I have recently spent more time than is healthy flicking through the suggestions proposed to Your Country, Your Call, Ireland’s latest doomed exercise in Magical Thinking. They are hilarious, of course, but there’s a desperate edge to much of my laughter. Because the ideas are not just stupid. They are often illegal, and sometimes dangerous.

One of the most common suggestions has been that the unemployed be made to work, in various ways, for the benefit of the nation. The top two suggestions, last I checked, were variations on this theme. The idea is very much in the air these days, being regularly aired on current affairs and discussion programs as a way of killing two birds with one stone – getting people back to work, and putting all hands to the pump in the cause of saving the nation’s economy. It is so current, that I think it needs to be pointed out that it cannot bear scrutiny for more than a number of seconds without its hopelessly impractical and socially and economically damaging nature becoming apparent.

The notion of forcing people to work for their social welfare payments is not new, and is known as “workfare”. It has been tried in some countries, with limited success. But whereas the old call was for this work to be of a socially useful nature, it is more often suggested now that this be for the good of “the economy”, in other words, that private, for-profit businesses receive the benefit of forced labour, paid for by the state. It was probably inevitable that after years of taking credit for apparently selflessly “creating jobs”, the private sector would come to regard itself as primarily charitable in nature. The proposition is simple: Companies are having a hard time meeting costs, and people are having a hard time finding jobs. Make people work for free and both problems are solved.

The primary obstacle to this is that it is, in all likelihood, illegal under EU law. It is State Aid, the subsidisation by the state of private industry, and contrary to competition laws in that it gives Irish business an unfair advantage over businesses in other member states. But even if it were not illegal, such a scheme would be profoundly damaging to the economy. It cannot, even in the short term, be economically wise to prop up unprofitable companies on such a scale. With “wages” so low, demand for the products and services provided by these business will also be low, at exactly the same time as they go into overproduction due to their extra new staff. The glut of products on the market will drive prices down, furthering the cycle of deflation. Further, prices and wages will stay low, because the entire economy will have been artificially stabilised.

Further again, how long is such a scheme proposed to last? Even if it did succeed in bringing companies back into profitability, at what time is it proposed that the social welfare recipients thus employed will take the step up to full employment? Why, and when, would a company who are getting staff for free suddenly decide to start paying one of them? And if they did, which of their previously unpaid workers would get the real job?

So much for the private sector. Public or community-based work, though not blocked by the same European Law problems as private sector work, is not without it’s drawbacks. Firstly, it is of no direct benefit to the economy. It might be nice, socially and aesthetically, to have litter-free streets, or well pruned hedgerows, but sending the unemployed to do such work has no bearing on the economy. Indeed, in the case of any serious work, it denies the private sector a possible contract, thus putting pressure on companies previously reliant on such work, perhaps ultimately putting them out of business.

As with the private sector version, there arises the question of demand. How much of the work to which people will be put is actually necessary? There’s only so much litter to pick up, so many hedges to trim. In any case, all but the most basic of tasks will require equipment and supervision. Even with free labour, this scheme would constitute a massive increase in public sector spending, at a time when the common view is that a reduction in same is required.

Demand, in fact, is the key here. The economy is not in trouble because labour cost too much. If demand is sufficiently high, it will be worthwhile for businesses to pay whatever the market demands that labour should cost. An artificial reduction (or in fact abolition) of wages does not solve the demand problem, indeed it worsens it. But that is not the real motivation of the scheme. The real motivation is the same as that which was behind the Victorian Poor Law. It is the furious certainty that somewhere out there, people are getting something for nothing. Being on Social Welfare must then be made so unpleasant that recipients finally decide they’d rather work. This, of course, assumes that there are jobs to be had.

There will always be people who are eaten up by the idea that money is being given away for nothing. These are the people who propose stringent and thorough means tests for all state benefits. Tell them that means testing often costs so much to perform that it makes the programs more expensive, and they will reply that a principle is at stake. They would rather cost the state more than give anything to people they consider layabouts.

This is the primary philosophical objection to workfare: it assumes everyone is abusing the system. If the primary purpose of unemployment benefit is to keep people going while they search for work, then workfare is of no use. It deprives people of the time needed to search for employment, and where necessary to retrain.

A few years ago, Ireland was as close to full employment as it is possible to get. At one point, in Dublin, less than 1% were in receipt of Unemployment Benefit. Indeed, we had a labour shortage (demand, you see) that we filled with migrant workers. Now, unemployment is, according to the latest figures, at 12.6%. Perhaps the extra unemployed, previously in gainful employement, all decided to become lazy leeches off state largesse. But it seems like a remarkable coincidence that they did so at exactly the same time as the economy contracted. Maybe, just maybe, they’re not working because the jobs aren’t there.

