Law & Order: Speeding Vehicles Unit
It’s not clear where Law & Order: UK scriptwriters get their plotlines from, but it’s a fair bet they’ll never be inspired by Traffic Blues, RTE’s fly on the windscreen view of the garda traffic corps.
The English version of the US franchise returned for a fifth series last night with a watchable enough episode about unexplained deaths at a hospital. Meanwhile, over on RTE, Garda Helen and Garda Gavin stopped a lorry that looked to be in bad shape (“it’s a holy show”, the driver admitted), but actually turned out to be roadworthy enough. It was allowed to go on its way.
Law and Order suffers from a similar problem to Heartbeat, another Sunday night staple on ITV: you spend so much time working out where you’ve seen all the actors before that the show is nearly over by the time you fully engage with the plot.
Look, there’s Bradley Walsh from Coronation St. And is that Freema Agyeman from Doctor Who? Your man looks very like Peter Davison from All Creatures Great and Small? (Actually, all three have been in Doctor Who). And is that James Fox? I thought he was dead.
It’s based very closely on its US parent, and its two offshoots Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Scenes are introduced in the same way, with a brief musical motif, and a description of the place, date and time that the action is happening. Many of the scripts are based on US episodes.
It’s an odd feeling for fans of the US series to go from these familiar sights and sounds, which are usually followed by a scene set in New York or in a busy police station, to a more laidback, English scene, where everybody’s just a little more detached and ironic than their US counterpart. Sometimes, it does feel like Heartbeat, with added skulduggery.
Bradley Walsh, who plays the main poilce officer, Ronnie Brooks, is far removed from Danny Baldwin, the charmingly cheeky chancer he played in Coronation Street. He’s a more world-weary and cynical figure, although occasionally you expect him to flash his winning grin and say: “go on luv, make us a nice cup of tea and tell us whodunnit”.
Jamie Bamber, who plays his sidekick Matt Devlin, is convincing as a reliable straight-shooter. Harriet Walter, as their boss Natalie Chandler, does a decent turn in a show that doesn’t really have any meaty female roles.
Like the US original, the UK version has plenty of twists and turns – last night’s episode featured a chiropodist passing himself off as a hospital doctor and an alcoholic consultant – but it suffers from a lack of resources. There are few enough external shots, and it’s all very deskbound and claustrophobic. It’s decent Sunday night viewing, but no more than that.
Traffic Blues could be rechristened Law & Order: Mighty Craic Altogether. It has the feel of a show that might have been put together by a few well-resourced guards to show their mammies what they do and to reassure them that they’re not in any danger at all.
I’m sure that’s not true, and that many gardai bravely risk injury every day of the week, but you get no sense of that from Traffic Blues.
As well as the lorry that turned out to be roadworthy, last night’s episode featured the arrest of a man for drink driving (he was later fined €100) and the seizure of a vehicle from a driver who didn’t have insurance.
There was also a car chase in Dundalk, during which a handbag stealer in what looked like a clapped out Ford Fiesta tried to make it to the border before he was stopped by the gardai. He failed. “It was a good day for the guards all round”, one officer said.
Unfortunately, the programme makers weren’t actually in the chasing car, so we learned about the pursuit only through garda footage and the subsequent accounts of the two officers on board, who sounded like they were giving evidence in court.
It was the closest thing to drama in the whole programme, but it was like watching paint dry.
This review originally appeared on Independent.ie on July 11 http://tinyurl.com/6xyh6bw
Who Is This Woman?
When I first heard that RTE would be showing a series in which an Irish-speaking woman from the North would visit people’s houses and give them advice about their problems, I thought that perhaps Mary McAleese was planning a new career as a reality tv star after she leaves the Aras in November. Building bridges, fixing fridges, eliminating midges: whatever your difficulty, Mary Mc has the answer.
