The Gospel According to Darragh

This column likes to consider itself second-to-none in its admiration of Darragh Ó Sé’s weekly column on Gaelic Football, published every Wednesday by the Irish Times during the Championship.

Yesterday, in his preview of Sunday’s All-Ireland Final, where only Kerry remain standing in the way of a historic five-in-a-row titles for Dublin, Darragh presented his masterpiece.

This may not have been obvious on first reading of the column. Some prophets are born to shoot from the hip. John the Baptist made it quite plain to Israel that the new covenant was at hand. Roy Keane, in those happy times when he annually righted the nation’s wrong as part of his charity work for the Irish Guide Dogs Association, and before the misery of his having to put his money where his mouth is began, was of the same school. Seán Báiste and The Boy Roy both gave it to us straight.

Darragh’s is of a different style. Darragh’s way is more subtle, more gnostic, more allegorical. Darragh’s is the way of parable and imagery. He is more in the tradition of Jeremiah or of that other John, servant of Jesus Christ, to whom was granted the Apocalypse.

To truly read Darragh we must engage in exegesis. We must carefully parse the text in order to lead out its true meaning.

As we consider Darragh’s column of yesterday, we note that it begins with a parable, The Parable of the Bomber. On the face of it, it’s a reminiscence of the two big men exchanging bantz before the 2009 final, and very middling bantz they are. But reader, shun the easy path. Look more closely. Ignore the instruments. Feel the Force.

Darragh decides to have a bit of fun, but the bit of fun he has – “as long as the three Sés are in it” – isn’t actually funny. So why tell the story? Because the prophet is telling his followers, lo, remember, I am Darragh the Trickster. I like to have a bit of fun. My words are not as they seem.

The next section is pure stodge, with a lot of old yak about the Killarney Races and the Rose of Tralee and how training is different from Darragh’s day. This is to scare of the unwary, who will lose the will to go on. The true followers continue, however, knowing the House of Wisdom is only reached after wading through the swamp.

And then, through the mist, we espy the first turret of that same house. “The one thing I’ve noticed this year with Dublin is that Jim Gavin seems to have settled on a team and more or less stuck with it.”

“The one thing I’ve noticed.” It’s straight out of Columbo. Just as the murderer thinks he’s got away with it, the LAPD ragamuffin says “there’s just one thing that’s been bothering me …”

Jim Gavin’s is a settled team, muses Darragh. In other years they chopped and changed. Not this year. The competition for places isn’t the same.

Dublin were training in Cooraclare, but Darragh is not at all sure they were going hammer and tongs at it. They’re well used to this, says Darragh.

Reader, does that sound at all like the Comfort Zone to you? Could Dublin be … complacent? Could Dublin be … stale? If Darragh were as his forebears, a voice clamouring in the desert, his acolytes’ ears would be pricking up big style at this stage.

Then Darragh remarks that, while caution may have got you to an All-Ireland final, an All-Ireland Final itself is a place in which to throw caution to the wind. “A final is a place to be borderline reckless in,” remarks Darragh, almost as an aside.

Reader, think back to the Parable of the Bomber. Of the nine (nine!) All-Ireland Finals in which he played, which one did Darragh discuss with the Bomber? It was 2009. Was anyone “borderline reckless” in 2009, borderline reckless in a way that would lead to the winning of the game? Reader, that sonorous booming noise in the distance is not the ringing of a marriage bell. It is the sound of the Prophet dropping a hint.

Having dropped that hint, the Prophet goes on to disrobe, oil up, and start whacking that great big gong that used to start some British movies in the 1950s, the better for his followers to pay attention.
Mayo caned Dublin in the first half of their semi-final, Darragh points out, but did not make it count on the scoreboard. The boy-king Clifford, Stephen O’Brien or that Geaney fella won’t be missing many from twenty-five yards, and Dublin have been slow starters this season.

His colours nailed to the mast, Darragh re-vests and ladles on the yerra, in case the Empire have sent their spies. He tells a Parable of Jacko, yea, and then he goeth even further unto the praising of the Dubs. He points out that Dublin are so strong that Eoghan O’Gara probably won’t make the 26-man cut. Golly. A team must be good if not even Eoghan O’Gara can make the grade.

Kerry's price had held steady at 9/2 since the semi-finals, but it went out to 5/1 with Paddy Power yesterday. The price went on the board just as Darragh was published, but before he had yet been digested. Reader, I fell it on like a thunderbolt. Adveniat regnum.

Government or Circus?

