For the last three weeks, the public has been in one of its periodic fits of morality. It may not be ridiculous – as Thomas Babington Macauley famously said of the British public’s regular outbreaks of moralising – but it is certainly predictable. With Ryan Tubridy and Noel Kelly due to appear before the Public Accounts Committee on Tuesday, the mood of the public may be very different by the day’s end. We may learn that the act which deceived was not by design but by dysfunction – something which characterises much of official Ireland since Covid. We have been here before, several times in fact.
Thunder, hellfire and burning stars at the Public Accounts Committee long predate Covid. But there is a familiar pattern since Covid: summertime, furious headlines fuelling a rush to judgment, subsiding only when reason, or even a court case, changes the picture.
Why are we so quick to judgment? One of the things we lost during Covid is perspective. Just under three years ago, fresh from the first lockdown, the country was breathing fire over Golfgate. Over eighty members of the great and good had attended an Oireachtas golf outing in Clifden. To deaf ears, the organisers, the hotel and attendees pleaded that Covid regulations were observed at all times. Sinn Féin demanded the Dáil be recalled. That didn’t happen, but public outrage dictated retribution.
The organisers were prosecuted. A crater opened in the body politic as a minister, a senator, and an EU commissioner were instructed, or felt obliged, to resign. An RTÉ journalist had his planned return to air cancelled.
It is remarkable that among these representatives of the great estates of our democracy, only a member of the judiciary held his ground – in spite of pressure from the Chief Justice. Two years later, that judge – Seamus Woulfe – was vindicated when the subsequent court case found no regulations had been breached.
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Unfortunately the two-year gap between the golf outing and the vindication afforded no collective reflection: in the interim, we charged into the breach again.
Katherine Zappone was a savvy politician, a senator and government minister, who had also been central to the marriage equality and abortion referendum campaigns. When in 2020 she lost her Dáil seat, she returned to the United States, from where she sought to continue to do the State some service. A position as special UN envoy on freedom of expression and LGBTQ+ rights seemed like a good fit. Simon Coveney, Minster for Foreign Affairs, was amenable and a salary of €12,000 for one year was mooted. Zappone held an “event” to celebrate her Irish experience in the Merrion Hotel with the permissible 50 attendees. All hell broke loose when a “leak” revealed Coveney had been tardy in informing his coalition partners of the post.
The conflation of Zappone’s “event” and her “special envoy” deal in subsequent debate – not to mention an Oireachtas committee hearing – left an after-image of pushiness. She departed the fray a sadder, wiser, grossly maligned woman. Her friends and colleagues, guests at the “event”, spent the following months apologising for attending. Leo Varadkar’s protestation that a part-time, temporary job that cost the Irish taxpayer €12,000 a year was hardly an abuse of power didn’t cut any ice: a committee or a public determined to see malpractice everywhere will imagine it anyway. The contemporaneous lockdowns, social isolation and Covid paranoia offer a partial explanation. But we are now three years on from Golfgate.
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Does today’s hysteria about RTÉ indicate a chronic condition?
The day that we stopped going to the workplace in March 2020 was also the day we stopped talking to one another. It seems a long time ago – but Ireland hasn’t fully returned to the office and there is evidence many workers never want to. This means they are missing a very important factor in the national discourse: the wisdom of crowds. It seems counter-intuitive but sociologists agree that a large group – a crowd – is better at problem solving than a solitary expert.
There is a generation of young workers which may never know the craic at the water cooler, the excitement of thrashing out ideas, arguing over politics. Because of this, inequities in our society, particularly between the generations, pass unaddressed and resentments grow.
Talk is the stuff of mortal life but social media has become the main centre of discourse since Covid. By definition, online debate is binary and judgmental. It obviates the need to meet people and look into their eyes while you pass judgment.
The things we lost in Covid are only beginning to be assessed. In the long term, fatherhood, fulfilment and foodie satisfaction were unexpected gains. But those benefits may prove to be a poor trade-off for the practices – not to mention presumptions of innocence – of civic society.