Maire Andrews
Mamo was a much different kettle of tosh altogether. Ten minutes in, at least some viewers must have been wondering: who is this woman? Why is she giving advice to Irish-speaking Moonies living in Cavan? Why is it on the television?
The answer to that third question is coming up, but first, some background. Mamo is Maire Andrews, a Northern Irish woman with far too much time on her hands. She speaks only in Irish, which only became a problem in her life when, many years ago, she married a sadly monolingual Protestant minister whose family didn’t speak Irish either.
That marriage might have made a documentary, or at least a very good sitcom, but instead Maire has been making regular cross-border incursions to give advice to Southerners made of less stern stuff than she is. Last night, she met the O’Cionnaths.
Colm, who’s Irish, and Dani, a Bulgarian, are Moonies who live in Cavan with their three children. Their religion is the most interesting thing about them from a documentary point of view but, of course, that wasn’t discussed after the first mention of it. Instead, we had 30 minutes of Mamo making a nuisance of herself fixing problems in the family which weren’t apparent to this viewer, but which may have centred on the fact Dani has no Irish.
The obvious suggestion – just speak more English, then – wasn’t canvassed for the simple reason that Mamo exists only because it was grant-aided by a fund devoted to television programmes made in Irish. The money seems to have come from the North, so it was very cheap tv from RTE’s point of view. But where was the quality control?
Dani may not have much Irish but she does possess a range of old Bulgarian sayings. “Your husband may be the head of the family, but you’re the neck” was one of the more puzzling ones. More familiar was: “A woman’s work is never over”.
In Mamo’s case, that’s sadly true for a little while yet. There are three more weeks of this nonsense to come.
A Northerner of much more attractive hue is Rory McIlroy, subject of Major Breakthrough, a BBC Northern Ireland documentary. The programme makers had very close access to McIlroy from February this year, travelling with him to Augusta in April to witness his last round collapse in the US Masters, and to Washington where they were present for his breath-taking performance in last month’s US Open.
Sensibly, they got the golf out of the way in just 20 minutes. The rest of the documentary followed McIlroy from the morning after the US Open victory until he arrived home In Northern Ireland the following night.
Anybody who thought the delay getting home was because he couldn’t tear himself away from the celebrations would have been quickly disabused of that notion. He didn’t get to bed after winning the Open and had to be in his hotel lobby with his father at 5am in order to travel to Cape Cod to play a round of golf for one of his sponsors.
That was followed by an overnight flight to London for more promotional work, before he finally made it home to his mother, his girlfriend and his dogs, who all got equal billing on his list of who and what he missed when he was away.
He gets well-rewarded for such a lifestyle, and spends his money freely – a nice house, some fantastic cars, a replica golf course in his back garden – but it can be tough work too. He does remarkably well to stay so calm and approachable.
One of the reasons for that may be his girlfriend, Holly Sweeney, with whom he split up earlier in the year. The couple are now happily back together. “I realised pretty quickly I’d made a mistake”, he said last night. ”I had to do a lot of begging, grovelling to get her back”.
It’s hard to think of another sporting superstar – certainly not Tiger Woods -who would admit that in a documentary. Despite his success, McIlroy is still a bit of an innocent abroad. That’s what makes him so likeable.
Despite the title, there were no Irish people on Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model on Sky Living last night. They’ll turn up in a few weeks when we’ll see hundreds of Irish wannabe models whittled down to just one or two who are regarded as having the potential to make it in such a cut-throat business.
Judging by the prizes on offer – magazine shoots, a £50,000 advertising campaign for Selfridges, cars, holidays etc – this is a serious competition. Unlike The X Factor, where most of the winners enjoy a few weeks of fame before never being heard of again outside pantomime or the Celebrity Big Brother house, the victor in Next Top model really does have a shot at the big time.
What a pity the whole thing is so dull, then. The young pretenders are as painfully alike as they are worryingly thin. It was very hard to distinguish genuine personalities in any of them. I’m told that the fun and games will start in a few weeks when the chosen few start living in the same house but Irish contestants or not, I don’t think I’ll be tuning in. Exposure to such high-levels of low self-esteem gets tiring after a while.
