was coined for queer-basher. It was a rainy night and J. caused the driver to search endlessly for an address. Finally when the destination was found and J. alighted, he left his umbrella on the back seat. The driver thrust it at him with the farewell: ‘Hey Fairy! Don’t forget your wand.’
Jeremy clutched his property, pointed it at the driver and said: ‘Turn to shite.’
The rest of us were boringly straight. But we had fun. Our coming-of age-occasion was when we dared have a drinking party on Good Friday when all pubs were closed. It was the initiative of Tom Mack, a fellow worker in the sound department who regaled us with tales of his enviable, and probably imaginary, sex life. Reality caught up with Tom: he was dismissed for sexually harassing a make up girl in a dressing room.
James Plunkett once described the RTÉ organisation to me as ‘compassionate’. He was referring to the organisation’s capacity for forgiving those who succumbed to alcoholism and other social diseases. But Tom Mack’s crime was sexual, which was beyond the pale. It was officially described in Civil Service terms as ‘moral turpitude’, and he ran away to England with the wife of the Head of Graphics. For an inhibited colleague like me, what was there not to admire about him? I was bored and desperate.
Out of the blue the cavalry came to my rescue. RTÉ management offered me simultaneously a choice of three jobs: production assistant for commercial radio programmes (which, with the hindsight of my detestation of consumerism, is ironic); trainee newsreader was the second offer – Mike Murphy was a fellow trainee. This was the initial path trod by most of the first batch of Irish TV personalities: Bart Bastable, Gay Byrne, Andy O’Mahony, Frank Hall, Bunny Carr, Terry Wogan et alia. I now murmur ‘Whew!’ at the narrow escape I had from the delusions of minor celebrity. But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it to me: ‘I could sure do with the money’.
The third offer was everyone’s dream job at the time: TV producer. It did not take any heart-searching to choose it. Looking back on my various jobs, I wonder how employers were blind to my chronic unemployability. Perhaps all they saw was malleable innocence and may have mistaken it for humility. If you can fake that you can fake anything.
I spent five busy years as a producer/director, working with some of the above talented people in programmes which included the original Late Late Show. But mainly I made documentary films, which enabled me to escape the straitjacket of a studio
In our youth in the Coffee Inn in Duke St. the late Nuala Ó Faoláin said to me: ‘You have unresolved adolescent complexes’. I had unwisely revealed my private thoughts to a journalist – worse, to a sophisticate. Twenty years later in West Virginia I met Nuala and happily told her I still had the same complexes, but now found them a useful spur to creativity. ‘Lucky you’ she said.
As I had recently produced a fictional memoir, Smokey Hollow, she asked my advice about doing the same. I could offer nothing except the jaded: apply thy bottom to a chair and start writing. Not long afterwards she began her acclaimed autobiography Are You Somebody? We had each learned that personal versions are the only antidote to objective reality. However, I was taken aback by her portrait of her father, bon viveur journalist Terry O’Sullivan, as the villain of her upbringing. He, a music lover, had once rung me in studio after a music programme which I had devised for Radio Eireann and wistfully said: ‘I wish I’d made that.’ I never met the man in person but it softened the feminist version of him later portrayed in Nuala’s book.
Ironically, Father Romould Dodd – another Dominican – head of Religious Programmes asked the powers-that-be in RTÉ that I, sceptic, agnostic, non-believer, take your pick, be appointed to his non-existent department. Thereafter, I could make films on any subject I liked. I would merely decide on a theme, meet Romould over his gin and tonic in the RTÉ social club, and tell him what I had in mind. He would nod approval, smile affably and regale me with tales of his time as a chaplain in the oilfields of the Middle East.
My illusions stayed with me when I was making documentary films. Early efforts concentrated on the old-fashioned truth that we are each a fallible link in a social chain made strong by cooperation i.e. we are completely interdependent. I even titled a film on the Cheshire Homes ‘The Weakest Link’ to argue that the apparently handicapped are just differently endowed and that the apparently healthy are just as handicapped, certainly less than perfect.
My penchant for fantasy was soon recognised by the new Head of Drama who invited me to join his department. I declined and told him about Robert O’Flaherty, maker of ‘Man of Aran’ and ‘Nanook of the North’, who had invited a friend to join him in documenting the lives of exotic and primitive peoples. The friend, John Grierson, replied that his personal preference was to document the lives of the savages in Birmingham. Grierson went on to found the National Film Board of Canada and become another hero of mine.