The yawning gap that exists in Ireland between the process of electing a government and what a government is expected to do was illustrated in an almost offhand exchange about the Independent Alliance on the Irish Times’s Inside Politics podcast of last Friday night. The exchange is between Fiach Kelly and Pat Leahy of the Times’s political staff, and begins at 12:25 on the podcast:

FIACH KELLY
Sarah’s right. They are not used to government. They are used to saying ‘get up the yard, get off the fence, let’s put our shoulders to the wheel’ - 

PAT LEAHY
They’re the opposite of government. It’s not just that they’ve been a conventional opposition, but it’s the exact opposite. They’ve never been the sort of opposition that had to prepare, that had to watch what they said because they envisaged being in government after the next election.

FIACH KELLY
They had their ‘Charter for Change,’ which formed the basis of their negotiations over the past number of weeks. This document they drew up about a year ago about their principles – motherhood and apple pie is a generous description of said document. I was speaking to someone in Fine Gael today who said that last week was the worst week of their lives because, at least when they were dealing with Fianna Fáil they were professional operators, they knew how to negotiate. Then you turn around and talk to the Independents and they didn’t know how the system or the government or anything like that worked, at all. So it’s going to be a very steep learning curve for them.

And the question your broken-hearted correspondent asks of all this is: why don’t the media report this? Where are the articles and think pieces that say politics is a profession, like any other, and while getting elected is a key skill, being able to govern is another?

A national politician who is serious about national politics should know how the instruments of government work. He or she may disagree with how those instruments work, and that’s fine. When he or she is in power, he or she will then have the power to make those instruments better. But he or she must know what those instruments of government are in the first place. And it’s quite clear that members of the Independent Alliance haven’t a bull’s notion.

There is a chicken-and-egg situation here. Media claim that they don’t cover these issues because politicians don’t talk about them. Politicians claim they don’t talk about these issues because the people aren’t interested in them. But how can the people learn about them if not through the media?

Yesterday the Sunday Business Post led with a story about an ‘understanding’ between disgraced TD Michael Lowry and Fine Gael in return for Lowry’s support for Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. As remarked upon here earlier, Lowry is like the dog that didn’t bark in the old Sherlock Holmes story.

Why would Michael Lowry support the government? What’s in it for him? The people of Tipperary elected Lowry on the first count in the election because he is seen to “deliver” for the people of Tipperary. What’s Lowry swung for the Premier this time? Why haven’t we been told? Why hasn’t any other media outlet (especially RTÉ) reported the story? Why hasn’t anyone asked the Nemesis of Cronyism, the Minister for Transport, Shane Ross TD, how he feels about a secret sweetheart deal with Michael Lowry?

This tweet from Matt Cooper may help explain why:

Very clever and witty insider column from Shane Ross in Sindo. Hope he continues in this vein every week he is a minister. Transparency.

— Matt Cooper (@cooper_m) May 8, 2016

Extraordinary. A story broke in the US last week about how ridiculously easy a member of the Obama administration found seeding stories in the media. That man wouldn’t ever have to get out of bed in Ireland.

But we have a government now, and they are sitting down to govern. How will they do that? Well, some of those governmental decisions that effect people’s lives and, potentially, the future of the state itself will be decided by a man who won a coin toss. Not because the Taoiseach has had his eye on this or that person’s career and thinks he or she could do a really good job as a junior minister in a particular department. No. It’s because he won a coin toss.

Imagine if, God forbid, you are in court, accused of murder. And instead of a judge, Bozo the Clown walks in and announces that, as a result of a coin toss, he’ll be running the court while Mr Justice Murphy will be doing pratfalls and standing on rakes in Fossett’s Circus for the foreseeable future. Then, with Bozo tooting a horn rather than banging a gavel, the court comes to order and the trial for your life begins.

Welcome to Ireland in the year of the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising. God help us all.

In Defence of John Waters

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Martin Callinan’s was not the only high-profile exit from Irish public life in recent weeks. After twenty-three as a columnist with the Irish Times, John Waters is moving on.

Why should we care? We should care because Waters has been one of very few voices in the national media to reflect rural concerns, to speak in a recognisably rural voice and to stubbornly refuse to fit in. That stubbornness has cost him and whether he was right to take some of the stands he did is a broader question. But when at his best John Waters wrote about concerns that were addressed nowhere else in the media, and for that his absence should be mourned.

If he never wrote anything before or since, John Waters should be remembered in Irish letters for his 1991 book, Jiving at the Crossroads. Books that accurately describe the Irish rural experience are by no means common. John McGahern is the most talented novelist to write about rural Ireland, but there is no denying that McGahern’s work is unrelentingly bleak, and maybe McGahern is missing some shading there. Now, in the 21st Century, Dónal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart is a source of true joy to those who like to see the Ireland they know in the novel form.