This review originally appeared on Independent.ie on July 5 http://tinyurl.com/66mftgb
Faraway, So Close
After their rain-soaked performance at Glastonbury on Friday night, the four members of U2 made their way into the BBC’s onsite studio to be debriefed on the experience.
They looked a bit smug. The performance had been a long time coming – Bono’s fragile back had delayed it by a year – and many were waiting for them to fail in front of a crowd generally regarded as bit too cool and indie to warm to a bunch of middle-aged Irish guys. In addition, a protest group was planning to draw attention to the band’s unusual tax arrangements. Disaster beckoned.
Bono At Glastonbury
As it happened, the performance was a triumph. If you bill it, they will come, and once U2 were confirmed as first-night headliners, their fans bought tickets in sufficient numbers for Glastonbury to be a kind of homecoming. (The same kind of thing happened the following evening when Coldplay gave the performance of their lives in front of a devoted crowd, who seemed to know all the words to all the songs).
U2’s show ranged back and forth throughout their 32-year recording career, even featuring a blistering version of their first single Out Of Control, which made a lot of older fans very happy. In addition, the protest turned out to be a damp squib (saturated, actually, given the conditions). The smug looks were understandable.
The interview that followed, with BBC presenters Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe, was, in its own cringe-inducing, fingers-over-the -eyes, way, one of the tv highlights of the weekend.
Rarely can there have been a more sycophantic interrogation. Superlatives flowed: “It was beautifully directed”; “you were so brave”; “beautifully sung”; “best intro ever”. No collection of theatre luvvies could have contrived such an extravaganza of back-scratching. There was, needless to mention, not a word about the tax protest.
As ever, Bono did most of the talking, and ended up waxing lyrical about a local church. He kept referring to Damien Hirst, who had created a video backdrop for the opening songs, as Hirsty, as though the artist played for some Premier League team.
Adam said hardly anything, smiling through it all like a benign Bond villain. Larry, who has become the band’s curmudgeon in recent years, was asked for his reaction to the evening’s events. “I was a little disappointed it was so wet”, he complained, as though Lowe and Whiley had done some kind of rain dance earlier in the day, just to spite him.
Why, he wanted to know, was the crowd so far away from him? (Because you’re the bloody drummer, Larry. It’s an occupational hazard)
The interview was one of the lower points of the weekend, but it would be wrong to complain too much. There’s a lot to be said for a music festival where you can watch some of the best bands in the world from the comfort of your couch while sipping a brandy. And there’s even more to be said about being able to climb into bed when the show is over safe in the knowledge that the music will start again the following day, just as soon as you locate your remote control.
Such is the Glastonbury experience for a growing number of people every year. As the most oversubscribed arts festival in the world, with hundreds of thousands of disappointed fans unable to get their hands on tickets, it no longer has to worry that live television coverage will affect attendance.
Hence the BBC coverage, which this year could be seen across BBC2, 3 and 4, and which, the odd dodgy interview aside, was magnificent.
It’s a kind of Wimbledon for music fans and the BBC clearly treats it as an important event in its calendar, dispatching almost 300 staff and several teams of presenters to Worthy Farm to create the impression that this was a festival for tv rather than the 150,000 fans who actually showed up.
The best performances of the weekend came from acts who best understood that Glastonbury is now as much a television event as a live show. The Chemical Brothers’ set, which seemed to have been designed by Jeff Koons (or Koonsy, as Bono probably calls him), was made for television; Janelle Monae used every single one of her massive backing troupe to come up with a breathtaking visual performance, possibly the best of the weekend.
Elbow invented their own version of the Mexican wave, which looked great on tv; Jessie J, confined to a kind of throne because of a broken foot, provided the most touching few minutes when she duetted on Price Tag with a cute and confident seven-year-old girl plucked from the audience.