Finally, (and I leave this point to last, because, though I believe it wholeheartedly, it is the sort of thing that sounds hopelessly quaint these days), there is such a thing as the dignity of work. Many of those unemployed worked in areas in which there is simply no work now. Having them out tending flower beds outside the local parish church, for payment that barely covers the essentials, is detrimental to the morale, the spirit we are repeatedly told is needed to overcome our current economic problems. Camus wrote that “there is dignity in work only if it is work freely accepted”. If it came to it, many would rather tend a bar in Australia by choice than be forced to work against their will in Ireland. If they left, they might think themselves betrayed by their country. They would be right.

My mother will be exhibiting at this along with the other Fine Art Printmakers who work out of the Print studio in Airfield House.

The exhibition details are

Airfield Studio Exhibition of Fine Art Original Prints at Airfield, Dundrum

Exhibition opens at 11am untill 5.30pm
Saturday 12th December.

Some of the artists whose work will be included in the show will be

You’d be foolish to miss it. Also, Airfield House is quite excellent for a visit all by itself. They have excellent new piglets in the Living Crib, which my 2 year old son is looking forward to examining closely.

Harry McGee is the hot young thing of the Irish Times political reporting staff. Having proved his thrilling modernity by running a blog while working for the Examiner, he moved to the Times and was one of their founding Politics bloggers. He lists amongst his interests on his new site ‘New Media and Technology’.

A lucky break for the nation- a political journalist who’s well placed to understand the internet and explain its political significance to the nation- and to other politicians. We’re not exactly swimming in journalists who give the impression they could bridge those gaps.

Which makes his most recent article “Politicians learn value of chirpy, chirpy Tweet greet” all the more disappointing. It takes an old media view of the significance of Twitter in Irish Politics, seeing it as just a new way for politicians to broadcast out their ‘message’ to voters.

But, in fact Twitter (contrary to my expectations when I signed up to it in 2007 to have a poke and prod at it) has become something very new and very subversive of that centre-out model of communications. Far from being passive receivers of political messages, voters are talking amongst themselves about politicians and with politicians on an equal footing.

This is a difficult experience for some Tweeting members of the Oireachtas who find themselves suddenly able to hear all the comments made about them and find them a bit harsher than what people say to their faces.

Here’s @midnightcourt putting this idea to Senator Dan Boyle;

And here’s Senator Dan Boyle replying;

Which only confirms the point.

But, then, we can hardly be too surprised if Harry missed the shifts in the national conversation which have been brewing in the last few months. Here are his most recent two tweets;

Yes, that second one is dated July 24th.

What was aggravating about Chirpy Chirpy Tweet Greet is that we really do need someone to explain and describe the real meaning of this strange, organic, Twitter-powered alternative to the dead meaningless world of centre-out ‘messages’.

Instead, we ended with Harry approvingly quoting DIT lecturer Ian Kilroy;

he says it should not be oversold. “The message is the same. The platform is alternative but incidental. It’s a new way of conveying the message.”

On the contrary, ‘the platform’ creates a new way of communicating, sharing, learning and deciding. Sure, you could just use it as another place to pump out links to your press releases. But good luck trying to plough on with the same dead message as everything changes around you.

Ask the Home Rule party how that works out.

You know how it is. You get up every morning, wanting to make a difference. You slog through day after day, scanning the horizon for any sign- any clue- that your work is having an effect. But every day, nothing.

So spare a moment to sympathise with Taoiseach Brian Cowen. In his recent interview on Prime Time he revealed both how badly he, and Fianna Fail have failed and how they ended up in this mess.

You see it turns out that, contrary to almost every possible measurable indicator, Brian and FF have been working to try to make Ireland ‘fairer’.

Brian Cowen can't say how disappointed in you he is.

At 0:16:20 you can see him wail that

“We’ve been building for the last 20 years a fairer society.”

Now, seeing as they’ve had 20 years to chip away at the thing, you might wonder how they’ve been so spectacularly unsuccessful. The answer comes immediately when Brian gives us the definition of fairness he’s been guided by for the last 20 years.

“We’ve ensured that we had a tax system where people could keep more of their own wages for their own benefit.”

A tragedy. They devoted themselves for twenty years to bringing about “a fairer society.” They just didn’t know what such a thing would look like.

Who amongst us will not now admit that after devoting two decades of their lives to letting rich people keep more of their money so that poor people didn’t have access to public services while trying to bring about fairness, that it is Fianna Fail and Brian Cowen who are the real victims here?

Certainly, his demeanour suggests he feels it is so. He feels our ingratitude like an ache in his soul.