In prose, Waters’ great forefather and inspiration was a man who wrote in these very pages, Charlestown’s John Healy. Jiving at the Crossroads has a chapter devoted to Healy, and Healy’s efforts two generations ago to remind the Dublin political establishment that actual people lived in the west of Ireland, and that Connacht wasn’t just some sort of wasteland of bog and snipe grass.

Jiving at the Crossroads is John Waters’ homage to John Healy. The book’s opening is a perfect description of what it was like to be young in rural Ireland in the 1980s. Seán Doherty had just been appointed Minister for Justice, and was being hailed as a conquering hero on his return to his home town.

Waters was not part of the reception committee. He and his friend watched the homecoming from a van in the distance, while listening to Bruce Springsteen singing Darkness on the Edge of Town on the van’s stereo.

And that’s it. That’s being young in rural Ireland in a nutshell. Looking at things going on that you want to escape from, while Springsteen sings on the radio about the land to which you want to escape, about the dream of riding out tonight to case the Promised Land, as The Boss himself put it.

And then, as the book’s narrative moves through the 1980s, Waters realises what we all realise, one way or another. Home might not be the Emerald City in the magical land of Oz, but not many places are. And for all the faults home has, there are a surprising number of places that are worse.

And that’s Waters’ narrative. The struggle to escape from home. The escape, and the realisation that the place into which he wanted to escape never really existed. And then, the struggle to return home, and to match the two parts of the story, where someone is from and where someone is going, into a coherent whole.

Through it all Waters’ personal story is mixed with the national story of the early Haughey years. But the national politics thread of the book isn’t about the specificity of Haughey and that time. It’s about the generality of Irish politics, the sharp divide between rural and urban (meaning Dublin only, by the way) concerns, and the fact that Irish politics is reported in a way that does not reflect how it’s talked about on the ground.

It’s always a source of disquiet for the Dublin establishment when it’s challenged on its bias and Dublin-centrism. But that the bias exists there is no doubt.

When Brian Cowen was elected Taoiseach, Derek Davis remarked on the radio that the Dublin media never understood Albert Reynolds and neither would they understand Cowen. How true that turned out to be.

When Albert Reynolds was Taoiseach, an Irish Times columnist sneered that “running a country isn’t like running a dance-hall in Rooskey.” Another Irish Times columnist described Brian Cowen’s Tullamore homecoming as being like “a country wedding.”

Reader, do you get the feeling sometimes that there are people who can’t quite believe that a Mayoman is Taoiseach? It’s not paranoia. Enda Kenny’s Irish has been criticised by people who do not themselves speak Irish. This, surely, is the ultimate instance of the Dublin media monkey eating its own tail.

Waters was the man who called the Dublin-centric media out. It was Waters who pointed out that building a bullet train from Sligo to Dublin would do wonders for the North-West, but a bullet train would never be built because there was more money in rezoning land in Lucan. It was Waters who fought a lonely battle for fathers’ rights. It was Waters who was the long-haired prophet, crying in the wilderness that the Emperors have no clothes.

Did Waters ever put his foot in it? Yes, he surely did. Waters wrote columns and took positions that were hard to understand – a one-man crusade against parking charges in Dún Laoghaire, an extraordinary paean to a model who died of a drug overdose. But then, which of us are perfect? Which of us has never backed the wrong horse, or loved the wrong thing?

Has Waters’ latest row proved his last? Who knows? Waters has certainly become a hate figure for some people who disagree with some of his views and the current standard of Irish debate seems to prefer attacking the advocate rather than the argument. That’s someone else’s fight. What this column is sure of is that rural Ireland needs a loud, clear and articulate voice, and that John Waters’ was that voice for more than twenty years. Who now will speak for the West in his absence?

The Delicate Etiquette of Correcting Someone's Irish

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The fortnight-long Seachtain na Gaeilge – yes, it is odd if it’s called a week and runs for a fortnight – has just ended. How many people noticed? How many people knew it was on in the first place?

In theory, Seachtain na Gaeilge is about encouraging people to make a special effort to use whatever Irish they have for that week (or fortnight, if you insist). But to use it for what? If you go down to the shop and order a mála milseán, will young Svetlana behind the counter have the first notion what you’re talking about?

The nation’s attitude to the first language was discussed in a piece in the Irish Times on St Patrick’s Day by Úna Mullally who, as well as being an Irish Times columnist, is also a presenter on TG4, and thus knows whereof she writes.

In the Irish Times piece, Mullally makes two points. Firstly, she believes that people who speak Irish outside the Gaeltacht should get the same support for their endeavours in speaking Irish as people who live in the Gaeltacht. Secondly, she believes that Irish that is not fluent is as worthy of celebration as Irish that is.