It wasn’t all good. Paul Simon seemed a bit out-of-place yesterday although, in fairness, he had the man flu. Plan B seemed a bit bored. Last night Beyonce failed to repeat her husband’s Glastonbury triumph from 2008. She frontloaded the performance with her two best and most popular songs, and it all went a bit flat after that. Her cover of Kings Of Leon’s Sex On Fire was humdrum.
There’s no Glastonbury next year because all the policemen and women for miles around will be on Olympic duty in London. After the weekend we’ve just had, that’s a terrible pity. Still, for Irish fans, and for RTE, it spells opportunity. Oxegen and particularly The Electric Picnic have great lineups this year. At least one of them deserves the Glastonbury treatment.
They Know How To Throw A Party
Since the start of the year, Sky Atlantic has secured such a major stranglehold on the best American television that viewers on this side of the world without satellite dishes have been starved of top class new shows to watch. The Big C was shown on E4 earlier in 2011, and has just started on RTE2, while The Killing, the American remake of an acclaimed Danish whodunit, kicks off a long run on Channel 4 over the next few weeks.
For the dishless amongst us, therefore, it’s been a bit of a barren desert television-wise, with only the release of a series of HBO box sets to look forward to.
Shameless USA, which has so far escaped the clutches of Sky, is one happy haven from the general trend. An almost exact remake of the Channel 4 series set on Chatsworth estate in Manchester, it moves events to a blue collar suburb of Chicago, retaining the same plotlines, most of the same characters (many of whom physically resemble their British counterparts) and the same sense of manic energy.
For people familiar with the British version, the effect is almost nostalgic. Since the first series, Shameless UK has lost almost all of its original characters and has become a lazily enjoyable tribute to its former self.
But its American cousin, which began on More 4 last night (it was shown on RTE 2 in the spring), hearkens back to the glory days. It is very funny, beautifully written (by, amongst others, Paul Abbott, who created the show for Channel 4), and graced by a cast of mostly unknown actors who seem to have realised that these are the roles of their young lives, and have embraced them accordingly.
As a result, and though many people thought Shameless would never take off in America, it’s been renewed for a second season.
Its best-known actor is William H Macy, who plays Frank Gallagher, the mostly wasted, drugged-up patriarch of the Gallagher clan, who range in age from two to 19, and who may or may not be his. He is used sparingly in Shameless USA, lest he unbalance or overshadow the many family dramas going on around him.
It took more than 20 minutes before he arrived in the first episode, being dumped on his kitchen floor by two cops who had found him unconscious outside. He doesn’t work –“too much insecurity?stress”, and his only means of income is a government cheque for a disability he picked up when he was “hit in the ribs by a headless flying chicken”. (The government’s understandable scepticism about that particular ailment becomes a recurring plotline in the coming weeks).
Other reincarnations of characters from Chatsworth include Fiona, Frank’s beautiful martyr of a daughter, who protects her younger siblings from the effects of an absent mother and a useless father. Her brothers include Lip, a brainy teenager who gives grinds to his fellow students, although all his intelligence doesn’t prevent him from trying to “de-gay” his younger sibling Ian, who is having an affair with his employer at the local supermarket.
A large cast of neighbours, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends adds to the general mayhem. Watch out in particular for Joan Cusack, the other instantly recognisable face, who plays an agoraphobic, obsessive compulsive kook, and who steals the show almost every time she has a scene.
The English Shameless was regarded as a bit risqué when it started, but it has nothing on its American counterpart, which ups the ante in terms of bad language and sex scenes, and may be uncomfortable viewing for some people as a result. But at its heart, it’s a family drama, not unlike The Simpson, in which the fecklessness of a useless, workshy, though mostly lovable father, is overcome by the close-knit unit around him.
Mostly, though, it’s just great comedy. Watch it while you still can.
This review originally appeared on Independent.ie on June 24 http://tinyurl.com/6erafr6
Anyone For The Bearded Lady?