Last week, a Judge in Louisiana refused a marriage license to a mixed race couple. In the ensuing furore, he was careful to make clear that “I’m not a racist, I just don’t believe in mixing the races”. To which one can really only respond, “But that’s what racism is, Jackass!” What Judge Bardwell was saying was that he wasn’t in the KKK, had never lynched anybody, and didn’t keep slaves. Ergo, he was not a racist.

Similarly, I once heard a co-worker explain that she wasn’t a racist, she just didn’t like black people. It was a matter of taste, that was all, “I don’t like Guinness either” (I swear to God, she actually said that.) When we have reached the stage where people can hold and express such views and yet deny being racist, I think it’s fair to say that there is no such thing as a racist.

Certainly, there are very few who will admit to being one, and ultimately, you can’t prove it one way or another. In any case, we very rarely these days attack people for being bigots. Rather, we attack their words or their actions as bigoted ones. To turn around and say “How dare you call me a bigot?” is to change the subject (see Jan Moir for details of the versatility of this gambit). We can’t know if you are a bigot or not, because we can’t look into your heart and mind and discern the contents thereof. But we can quite easily look at your words and actions and call them what they are. The accused can’t defend what he said, so switches the argument to one about his character. Friends and colleagues are trotted forward as witnesses to his not-a-bigot-ness and before you know it, he is the victim. Often, flushed with this success, he decides he is a hero of Free Speech too, but that is over-reaching. But still, you can’t call a person a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe and expect to be allowed to make your argument, so perhaps we should come up with some new language to emphasise the difference between a person’s non-bigoted essence and their bigoted words and deeds.

While we’re at it, it might be no harm to come up with a new synonym for “fascist”. It is almost proverbial that calling someone a fascist is a sure fire way to lose credibility in an argument. This is a real shame, as fascism is not simply a matter of goose-stepping and genocide, and alas did not come to an end in 1945. As with racism, you’ll find nobody who’s not offended to be called one, but plenty of people who hold what are, literally, fascist opinions. To demonstrate this, I need to say a little bit about the origins of fascism. There was a time when it wasn’t an insult, but a mainstream strand of political opinion. It arose in the midst of a huge economic and financial crisis. Politics were radicalized, as left and right wings became more extreme, with their disagreement sometimes being played out in violence on the street. But for every person who had drifted to one of these two wings, there were more who had no great interest in political ideology and just wanted a government to actually be in charge. We now associate fascism with the right wing, but at the time of its emergence, it was something very new, a Third Way between capitalism and socialism. It was not, like traditional conservatism, exclusively focused on the past, but was a forward-looking, consciously modernist movement. Pragmatism, innovation and industry were valued. The innate power and energy of the People was praised. Fascism didn’t over-think things. Fascism got it done. (the title of Triumph of the Will is perhaps the most succinct summation of the fascist ethos). In place of ideology, the flag was inserted. Neither left nor right, but [insert nationality here] was the basic position. Great emphasis was placed on “The People”, who allegedly had no time for the partisan bickering that made up politics. There was less respect for the will of the people as expressed through elections, when they voted for said partisan bickerers. Leadership was all-important. The question of whether the leader knew what he was doing was not so much unimportant as put to one side in case it led to “disunity”. Unity, banding together for the good of the nation was a key element. Just as the socialists, communists and some liberals banded together for the good of the left into a “Popular Front”, patriots of all stripes banded together into a National Front. Put like that, it sounds almost noble.

Of course there was more to it than that. From the very beginning, a powerful element of aggression towards outsiders was involved. Some have argued that in the case of Nazism, it was only ever about the anti-Semitism, and everything else was only the scaffolding for the holocaust which was the movement’s raison d’etre. Certainly, the hatred was always a driving force. But strip away the more garish elements, the salutes and militarism, and you are left with something which is worryingly attractive to a lot of people.

In the past year (also a time of huge economic and financial crisis) I have heard, on many occasions, the need to abandon ideology in favour of pulling together and wearing the green jersey. It is not entirely clear how this abandonment of difference is to be effected. If we’re all pulling together, who exactly decides what principles we’re pulling together behind? Some arguments don’t allow for compromise. This is not simply agreeing to disagree. If these differences are to be put aside it can only be by one side being forced to capitulate to the other. People don’t like to be accused of advocating the crushing of dissent, but there it is.

I have read in newspapers that our Government, who have a majority and can pass any measure they want, are being hampered by the Opposition in their attempts to Get Things Done. If this state of affairs is allowed to continue, respected commentators have written, the very survival of the state is threatened. People think it’s rude to accuse them of advocating the abolition of parliamentary opposition, but I can’t think of any other way of putting it.