Meanwhile, I was finding out that my childhood version of Christianity was an imposter, a pretender. I had been led up the garden path. Fundamental Christianity and Socialism, though apparently deadly enemies, were actually the same thing and neither were being practised! Quite unconsciously I fell for the worst of both worlds and became that contradiction in terms, a Catholic Marxist, just like Arthur Dooley, the Liverpool sculptor. Dooley had shown my colleague Jim Fitzgerald and myself his absurdist two-story miniature Model T Ford which he had called after the Tory bigwig, The Sir Alec Douglas Hume. Because, Arthur explained, ‘it doesn’t work either’. Fitzgerald kept the sculpture until poverty forced him to sell it to Charles J. Haughey.
These vague ideas I tried desperately to reconcile, despite two realisations that blunted my idealism. The first was watching my films as they were broadcast under the RTÉ religious ‘Horizon’ banner every Sunday at teatime. The family would briefly glance at the screen (“Oh, another of yours’) and resume eating. The second was Catholic-induced guilt: I was a whited sepulchre. How could I preach social virtues to others when I myself was a confused hotbed of lust and decadence? How else explain being locked up with a cageful of prostitutes in a Parisian gendarmerie in 1966? Here is my version:
On the RTÉ rugby football team actor Frank Kelly (aka ‘Father Jack’) and myself were the centre three-quarters who outdid each other in physical unfitness. The team travelled to Paris to play the RTF (French TV) team and see the Irish/French international. Our ruthless opponents forced cognac on us and kept us up until 4.00 am. At 9.00 am we staggered onto the rugby pitch, were soundly thrashed and that afternoon saw the Irish team suffer the same fate. There was then another sorrow-drowning dinner with a cognac-scoffing competition and a French tie-snipping ceremony – presumably a symbol of our rugby castration that morning – which led to mild violence.
That night we attended a discotheque whose air I found suffocating. I climbed on to a window sill on the 2nd floor to get a breath of the balmy Paris night air and a little peace. It appears that some overwrought dancer then looked up, spotted my legs dangling overhead, screamed and gave everybody the impression that there was a suicide in the offing. Soon a group of uniformed men arrived to talk me down. I explained my breathing difficulties to the Gendarmes but they missed the point and insisted I come along with them. I did so, protesting mildly about free will and democracy.
That is how I ended up in a cage in the police station, being fed cups of black coffee and sharing mimed jokes with some ladies of the night who had also been rounded up. One of my team mates with a smattering of French finally persuaded the Gendarmes that I was not a serious threat to public order or myself, and they released me.
I continued my television campaign for illusory decencies until 1967 when the effort proved too much. My labours had produced no change in the world, certainly none apparent to me; the majority of people were as sensibly pragmatic as they’d ever been. Most were – to this arrogant observer – living unexamined lives, concentrating their energies on careers, ignoring my filmic exhortations to observe the lilies in the fields.
Literature gave me intimations that everybody lived unadmitted lives of quiet desperation. I remember devouring, on successive lunch hours in Kiely’s pub in Donnybrook, two books that were mind altering: R.D. Laing’s Politics of Experience and Peter L. Berger’s The Precarious Vision. I would defy any impressionable person of the time to read those books and carry on their normal humdrum lives. They certainly changed mine because I had not been defused by third level education, and was that homemade time-bomb, an autodidact. The first book questioned our definition of ‘normality’; the second demonstrated the relativity of all belief systems. They incited me to question the very ground on which I walked, and established a lifelong pattern of querying every fixed position.
I also got an insight from the late writer Francis Stuart.
In the Arts Club in Dublin I asked him whether he resented the likes of Frederick Forsyth making a fortune from reactionary potboilers while he had to soldier on modestly. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I see myself as a backroom researcher. My findings will gradually filter down.’ This demonstrated to me his modesty as well as faith, hope and confidence, attributes to which I hopelessly aspired.
Stuart defined for me the only unique perspective a person possesses, the one that alone distinguishes him or her from their fellows: his ignorance. That cheered me up. Not possessing much talent but plenty of ignorance, it became my lifejacket. In his advice Stuart was echoing T.S. Eliot’s dictum: ‘what we know is what we do not know’, and ‘the only wisdom is humility’.