Before the opening credits rolled on Embarrassing Fat Bodies, a helpful announcer warned that the programme would contain “full frontal nudity and graphic scenes of surgery”.
Anybody expecting a porn version of Grey’s Anatomy would have been sorely disappointed, however. Instead, we were treated to a kind of public humiliation masquerading as a health show.
Pixie McKenna
The series is the latest in the Embarrassing franchise, in which British people with unusual health issues or ailments are tuned into prime time television entertainment. Other titles over the years have included Embarrassing Illnesses, Embarrassing Teenage Bodies and Embarrassing Bodies: Kids.
Its presenters, who include the Irish doctor Pixie McKenna, portray it as the kind of valuable public health programme which saves lives. Every now and again, some helpful – if completely obvious – advice like “Don’t skip breakfast” is thrown into the mix, but overall, it’s very hard to see how such extreme examples of obesity would have any effect on the behaviour of the general public.
It’s much more likely that people watching would give silent thanks that they will never look anything like the oversized creatures they’re watching on screen, and have another sip of wine to celebrate.
Embarrassing Bodies makes much more sense as kind of 21st century version of those old funfairs in which members of the public were invited to laugh and point at bearded ladies, Siamese twins or the world’s smallest man.
Great care has obviously gone into to tracking down the most spectacular examples available of British obesity and persuading them that their problems could be over if they let it all hang out in front of the Embarassing Bodies doctors?and a few million television viewers.
The individuals might well get something from the experience, but they are paying a huge price in terms of loss of privacy and dignity. “We’ll see later if Tony ever gets to see his penis again”, an ever so slightly sarcastic voiceover announced after one of the programme’s patients had discussed the rolls of fat which poured from his stomach over his midriff.
A woman called Yolanda discussed “my hernias” as though they were pet kittens. Her daughter, who looked no more than 10 or 11, talked sadly about how she could only go shopping at night with her Mum so that fewer people would see them together and maybe comment on Yolanda’s weight.
Melissa, once Britain’s fattest teenager, has since lost 23 stone with the use of a gastric band, but the weight loss has had a devastating effect on her body. As she said and we saw, it looks like that of a ninety-year old. “My granny’s got better boobs than me”, she claimed.
It’s hard to see what Tony and Yolanda and Melissa and the others featured in the series will achieve from their participation other than a few minutes of a peculiar kind of fame, and nuggets of advice they must have heard a thousand times before.
When the cameras have gone, and the excitement has worn off, how will they fare then, with the same body issues, problems and insecurities which allowed them to get that obese and that desperate in the first place? Where will Channel 4 be then? Off on a search for exhibits for its latest freak show, one suspects.
This review originally appeared on Independent.ie on June 21 http://tinyurl.com/5r9wkrh
What Women Want
Channel 4 has made so many bad programmes about sex over the years (who remembers ‘Designer Vaginas’ and ‘The Wold’s Biggest Penis’?) that few viewers can have approached last night’s The Sex Researchers with anything but trepidation. And in some ways – a surfeit of gratuitously naked bodies; Monty Pythonesque graphics – it was exactly as you’d expect. As a piece of history, however, it worked very well, providing interesting facts and fascinating perspective in equal measure.
Did you know, for example, that cornflakes were invented by WK Kellogg because he thought that a dry, bland breakfast in the morning would dampen people’s sexual desire? It makes you wonder what the snap, crackle and pop of Rice Krispies is supposed to do. Kellogg was one of many people throughout history who were obsessed with female sexual desire, essentially believing that there was no such thing and that any manifestation of such pleasure must be a sign of illness. Until very recently, this was a more widespread view than you might think, rooted in Christian belief rather then science, and last night’s programme made a very good case that throughout history sex research, by conducting investigations and uncovering facts, acted as a kind of scientific counterweight to the prevailing morality of the day.