The problem with the first point is that Mullally contradicts herself in her own piece. In her third paragraph, she claims that “given the massive population of young people attending all-Irish speaking schools in the greater Dublin area, there’s an argument for Dublin eventually even being the largest Gaeltacht in the State.” Two sentences later she writes “if you want to ‘keep up’ your Irish in the capital, you’re pretty much on your own.”

Both conditions can’t be true. If Dublin is hopping with Irish speakers, then you cannot be “pretty much on your own” in keeping up your Irish. To use some broken English, the case has gotta be dis or dat.

Mullally’s second point in noble in thought and intent. She speaks of celebrating efforts that people make to speak Irish even if their Irish in poor, writing that, for those who are not fluent, “the intent to speak …[Irish] … is as valid as the poetic prose that flows from a native speaker.”

The problem with this noble thought is that it has very little bearing on reality. Concepts like “celebration” and “validity” have nothing to do with talking. “Celebration” and “validity” are words that have to do with equality politics. They are not about communication, understanding and being understood.

There’s a reason a person’s ability to speak a language, any language, is graded. If the person’s ability is insufficiently good, then that person can’t be understood. Celebrations and measures of value don’t come into it. The person may be a saint or a sinner but we’ll never know because he or she can’t tell us.

What we’re left with, then, is tokenism. I pretend that I can speak Irish and the person to whom I’m speaking plays along, while we both know that if either us hit a little bump we can drop in an English word, we both being – amazing co-incidence, I know – fully fluent in that language. But what we serve by doing that I can’t imagine.

Correcting someone’s Irish is seen as one of the rudest things we can do. The only Irish language book to ever make Number 1 in the Irish booksellers’ charts was Breandán Ó hEithir’s Lig Sinn i gCathú, first published in the mid-1970s. There’s a scene at the end of the novel where two professors are roaring at each other over the inscription on a plaque to commemorate the 1916 Rising.

One man insists the plaque should read “D’ardaigh siad an tine beo,” and the other says it should read “D’ardaigh siad an tine bheo.” This is not the celebration of validity that Úna Mullally was writing about, but it is a fairly accurate snapshot of what’s been going on in the country since Independence – fighting with each other has been more important than promoting the language.

But if no-one’s Irish is corrected, who’s ever going to get it right? Seán Ó Ruadháin, the great Irish scholar from our own County Mayo, wrote in frustration once that the idea of broken Irish being better than clever English was only meant to last for a while – it was never meant to be a licence for bad Irish.

Ó hEithir’s beo/bheo difference is a relatively subtle one. But there’s a picture floating around the internet currently of a man who’s made the most tremendous blunder in Irish, and he’s now stuck with it forever.

The picture is of a man who had a motto in Irish tattooed onto his back, right between the shoulders. The motto is from the poem Invictus, which Nelson Mandela famously recited to himself during his long years of captivity on Robben Island. The lines read:

I am master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

There are two ways of saying “I am” in Irish – “tá mé,” and “is mise.” This man chose “tá mé.” He should have gone with “is mise.”

This tattoo is valid celebration of the Irish language by Úna Mullally’s lights. By someone else’s lights, it’s a disaster. Firstly, the man is stuck with it. It’ll only come off if he’s flayed, I believe, and bad and all as the translation is, getting skinned alive would be worse. But what’s worse is the confusion it creates.

Someone who’s struggling to learn when to use is mise and when to use tá mé will get confused if he or she is not shown good examples at every turn. Bad Irish means bad examples. Bad examples mean worse Irish, and worse Irish will eventually mean no Irish at all.

If the cost of saving the language is hurt feelings, it’s cheap at the price. I’m sorry Dublin. You’ll just have to offer it up.

Magdagate: Another Mortal Wound for Irish Journalism

You can’t have a democracy without a free press. The biggest danger to Irish sovereignty isn’t the bailout; it’s the absence of a free and functioning press.

Why do you need a free press? You need a free press to hold the powerful to account. To tell people what their leaders are doing and saying on their behalf, to interpret it, to encourage discussion and to ensure that, when the people go to the polls, they are as informed as they can possibly be.

The Irish media are failing badly in this regard. Because the country is so small, it’s always been difficult to have a fully impartial media. Unfortunately, the past year has seen such a calamitous fall in standards that it is now at a stage where the main check to governance of the country is hors de combat, and that is a crisis in any democracy.

RTÉ let itself down on the double. Firstly, the extraordinary libel of Father Kevin Reynolds on Prime Time, and secondly, the scuppering of the Seán Gallagher Presidential campaign by a tweet that was sent from a clearly bogus account. Either is a scandal. The combination of both is mind-boggling as regards standards in a publicly funded national broadcaster.

