As a vignette of contemporary Irish values, last week's Late Late Show was just about perfect. Especially if you consider not just what was on the screen but what wasn't. One of the items that was meant to be on the show was an interview with Marsha Hunt and some of the ex-prisoners with whom she has published a book called The Junk Yard: Voices from an Irish Prison.
It was, or ought to have been, a part of the classic old Late Late Show tradition: a light shone into a dark corner, a chance for people about whom we know little to grab the attention of the public. The beginning, perhaps, of a national conversation about a part of Irish life that we don't like to discuss.
Except that the item was dropped at the last minute. Something really big became available. A golden opportunity arose. Sinead O'Connor happened to be in the RTE studios, giving an interview for another television programme being broadcast from Belfast. There was a chance to put her on display before the nation in her dog collar. So out went the prisoners and in came the worst exercise in crass voyeurism in RTE's history.
For all the terrible things about the Ireland in which Gay Byrne used to function, one of its virtues was a certain sense of tact. There was, in general, a capacity to recognise a human being in distress when you saw one. There was some element of decency, of discretion, in the way people approached pain and grief and disturbance. Maybe there was too much tact, too little inclination to intrude. But that reserve came at least from some sense of compassion and it often showed Ireland at its quiet best.
Even in what might be regarded as remote, conservative places, there was an ability to react gently to disturbance. A writer who lives near a small town in the West told me, for instance, the story of a local small farmer. He was a middle-aged bachelor who had lived alone for many years. He had an accident and had to go into hospital. There, he became fixated on the nurses. When he got out, he bought a nurse's uniform and began to wear it all the time.
He went around the town, into the shops, the pubs, the Post Office, dressed as a nurse, but no one treated him as a freak. No one saw him as an opportunity for entertainment or cruel amusement. They drew from some reservoir of delicacy an impulse to protect the man, to shelter a hurt mind from further harm. They neither confronted him nor exploited him.
Even in the city, there was a similar protective urge. The Dublin I grew up in was one in which, for the most part, people with delusions were treated gently. As children, we were told above all: "Don't stare. Don't gape." The overwhelming response to public displays of religious mania, or of strange fixation, was tactful and solicitous. I don't want to romanticise that society, or to deny its many cruelties but in this at least it had an underlying capacity for kindness.
That capacity may not be entirely lost but it is certainly endangered. We live at a time when misery, grief and distress have become forms of entertainment. There is now a widely-shared taste for the kind of emotional striptease practised on American daytime chat-shows. Even in serious current-affairs programmes, the question "How do you feel?" is often deliberately used to provoke tears. And tears look good on screen. They add drama. They create a sense of reality. They keep the audience watching.
Irish television, and Gay Byrne in particular, used to be very good at staying just the right side of the line between emotional drama, on the one side, and downright voyeurism on the other. Gay Byrne used to have an accurate internal compass that allowed him to sail close to the rocks without foundering on them. But until recently, he and his team on the Late Late would never have believed that a famous and vulnerable young woman should be put on display before the nation merely to liven up a dull show.
I don't pretend to know what is going on in Sinead O'Connor's mind and I don't really want to know. But it is clear to anyone with a tittle of wit that it is not about the Tridentine rite, or Catholic theology, the nature of lawful ordination or the case for women priests. Her emergence as Mother Mary Bernadette with a Roman collar and a crucifix isn't a public campaign about the direction or future of the Catholic Church. There is, in her actions, nothing to debate, no general enlightenment to be gained.
There is only private trauma and inner turmoil breaking the surface and demanding attention. It happens to take the form that much disturbance in Ireland has always taken - that of a religious costume and a religious vocabulary. But it is connected with Catholicism only in the sense that a man who believes himself to be Napoleon is connected to the French revolutionary wars.
It should be obvious, too, that putting a woman in the throes of such pain on live television is an appalling act of exploitation. It might be argued, of course, that the print media had already wrung whatever they could from the story. That may well be so but print gives an abstract account of a person's words and actions. Live television uses the person herself. It creates a direct, raw and merciless display. It leaves, and Gay Byrne knows this better than anyone, no hiding place.
There was indeed a sense, watching the programme, that Gay Byrne himself knew what an awful thing he had done as soon as the whole thing started. His interviews with Sinead O'Connor have always been marked by a genuine affection and protectiveness, and you could see that he was shaken by her troubled state. But he didn't have the guts to stop. His professionalism took over. The show had to go on.
To his credit, another of his guests, Terry Wogan, had the innate decency to step back from what was happening. Urged to ask Sinead O'Connor a question, he declined and registered, as gracefully as he could, his feelings of unease. And to their credit, much of the studio audience also refused to take part in the ritual pretence that what was happening before them was just some jolly entertainment. They sat stony-faced and silent.
In that, at least, there is some consolation. There is still, perhaps, some reluctance to gape at other people's anguish as if it were the best show in town. Some residual ability to tell the difference between the public revelation of a society's secrets on the one hand and the public exploitation of private distress on the other. What a shame it would be if Gay Byrne, who has done so much to advance the first of these, should end his career indulging in the second.