I have read in the same papers that a national government (that government-without-opposition idea again) is favorable to holding a general election, even though any such election would represent an overdue adjustment of the make-up of the Dáil to reflect a change in public opinion. People get narky when you point out that they think the people can’t be trusted to exercise their franchise responsibly, but that’s what they’re saying.

I have heard it suggested that “we” should “get rid” of the politicians, who have failed us, and “put” people who can get things done “in charge”. Michael O’Leary is often mentioned as a candidate. What scares me is not the fact that that if O’Leary was in charge of our hospitals the corpses would be piled up in the corridors. It is the notion, so blithely floated, of installing non-elected leaders. Michael O’Leary is too smart to run for office, and wouldn’t get elected anyway. So “putting” him or anyone else “in charge” would in fact be a coup d’etat. People take offense when you accuse them of advocating coups, but go look the word up in a dictionary, that is what it means.

These startling arguments are trickier to counter than one might think, partly because you are fighting with one arm tied behind your back. You can’t express yourself entirely freely, because it sounds over the top to use the f-word. To call these arguments by their terminologically and historically accurate name is to cross a line that we prefer not to cross. Once you’ve called someone a fascist, there’s really no going back. You sound hysterical, and they are personally offended. It might be a good idea then, to find a way to talk about these ideas that doesn’t involve the f-word. We pretty much define a fascist as a racist, jew-obsessed sadist, and by that definition there are thankfully few fascists around. But it sets the bar awfully high and lets a lot of objectionable stuff off the hook.

Fascism didn’t become popular without having a genuine appeal. It spoke to the baser elements of human nature. Those elements, the impatience with the delays, fudges and compromises that are an inevitable by-product of democracy; the frustration at rules that serve abstract principles rather than immediately practical benefits, the wish that someone would “take on” whatever group of people are the current object of your ire, and “just get the job done”, all are still present in humanity. They didn’t disappear in 1945, and they aren’t limited to any one country. The racism, cruelty and mania are what everyone remembers, but they weren’t what made fascism attractive.

In contemporary Ireland, when one beer-sponsored festival has barely ended than another begins, to the extent that one is barely aware of their existence, it is easy to remember that these things used to be a big deal. While a Heineken Green Energy or a Murphy’s Comedy Festival will barely merit a mention in the “What’s On” round-up, there was a time when festivals would be endlessly trailed in advance, covered breathlessly while in progress and recorded for posterity.

The daddy of all these was the Galway 500 festival of 1984, the 500th anniversary of the granting of a town charter in 1484. Cork, of course, couldn’t let this pass, and the following year we were treated to Cork 800. Then silence. But the pride of the capital was undoubtedly stung. It was one thing to let Galway have a bit of a jamboree. But Dublin was damned if Cork was going to be allowed to hog the limelight. And so, in 1988, Dublin went for the Grand. The futuristic-sounding Millennium left behind many artefacts; milk bottles, dust-bins, a 50p piece, but none was as long-lasting or as corrosive to the national spirit as the tradition of the humorous rhyming nickname.

When Eamonn O’Doherty’s (actually quite attractive) sculpture “Anna Livia” was installed in a fountain in O’Connell St. it pleased someone to give her the nickname “the Floozie in the Jacuzzi”. Really, it wasn’t a bad joke. She was entirely unclad, and there was something not-quite-right about the fountain in which she reclined. Upon hearing the nick-name, one suddenly realised what it was: yes, she looked like she was sitting in a Jacuzzi. A small joke, not in the league of Myles’ “Tomb of the unknown gurrier” but not bad. Alas, it was held up to be a jewel of “Dub wit”.

Then, the deluge. Two women sitting on a bench with their shopping? “The hags with the bags”. Molly Malone, wheeling her wheel-barrow, through streets broad and narrow? “The tart with the cart”. A former colleague of mine, a Dubliner of many generation’s standing, would go into a rage when such nicknames were mentioned. Patronising “Dublin Character” nonsense, he’d spit, condescending pseudo-working-class guff from the same sort of people who brought us Ould Mr. Brennan. But worse was to come.

Nothing much happened in the way of Dublin public art for a while. When the money started rolling in, and Dublin Corporation resumed their always-dubious beautification of the city, it was decided by our media (“The hacks with the facts”? No, of course not) that every new work must, must, be given a rhyming nickname, however tenuous or tortured its logic. It often seemed that no sooner was the artist’s impression of a proposed piece made available, than the press were racking their brains and their rhyming dictionaries for a nickname, to be used by themselves and absolutely nobody else. The Millennium Clock? “The Time in the Slime”. Because the Liffey is dirty. And it’s a clock, like. Gas. The Millennium Spire? “The Stiletto in the Ghetto”. Because it’s on the northside, see?

