Connect: Bertie Ahern, Pat Kenny, Seamus Heaney, Adrian Hardiman, Roy Keane, Bono, Joe Soap who wins the National Lottery, and Joe Soap who doesn't - should their rights to privacy be treated equally by the media? How about their approximate female counterparts - say, Mary Harney, Marian Finucane, Eavan Boland, Susan Denham, Sonia O'Sullivan, Andrea Corr and a couple of Jo Soaps?
The convention in Irish journalism is that the privacy of different types of people deserves different protection. Nobody implored Kenny or Finucane, for instance, to do the jobs they do. If you make yourself a cynosure of the public gaze, convention dictates you must expect more breaches of your privacy than should reasonably be tolerated by Joe or Jo Soap.
Thus fame, especially when you have been such an active agent in not avoiding it, is considered a Faustian pact. The legitimately private area around you continues to exist, of course, but it is significantly diminished. Heaney or Boland are considered to be in a different category: their fame is generally considered a by-product of a talent with a different primary aim.
So well-known poets can expect some diminution of their privacy, but not nearly so drastically as Kenny and Finucane. When it comes to Hardiman and Denham - both Supreme Court judges - it's because they hold high public office that certain standards are presumed. Joe or Jo Soap might enjoy the occasional barroom brawl, for instance, but judges are expected not to indulge.
Keane and O'Sullivan, like Bono and Corr, help flog newspapers and attract viewers and listeners to TV and radio. They are sports and pop stars and any alleged misdemeanours will be ruthlessly exploited. It's part of the price of what's known as "celebrity": the media will seek to make profits by preying on the prurience of the public. Sometimes it's morally legitimate. Often it's not.
Then there are the Soaps who win the National Lottery and the Soaps who don't but are inadvertently catapulted into media notoriety through fate. How much, if any, of their right to privacy should they surrender? If, for instance, they have previous criminal convictions, is that relevant? Could it be so? What if they were closely related to national heroes or notorious outlaws? Clearly it's interesting - but should it be published? Certainly, it will help to flog more newspapers if a lottery winner is related to Ahern, Kenny, Heaney, Hardiman, Keane, Bono, any of their female equivalents or other eminent people. Likewise if a lottery winner is a relation of John Gilligan or Catherine Nevin. Many decent people are related to rogues and don't wish to blab about it.
All of which leaves politicians such as Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney. These people are powerful and well-known and may be considered "celebrities" of a sort. They deserve private lives, of course, but because they are public figures they cannot expect the degree of privacy normally (or at least notionally) afforded to ordinary citizens. It's absurd to argue otherwise.
Politicians - Brian Cowen, Seamus Brennan, Willie O'Dea and Martin Cullen, among reportedly more than half the Cabinet - want more control of the media by law. Well, well! For them it's essentially a power issue, cloaked as a morality one. They see, as politicians tiresomely do, that in exchange for planned reform of libel law they can get something for themselves.
The risk is that important journalism, along with the invasive rubbish aimed at human prurience, will be shackled. Rogues - political and otherwise - will sometimes manage to hide behind a privacy law. In a country where the church, business, politicians and organs of the State (the blood bank and the Garda, for instance) have too often behaved criminally, the prospect is outrageous.
Certainly, there's a case for the media to answer too. But sleazemongers making profits for proprietors and directors by appealing to people's prurience may make it more difficult for decent journalists to do their work. That's why the sleazy stuff is not simply "a bit of fun". Its cost is paid by the public being kept in ignorance. With power types there is never any such thing as a free lunch.
People can't live on seriousness alone, of course - life like that would be too grey - but the cost of invasions of privacy is always ultimately paid by the public. Privacy is important and everybody deserves a certain amount of it because invasions of it make it difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to reach a healthy, integrated maturity. It is society that picks up the broken pieces.
So care involves respect for autonomy too. Anyway, the politicians' arguments will be that the media have abused their freedoms and must be curtailed. The truth is that some media have abused some freedoms so the politicians use this as an opportunity to shackle all media. Cute lads, eh? Really, there is a startling clash of interests when politicians decide to regulate the media. Because they hold power they warrant close inspection - yet they have the power to set limits on that inspection. That's great democracy from our "democrat" politicians. What a joke.