I became confident in my ignorance, enough to stop trying to conceal it, actually revelling in it. As a direct consequence a producer colleague once rhetorically asked whether I was very humble or very stupid. I answered that I was very stupid, which reply the arrogant wretch was forced to concede as quite clever, covering both bases. It even saved him a bloody nose. I discovered that an admission of ignorance on my part invited confidences from others. This proved invaluable in the making of documentary films.
I did not pause to assess the truth of Stuart’s or Eliot’s wisdom; I was too busy picking theirs and everybody else’s brains for answers. I thought Stuart’s was a good philosophy for a writer who sensed the abyss. It was not inconsistent with his youthful throwing in his lot with the Nazis, for which many would never accept his artistic excuses. Although I found his autobiographical Black List Section H to be a little self-serving, designed to de-nazify his reputation, its frankness was startling and his novels were thought-provoking. Francis Stuart was a devout, perhaps even a mystic Christian, who enjoyed a very long life and whose funeral I attended in County Clare.
The challenge of ‘that which we do not know’ is for me balanced by the insight that we are all in the same gluepot, just guessing, studying form. The exceptions are those – among them career academics, high priests and politicians – whose busy eyes and mouths are full of certain certainties. I could add much more on this subject, having spent the second half of my life trying to rid myself of what I learned in the first half.
I think I have by now earned an honorary PhD in ignorance.
In the sense that a doctor ‘practises’ medicine, never mastering it, I practised the art/craft of film for many years. Now I realise I was merely treading water, blundering around and, unlike doctors, unable to bury my mistakes: twenty of my films were recently re-run on Irish national television With few exceptions, they resigned me to the futility of any attempt at excavating truth or changing the world by one tiny iota. Rather late have I discovered that all change begins with oneself.
One trail runs dry, but a scent hangs in the air. Pursuant to Stephen Court’s Drivetime article for Cassandra Voices deconstructing the Irish media’s – including RTÉ ’s – relationship with the motor car sector, I lodged a Freedom of Information (FOI) request with the national broadcaster.
I sought records of payments, or payments-in-kind, from car dealership to leading RTÉ stars, approved by RTÉ ’s management since January 1st, 2017 under the Personal and Public Activities Guidance.
RTÉ’s FOI officer responded on June 6th to say there was no record of any such payments or payments-in-kind.
So can we be sure that RTÉ ’s ‘star’ personalities are appropriately objective in their reporting on transport issues?
Unfortunately not, as an FOI is a request for records containing information, rather than the information itself. According to a recent judgment (quoted by RTÉ’s FOI Officer): ‘If the record does not exist the body concerned is not required to create records to provide the information sought’ (Case 170505, Ms X and Louth County Council).
In other words, the FOI officer is under no obligation to dig for information on behalf of an applicant if the question posed misses records containing the targeted information; albeit an officer must take reasonable steps to comply with a request, which usually takes thirty days.
There is ample evidence of a permissive culture among RTÉ management towards employees’ earnings from third party sources. This was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year, unrelated to enquiries into the motor sector. But RTÉ’s officer chose to withhold details of who received what from whom – for reasons of commercial sensitivity.
As long as the national broadcaster does not provide a publicly accessible register of all transactions between employees (including so-called ‘external employees’ who avail of tax breaks available to companies) with third parties, as the BBC does, then suspicion lingers.
At the very least the national broadcaster should reveal the text of the Personal and Public Activities Guidance, which regulates employee’s third party relationships.
Any media organisation in receipt of a disproportionate proportion of its advertisement revenue from a particular sector is exposed to a charge of bias, which may operate in subtle ways.
II –Bring Cyclists to Justice
A recent example of what appears to be ‘Groupthink’ in the national broadcaster came from the unlikely source of Olivia O’Leary on – you guessed it – her weekly Drivetime column on June 19th.
Drivetime’s website adopts the incendiary title: ‘Olivia O’Leary on Cyclists: ‘It’s time we called in the law and fought for our footpaths’. It is a case of ‘we’, the ‘normal’ people, presumably motorists, ranged against ‘them’, that strange species of two-wheeled fanatics, invading ‘our’ footpaths. The title invites confrontation beyond legal enforcement.
The column itself is more balanced than the title suggests, but contains serious lapses of judgment. O’Leary said she was in favour of banning cars from between the canals and acknowledged that ‘cars destroy a city’, but then proceeded to lambaste the behaviour of cyclists in Dublin’s city centre.