Clearly, taste was no consideration here, or at least not one that ranked above getting a rhyme. Why else would a statue of Oscar Wilde, a genuine genius, a proper, no-messing, actual Great Man, be called “The Fag on the Crag”. “The Fag”: someone decided that he was somehow qualified to dismiss one of the greatest minds the world, let alone Ireland, has ever known as “the Fag”. Not that the nicknames were ever claimed by those using them. Despite never being used by the citizenry, they were always presented as the coinage of the simple but charming Dublin people. Though in fact entirely journalistic creations, the pretense was maintained that our correspondent was only reporting to us what was said by “one wag”, or “a local wit”. A cartoon vision of a jolly, ballad-singing, “Arthur”-swilling rare-oul-timer springs to mind.

The nadir was reached some weeks ago, when Orna Mulcahy (of whom more later) wrote her column about the Dublin Bike scheme. Ms. Mulcahy has an almost autistic-savant talent for parodying her own class, a talent which I suspect she remains unaware of. Having let us know that she decided to start cycling only after she saw it in a Woody Allen film, she sallies forth, with the customary attribution to “one Dublin wit”, with “The Yokes on the Spokes”. Let us remember that we’re not dealing with art here. These are bicycles. We all know what a bike looks like. The potential for a joke about the appearance of an item so familiar to us is close to nil. We know too, that bikes have spokes. But even here, humour may achieved. These bikes, they are the what with the spokes? The yokes? Seriously? Ms. Mulcahy is telling us only that bicycles are things that have spokes and expecting a laugh, just because it rhymes? That is the kind of thing that can get a journalist a nickname*.

*Suggestions for which are gratefully received in the comments

I don’t usually post about my day job here (or at least not about the inner workings of the McGarr Solicitors office) but I did want to say something about the launch of Personal Injury Ireland.com this week.

You can read E. McGarr’s take on it on the McGarr Solicitors blog post The Colour Supplement.

This is a bit of a departure for us, and something of a novelty in the world of solicitors’ websites, in that we have created an entire site which is not primarily focused on talking about our firm but rather is attempting to put ourselves in the shoes of the injured party and to answer their questions. We’ve also tried to highlight some of the most important things that they might not be aware of.

I should say that we were greatly helped by our forbearing designer Sabrina Dent as we struggled to imagine what questions would be most to the forefront of our visitors minds. It is difficult, when you are in a profession, to remember that many people will not have knowledge of lots of the things you take for granted. Sabrina regularly pointed out issues to address which we might have overlooked.

The prompt for this post, other than to get the old google juice flowing of course, was a phone call I took from a man yesterday. He was calling on behalf of his brother, who had been very seriously injured as a result of an acknowledged incident of medical negligence. It was now four years since the incident has occurred and he was only now able to try to address the question of compensation.

I was sorry to have to tell him, after making the necessary inquiries of him, that the law allowed only two years to make a claim for personal injury, regardless of the seriousness of that injury. From the facts he gave, his brother was now statute barred from seeking any compensation, even though, as he told me, he would suffer from the after effects of that injury for the rest of his life.

Good information, quickly and understandably delivered is vital for people who have suffered an injury to understand what their rights and their obligations are. Hopefully personalinjuryireland.com will help people to get that information a little more easily.

Some years ago, American writer Joan Didion wrote a memoir called The Year of Magical Thinking. It detailed a year of her life in which her husband died suddenly, and her daughter developed an ultimately fatal illness. For months after her husband died, Didion refused to throw out any of his clothes, did whatever she could to keep her life and living arrangements identical to what they had been when her husband was alive. This, she came to realise, was magical thinking. At some level she thought that her husband would return, but that in order for this to happen she needed to have constant faith. Throwing away his clothes would signify bad faith, and thus ensure that he never came back. Only when she accepted the reality and permanence of her situation was she able to leave behind the magical thinking, the sense that reality could be altered simply by wishing.

Magical Thinking, or wish thinking, is a comforting, basically childish way of thinking about the world. It comes about in times of stress. And it is everywhere these days. We are a year into the worst recession in living memory and still people are in denial. Even as they call for drastic cuts in public services, many of us, especially those who at first denied the recession was even happening, are acting like we can simply wish ourselves out of recession.

“”If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”

The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed, then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever”

- J. M Barrie, Peter Pan.

Substitute the Celtic Tiger for Tinkerbell, and you will have some idea of what I am talking about. Yes, consumer confidence is essential to an economy. Yes, you need a can-do attitude to get anywhere as an entrepreneur. But you also need a good product, a line of credit, skill, connections and many other things, many of which are in the shortest of supply these days. Confidence can only bring you so far, and if unaccompanied by any of the other requirements of a successful business, it will bring you to financial ruin. Sure, every success story involves people taking risks and defying the odds. But so does every one of the far more common, but less often heard stories of failure.