Today FM disgraced itself in its treatment of Sam Smyth. God only knows what goes on editorially in Newstalk, other than to remark if Prime Time wanted to do a States of Fear II, Marconi House would be a good place to set it. Allegedly.

The Irish Times let itself down very badly indeed in its attempt to re-write history in the sad case of the death of Kate Fitzgerald. They probably know it and the libel laws don’t help, but it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it right at all.

But even in the light of all this, there is something about the “Magda” story in yesterday’s Irish Independent that is particularly worrying. These are the facts: the Indo found an interview in a Polish magazine with a Polish woman who spoke about life in Ireland. The Indo printed the story as the woman having a big laugh at the dumb Paddies who are paying her way.

It would be the perfect newspaper story, if it weren’t for one pesky detail. It’s sensational, it’s got water-cooler appeal, and it rings a bell for people. There’s a whole generation of people who came home from J1s laughing at the Yanks and telling stories of the scams they pulled so it was only reasonable to assume that the new Irish were telling the same stories. And now here was proof.

The one pesky detail is that the story in the Indo bears no relation to the original Polish story. This is the Indo story; this is the Polish original, translated into English by the John Murray show on RTÉ Radio One. There is no basis for the Indo story in the Polish original. None at all. It’s all rubbish. Every word.

So how did it get printed? One of two ways. Either the Independent’s editorial process is so incredibly bad that they really don’t care whether or what they print has any basis in reality at all. The second possibility is worse. The second possibility is that they knew full well what was in the Polish original, and didn’t care.

If the article isn’t true, so what? Nobody’s named, therefore nobody’s libeled, therefore nobody can sue. It’s win-win. Sure they’ll be some yap about it but it’ll sell papers and the Indo will get a reputation as the paper that prints what others are too scared or – hah! – too “politically correct” to share with the nation.

The media is failing to self-regulate. No-one in the media will take on a powerful media group because who knows when the day will come when that somebody may need a new job and hope for food from a hand that they’ve bitten.

So journalists end up in the position of men in the women and children’s lifeboats – they feel terrible about the destruction of their profession, but they prefer it to drowning, thanks all the same.

That’s not good enough. Irish sovereignty is in greater danger from the absence of a free press than from the Troika, who only want their money back. Don’t let media cynicism take your freedom away. Don’t let it!

Irish Times Free to Access Online Once More

How heartening it is to go online this morning and see that the Irish Times is free to access online once more. The Irish media space has become a strangely narrow one, and it’s essential that a voice as strong as the Irish Times’ be heard. The world is now more globalised than ever before, with huge commercial behemoths crushing through cultural borders to flog product mercilessly, and unique cultural voices are needed if we’re not to be subsumed into the general mush.

The different print, radio and TV media are essential to the preservation of these voices, but the three strands of media are no coalescing as never before, because of the advent of internet technology. The media has changed unrecognisably in the past fifteen years, as the very way that we information is presented has changed. It’s no longer necessary to wait until the six o’clock news on the TV to find out what’s happening – you can follow it all as it’s happening on the web.

The newspaper as we knew it has been consigned to history, and the Irish Times realises this. The trick is how best to combine the two elements – the immediacy of the online content, which can now also allow for live streaming – with the more measured, homme serieaux approach of the classic broadsheet newspaper. Some are adapting better than others - the Washington Post and Manchester Guardian sites are An Spailpín’s two favourite examples of how best to adapt to the new environment – but it’s a question now of keeping up or being left hopelessly behind. Three cheers then, for the Irish Times’ bold move to embrace the brave new world. I hope they succeed, and I hope that more follow. An Spailpín Fánach isn’t ready for a barcode on his backside just yet.






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An Spailpín in the Irish Times

An Spailpín Fánach is flattered once more to be published in this morning's rather historic Irish Times, as one Taoiseach moves on and another is appointed. On the eve of Brian Cowen's ascention, and in a cynical age, it's only fair to take our hats off to the Taoiseach-elect's commitment to Irish and its role in the State as the first language. You can read the full piece here, or for romantics who enjoy the print edition, it's opposite the letters page / the Bertie Ahern supplement.





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An Spailpín Fánach in This Morning's Irish Times

An Spailpín Fánach is deeply flattered this morning that the Irish Times has chosen to republished a slightly edited version of last week's post on the "Quiet road girl milk" Carlsberg ad. In the print edition, I'm on the same page as Vincent Browne himself. It's like being seated at the right hand of the Lord. Online subscribers can check it out here.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, Irish Times, Carlsberg ad