She limits her complaint to a certain type of (male) cyclist on a Dublin bike ‘thundering along’ footpaths, but that nuance is lost in the following statement:
But, you know, there is one thing that private cars, for all their faults, usually do not do. They do not drive down the middle of the footpath, scattering pedestrians left and right. Cyclists, on the other hand, do this all the time.
O’Leary also, remarkably, jokes about using an umbrella to unseat any cyclist who engages in ‘Panzer tank stuff’, before adding that she would not actually recommend this. Ha ha ha. Hopefully some hot head has not had ideas put in his head.
This seems particularly insensitive, to put it kindly, considering how that very week in June ten people including three pedestrians had been killed by motor vehicles. Two were hit-and-runs. Unlike those killers, O’Leary missed the real culprits.
Moreover, as Cian Ginty points out in a column for Irishcycle.com, a simple Google search yields examples of pedestrians on footpaths being killed by motorists.
O’Leary is relating her personal experiences as a pedestrian in Dublin, which is fair enough, and of course there are lunatics out there. But what she fails to acknowledge is that friction between pedestrians and cyclists is largely a product of the deficient cycling infrastructure in the capital.
Mounting the footpath in Dublin’s centre is often a safety measure in a crush of buses, taxis and private cars. Most cyclists will then glide at the pace of the average pram, and give right of way to pedestrians, some of whom, nonetheless, will take the opportunity to scream into the cyclist’s ear.
O’Leary should have known better than to target cyclists for long failures in urban planning. She also ought to be pissed off with how the Drivetime producers have distorted her column.
III – Motor Mouths
Transparency in terms of external payments and gifts is especially important where, as Stephen Court’s article illustrates, there is a record of high profile figures – including Ryan Tubridy and others – apparently receiving free cars from dealerships, and also where numerous programmes from Drivetime to Liveline are sponsored by car companies, who also dominate commercial breaks.
If a presenter’s salary is linked to the advertising revenue his or her programme attracts this could be seen as an indirect payment, which might inhibit the expression of views unsympathetic to the sponsor. At the very least large scale advertising by any sector creates an objective bias, i.e. an appearance of bias, even without direct evidence.
No doubt these are existential questions for a state broadcaster, whose business model relies on advertising revenues of €151.5 last year, along with TV €186.1 million in licence fees.
One of the reasons I say that we have to have our numbers up [is] because it only works when the numbers are up. Joe Duffy, Irish Times, Saturday, December 9th, 2017.
Is a widespread devotion to ratings really a pursuit of advertising revenue? With RTÉ consistently losing money (€5.6 million last year), it is time to cut its cloth, and focus on its primary public service: the delivery of news and current affairs at a remove from vested interests.
This should involve an end to exorbitant salaries. The country is awash with aspiring journalists, most of whom would happily work on an average RTÉ salary of €70,000 per annum.
The BBC manages to perform this role satisfactorily in the UK, while allowing commerical competitors. The population might be more willingly pay their TV licenses if the broadcaster delivered a better service. The country has among the highest evasion rates in Europe.
It is time to kill the radio star on the national broadcaster.
IV – A Broader Malaise
The extent of payments from external sources to RTÉ’s household names was revealed in another FOI application I took earlier this year. But the officer refused to divulge precise details, claiming this could be advantageous to competitors, might result in financial loss to contractors, and potentially ‘prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations in respect of future engagements with independent contractors’.
I saw details of payments by third parties to Ryan Tubridy, Ray D’Arcy, Miriam O’Callaghan, Damien O’Reilly, Marty Morrissey, Claire Byrne, Bryan Dobson, Sean O’Rourke, Joe Duffy, Philip Boucher-Hayes, Joe Duffy, Kathryn Thomas, Mary Wilson and Marian Finucane
The officer responded that for 2017, ‘the total number of requests to engage in external ventures that RTÉ received was 122. Of that number, 114 were approved and 8 were refused. Of those granted, 97 were independent contractor requests and 1 was a RTÉ employee request. Of those refused, 7 were independent contractor requests and 17 were RTÉ employee requests.’