One of the new clichés bequeathed to us by the Celtic Tiger is that “Our Greatest Natural Resource is our People”. This has its origin in the rhetoric of Mary Robinson’s Presidency. Robinson came to office at a time when Ireland was still drab, depressed, and exporting many of its young people abroad. Audaciously, Robinson began telling us that we were young, dynamic and energetic. It wasn’t true. But it became true. Confidence increased in Ireland throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s, until we became the insufferable boors of today. For decades we thought of ourselves as lovable losers. We weren’t rich, but we were charming, quaint and artistic. Now we think we are lovable winners. Even now that we’re not winning, we seem to have to decided that if we act as if we are, things will soon work out.

Magical thinking in its current form is fixated on the notion that the problems we find ourselves in are simply fixed. All that is needed is goodwill and collective effort. A key motif is that the resources are “out there”, they need only to be “harnessed”. Hence, the preponderance of people starting a website and simply waiting for the problem to be solved by wishing it so. This tendency is demonstrated by a range of initiatives launched by public and private sectors, as well as by concerned citizens. The recurring thought that comes to me upon reading the content of all of these sites is “As if it were that simple”. Nothing much will come of any of these projects. I would lay money on it. But let’s look at a few of them:

Let’s look, for example, at Amhrán Nua. It announces itself a new political movement. Their website ticks all the usual magical thinking boxes. It calls for patriotism, an end to partisan bickering, a general pulling together of the nation. As with the name, visually, it harks back to the fresh, hopeful style of the early days of the Celtic Tiger. Celtic mysticism with a modern hi-tech sheen. Blue skies, green fields, a fresh breeze blowing from off the Atlantic. It is somewhere between a mid-90’s Bord Fáilte ad and a Corrs video. The policy pages have nothing controversial to say. Cut public spending, increase revenue, slim down the public sector, the usual. It is interesting to note that the recession has turned Fine Gael economic policy into the new, unquestioned conventional wisdom.

There is no evidence that I can find on the site that Amhrán Nua has any members beyond those involved in setting up the website. I can also find no evidence that they have registered themselves as a political party. Indeed, I strongly suspect that those involved are not aware of the requirement to do so. Schemes like this are hatched in great enthusiasm, often in the pub. Following through is not really the point. Other than talking vaguely of fresh starts and pulling together, what are Amhrán Nua actually doing? Their “Events and Activities” page is blank.

Here’s a post on Politics.ie, also proposing a new party. You can read the ten point plan if you like, but the first sentence sets the tone:

“Have a political system where the government is made up off (sic) top experts in their field, not TDs.”

OK, an unelected government. Thanks for your suggestion. We’ll get back to you. This guy suggests that his movement will have great appeal to the intelligentsia, by the way.

Reclaim Ireland: A cheaper looking site, with slightly more edgy, combative language. “Reclaim” suggests that Ireland is in the hands of others, and must be taken back. The slogan meanwhile, urges us to “Vote for Revolt”. It is not made clear whether Reclaim Ireland are a party for whom we can vote. They state they are not allied to any existing parties. Anyone on the way to the polls to “vote for revolt” could be forgiven some confusion as to how to go about it. Inevitably, a cut on wasteful spending is recommended. But as Bord Snip makes clear, answering the question of what is wasteful is not straightforward. The Agenda page commences by calling for a national government, and then goes on to call for universal education and healthcare. Fair enough, but what about the sizeable chunk of the national government, and indeed the electorate, that is dead set against such lefty policies? That difficulty can apparently be wished away, because

a power shared government might just get the job done if we are all on the same side

Hmm, one-party government. I see a theme developing here. Again, no actual activities have been undertaken.

So much for politics. How about the private sector? First, the now rather celebrated Spirit of Ireland project. The website again is decked out in circa-1997 imagery of fluffy clouds against blue skies, waves frothing off the Cliffs of Moher and emerald green fields. This is apparently Riverdance: The Energy Company. Spirit of Ireland’s plan is all about renewable energy. I will leave it to the experts to demonstrate that the entire plan is guff and limit myself to the magical aspects. Spirit of Ireland announce

Ireland has some the very best wind resources in Europe – an enormous natural asset with revenue potential of tens of billions of Euros per year.

Wind, previously just a meteorological phenomenon and means of drying clothes, is now an asset. Billions of Euros a year have been brought into existence, simply by saying so. Renewable energy is the perfect magical thinking project. It has no actual tangible products. Rather it is a matter of “harnessing” something that is already there. As my researches for this post have shown, Ireland is not short of wind.