That the vast majority of requests were approved in 2017, particularly to independent contractors, shows the organisation takes a liberal view on potential conflicts of interest. Indeed, it is a matter of public record that management approved a payment by Origin Green/Bord Bia to Damien O’Reilly last year despite an obvious conflict of interest.
RTÉ’s Damien O’Reilly.
RTÉ claimed the majority of payments were for ‘non-commercial events, and mostly in support of charitable or other not-for-profit organisations’. In the absence of further details, however, it is impossible to verify this claim. It begs the question: if the work is harmless, or even benign, why did they withhold the information? Bord Bia is a not-for-profit semi-state body, but there was still a conflict of interest for RTÉ’s main agricultural correspondent to be receiving money from that organisation.
We cannot now tell whether any of the third parties have connections to the motor car industry in Ireland. And even if an organisation is charitable, or not-for-profit, this does not imply neutrality on contentious issue.
The claim that divulging information would “prejudice RTÉ ’s contractual negotiations” suggests the likes of Ryan Tubridy – who has been outspoken in his criticism of cyclists – could be lost to commercial competitors if damaging information enters the public domain.
That contention may be questioned, in the case of Tubridy at least. After moonlighting with the BBC in 2016 Tubridy admitted he found connecting with UK listeners difficult, while leaving for Newstalk or TV3 would represent a career regression.
Most of RTÉ ’s household names found fame, and fortune, through extended exposure on RTÉ. The failure of Pat Kenny to draw a substantial number of his former listeners away from the station, when he departed for Newstalk, indicates most people are in the habit of tuning into the state broadcaster, rather than the radio ‘star’.
V –A Tool of the Sector
The state broadcaster is certainly not alone in the Irish media in its reliance on advertising from the motor car industry, and the objective bias this brings. Our ‘paper of record’, the Irish Times, seems to do little investigative work into subject-matters impinging on its leading advertisers; and while generally virtue-signalling in its approval of cycling, has also contributed to negative stereotyping.
One such portrayal came from Fintan O’Toole in 2013. O’Toole, whose father was a bus driver, as he has reminded his readers, does not drive. But seemingly that does not extend to sympathy for cycling. During National Bike Week in 2013 he wrote, tongue-in-cheek, that cyclists were the ‘spawn of the devil’, no doubt to the guffaws of his colleagues on the editorial floor.
But the article was actually a genuine indictment of the behaviour of cyclists, who are portrayed as casually mounting footpath and endangering pedestrians, even where they have been provided with their own lanes.
As with Olivia O’Leary, O’Toole posited a false dichotomy between pedestrians and cyclists, ‘us’ and ‘them’, which ignores how the problem is not with either form of locomotion, but the utter dominance of the motor car in Ireland’s urban areas.
Many of Dublin’s cycle lanes are defective: the track might be potholed, or simply a part of the road that is coloured red, a simulacrum of a real cycle lane without a protective curb, where parking is often permitted outside rush hour.
O’Toole recently wrote an article criticising plans to remove motorized traffic from College Green, a measure which would also be advantageous to cyclists. O’Toole’s argument was that this would work to the detriment of mostly working class bus passengers. Cycling is not mentioned once in the article.
College Green c.1890.
The implication is that cycling is not a realistic mode of transport for the working class, but instead the preserve of middle class, lycra-clad, fitness enthusiasts, which is certainly not the case in cities where the bike is king. O’Toole is right insofar as he draws attention to the poor provision of public transport in Dublin, and to emphasise the continued importance of the bus.
But rather than abandoning plans for a plan that would make the centre of the city more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists, a better outcome would be investment in quality bus corridors and the introduction of radial routes.
*******
With a climate comparable to Copenhagen’s and Amsterdam’s, Dublin is regarded as the Great Bike Hope of Emerging Bicycle Cities. But the media, from state broadcaster to the national ‘paper of record’ have failed to drive home that message, and few politicians, beyond the Green Party, have consistently campaigned on behalf of cycling, which should be a viable and healthy alternative for most healthy urbans residents.
A deficient cycling infrastructure is another blot on the copy book of a country ranked second worst in Europe for tackling Climate Change, and which confronts an obesity pandemic.
The national broadcaster might insulate itself from claims of objective bias by not treating news and current affairs as cash cows. Then we might be offered better reporting on important issues, such as reforming a sclerotic transport infrastructure. And if RTÉ’s ‘stars’ reckon they are not being paid well enough, they should be told to get on their bikes.