The Ideas Campaign is the government’s own approved harnessing exercise. There is, it seems, a genius for innovation and initiative residing every one of us. Never mind that it didn’t make its self shown for centuries, it exists, and is quintessentially Irish. The Ideas Campaign set out to tap that genius, which, like wind, is just lying around, being wasted. We were sitting on a goldmine all this time, and we didn’t even know it! Having harvested the sweet, sweet ideas from the brains of the nation, the Ideas Campaign produced a report. The other day, they announced that they were immediately implementing 17 of the ideas produced by their brain-farming. I will confess, even I was nonplussed at 17 ideas. I’ve come up with more than that myself on a night on the pub. But who knows, maybe they are all pure gold, sure-fire recession-busters:

Facilitate career breaks and shorter working week in public sector

This has been happening for, literally, decades.

Encourage schools to organise transition year trips within Ireland to assist tourism

I imagine the recession will take care of most parent’s urges to send their kids away on expensive school trips abroad.

Develop a coherent ‘Ireland’ brand for education in order to draw more international students to our third-level institutions

I’m not sure I even know what this means, but it smells like an excuse for a big PR spend.

It is clear that is happening here is that the government, having vocally supported the campaign, are now humouring it by officially adopting some of the ideas that require no change from current practices. Well done all. I hope you didn’t spend too much on that. Oh, and the “no whinging” sign on your site? I’d hide that if someone who’s lost his job comes around. It might come off as a little insensitive.

Some will no doubt take offence to this post, or say “At least they’re doing something instead of complaining”. But my point is that these projects aren’t doing anything either. If you are starting a company or other venture, I genuinely wish you luck. All of the projects I’ve outlined above were launched with greater or lesser degrees of ballyhoo before petering out, because underneath the enthusiasm, there was nothing there. If these projects have any success whatsoever, it will be on their merits. If they fail, it will also be on their merits. My criticisms will not have any effect on them either way. To think otherwise is to think, like Peter Pan, that the Celtic Tiger can be brought back to life simply by believing and clapping your hands.

I was an audience member for RTE’s Questions & Answers on two occasions. I can remember almost nothing about either program. The first time, I think Mary O’Rourke was a panelist. The second, Joe Higgins and Michael McDowell were on. They probably had a row. I can’t remember.

What I do remember is the hour or so before the show. We milled around in a too-small reception room and ate hors d’oeurves and drank wine. A producer arrived in and silenced the room. She thanked us for coming, and told us that she wanted questions on a small number of topics. The economy, the north, the health service, the “funny” one, the usual. All of these topics were to do with what was in the newspapers that week. We wrote out the questions we had been told to ask and went back to our prawn sandwiches. The producer returned and told a few of us that our version of the questions they had told us to ask was chosen to be put to the panel.

We were herded into the studio. John Bowman came out and welcomed us, and then introduced the panel to us. He asked us to bear with him as each panelist was asked to speak for a moment or two so that the sound crew could get the microphone levels right. I vaguely recall that Michael McDowell spoke about the weather. Joe Higgins talked about the traffic out to Montrose. He may have used the term “neo-liberal”.

The filming commenced. The chosen guests asked the questions they had been told to ask. Most framed their questions in cute, pun-based terms. Given that the producers and researchers plucked the topics from the week’s news coverage, it is no surprise that they chose questions that most resembled the language of political correspondant’s columns. The panelists responded in more or less the terms they might have been expected to respond in. The audience participants gave away their political allegiances by clapping a little too loudly at unremarkable contributionss from their representatives. Contributions from the floor were mostly openly partisan. The filming ended. We left, none the wiser.

I have watched Q & A maybe a half a dozen times in the past half-dozen years. The rehearsed and unreal nature of the program made it a largely irrelevant ritual. Panelists might as well have shown up and responded to each question with a link to the relevant policy page of their organisation’s website. Each was clearly present as a representative of an interest, a mouthpiece whose job it was to repeat certain positions rather than to respond to questions or to engage in debate. The panel would usually be made of a member each of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, a Labour member or Union or NGO rep, a journalist or lawyer, and a mystery guest. The mystery guest could be anything from a businessman to the head of a lobby group to a Director of one of the dizzying number of quangos which sprang up in the Ahern era. The important thing for the viewer to know was that the mystery guest was a second Fianna Fail panelist, flying under neutral colours. Everyone would say their piece in exactly the terms that we expected of them, Pat Rabbitte would make one of those jokes of his, and we could all have a chuckle and go home. Nothing ever got debated. No minds were changed, no ideas developed. Wherever possible, John Bowman would steer discussion away from the issue at hand to how that issue might affect opinion polls and political alliances. The stakes could not have been lower. The National Conversation could not have been more badly served.

I watched last night’s final edition of the show. Fittingly, the show featured no questions, finally achieving balance with the dearth of answers in all previous episodes. About five minutes of interesting comment could be distilled from the three panels RTE wheeled out for our delectation. Moments from the past were replayed. There was a montage of questions being asked by audience members who are now public figures, which suggests that Q & A even now thinks its greatest weakness – the exclusion of ordinary citizens in favour of party hacks – was some kind of strength. There was a look at the episode during the 1990 presidential election that lead to Brian Lenihan’s downfall. That moment was rehearsed too, a fact that was acknowledged, but not commented on in terms of what it said about the program itself.

This is the notional conversation. A small group of politicians, journalists, lobbyists, press officers, lawyers and businessmen talk to and about each other. PR people brief the papers. Broadcasters follow up the story by interviewing Politicians. Sometimes they even interview the journalists. Occasionally, journalists interview broadcasters. The media moments thereby created are fed back into the system, and the papers will write entire articles about the reaction to such moments. This is usually a matter of talking to a few backbenchers and some other journalists. The citizen remains unconsulted. Thus is the mood of Doheny & Nesbitt’s confused for the mood of the nation.

There was an election a while ago. You may remember it. The country appears more than usually schizophrenic during election campaigns. On the one hand party leaders travel the length and breadth of the country getting stupid photographs taken of themselves for the benefit of the media who tag along. At the end of each day, journalists decide whether each party had a good day or a bad day. One can only imagine this is done either on a hunch basis, or by a collaborative process whereby the entire press corps comes to a consensus on the matter.

Meanwhile, the actual National Conversation is going on at doorsteps on summer evenings. That conversation is of no interest to the closed circle who conduct the notional conversation on TV and Radio and in print. Journalists love campaigns, not elections. That is why the notional conversation took no account of the looming defeat of the Lisbon Treaty at referendum. That is why it is making the same mistake now, and may be similarly surprised. That is why Eoghan Harris of the Sunday Independent wrote the following, a mere week after the Local and European elections:

“By punishing Fianna Fail and rewarding Labour, the voters have done another Lisbon, that is, done something they are already regretting.”

One ought not to expect sanity from Harris, but the patrician arrogance of this sentence is breath-taking. Here we have a man who, offered the evidence of his own eyes, an actual election of actual citizens who cast actual votes, prefers to ignore it. He knows what we think, and he doesn’t need any vulgar elections to figure it out, anymore than he needed one to get into the Senate. The column, by the end, sounds a bit like the impromptu speeches insane dictators make to their underlings:

“Since I amplified my early Sunday Independent position on Newstalk, some of the pundits seem to be shifting their positions .In short, I am helping to set a new agenda, one that puts the results in a more realistic perspective.”

The voters were wrong. The pundits must put things in perspective. The ugly interruption by the citizenry will soon be forgotten about. It’s not like they count anyway. Why, some of them don’t even appear on Questions and Answers.

Ah yes, Questions and Answers. The distaste of the media establishment for the rude interruption of reality into their circular narrative was displayed in last night’s final edition. Some months ago now, a man named Michael O’Brian made a passionate, eloquent and upsetting contribution to the program following the release of the Ryan Report. He burned through the screen, and through the rehearsed, Carr Communications-tested verbiage that made up most of the program. It was compelling because it summed up the fury felt by the Irish people at the contents of the report. For a brief, intense moment, the National Conversation and the notional conversation intersected.

Last night, having run various greatest hits and dissected them in studio, Q & A replayed Mr. O’Brien’s short speech. They went to the panel for reaction. The talking heads spoke of it as a powerful moment of television. One described where she was when she saw it. I cannot tell you how nauseated I was by this treatment. This poor man’s cry of hurt and anger was being turned into a TV moment. It was being treated like Ray Houghton’s goal against England in 1988.

The notional conversation was having its revenge. When real people intervene in the notional conversation, they need very quickly to be made less real, to be turned into a media talking point. Susie Long has had her name degraded by being constantly used as a catchphrase. Mr. O’Brien, who has surely suffered enough, is going through the same process.

Nothing real can survive for long in the notional conversation. Election results are discounted. Ideas are ridiculed. Moments of feeling and reality are cheapened and degraded. This is done by people who consider themselves in tune with the nation, who write and talk about the mood of the people for their living.

Eamonn De Valera used to say that when he wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, he needed only to look into his heart. In the notional conversation, the same approach is adopted. Though in today’s less deferential times, it might more vulgarly be said that it is less a matter of looking into one’s heart than of pulling it out of your arse.