Sex researchers Masters and Johnson
A man called Tiresias from Greek mythology is regarded as the first sex researcher after living for seven years as a woman. He was later struck dumb by Hera, the wife of Zeus because of his belief that women took more pleasure from sex. Even in those days, such an opinion got a bad press. Like Hera, David Norris’s friend Plato had very definite views on female sexual desire. It didn’t really exist, as far as he was concerned. In later years, such desire was write off as witchcraft, and later as hysteria. The vibrator was invented as a medical device, to cure women who displayed signs of sexual pleasure, and in the early years of the last century, conservative women’s magazines like Home Needle Generator were full of ads for such gadgets. It was only when they came to be seen as a means to sexual pleasure in themselves that they migrated to sex shops, the back counters of Ann Summers’ stores and to the internet.
Sexual research continues up to the present day, and seems currently obsessed with what woman want, and what brings them the sexual pleasure they were denied for so long. According to one experiment, a vigorous 20 minute workout before intercourse greatly increases a woman’s enjoyment, assuming she has any energy left, of course. Another investigation of “the plasticity of female sexuality” showed the same two images – of a naked male and a naked female – to a heterosexual man and woman, whose eye movements were monitored to determine precisely where they looked.
The man’s eyes barely left the female’s body (and occasionally her face) while the woman’s eyes spent as much time looking at the female as at the man. Was this a sign that she was “checking out the competition”, The Sex Researchers asked, or did it indicate that she is more open to new sexual experiences then men? There’s no answer to that one yet, apparently. There are some things even sex research can’t find out.
This tv review appeared on Independent.ie on June 17
The Naked And The Dud
Other than lust, procreation, charity swimming events or that strange quirk of the German personality which leads to regular and enthusiastic nudity, what makes some people bare all in public? Why, when all your most important bits have long ago begin their sad journey south, would you put your infirmities and insecurities on display? Specifically, why would an artist’s model do it, when the nakedness is accompanied by the discomfort of sitting still for so long, or adopting awkward, highly unflattering poses?
I’m none the wiser on any of those questions after watching Naked, RTE1’s long and pointless portrait of people who pose as nude models . Featuring some vaguely well-known names – columnist John Waters, art critic Gemma Tipton, Olympic swimmer Melanie Nocher – who had agreed to pose nude specifically for the documentary, it told us nothing about the people themselves, their sense of what it was like to be naked in front of a stranger, or indeed what it was like to be that stranger, trying to make art from subjects at their most exposed and vulnerable.
A better documentary would have gone looking for actual models, people who strip regularly at art classes all over the country every night of the week, who get paid for it, and for whom it’s a way to pay bills or get through college. One such creature , Des O’Connor, appeared briefly last night, but was allowed to say very little. We learned nothing about him or what motivated him – money, boredom, some kind of illicit thrill? – and less than half way in, the programme makers effectively abandoned him. It was back to the personalities.
Because they’d never posed nude before, probably won’t do it again, and were allowed to do so in relatively comfortable circumstances – in front of a single artist of the same gender – they had nothing of interest to say and were reduced to soundbites. When we first encountered Waters in the Sligo studio of artist Nick Miller, he looked like he was sitting comfortably in a nice fur coat. Later it dawned that he is a remarkably hairy man, and that Miller had effectively taken on the role of those gifted savages who used to sketch woolly mammoths on the walls of ancient French caves. “Our clothes are really various layers of masks”, Waters said at one point, just for something to say, really. Gemma Tipton warbled on about revelling “in the naturalness and beauty of the body”. As Melanie Nocher had her posterior preserved for posterity, she made some point about being comfortable with some things and not being comfortable other things. That, I’m afraid, was as profound as it got.
By that point in the programme, Twitter was in meltdown, and not just because of John Waters’s chest. On TV3, A Girl’s Guide To 21st Century Sex was winning the award for the most explicit programme on Irish television ever. Cameras were placed where cameras were never supposed to be, literally where the sun don’t shine. Nothing was left to the imagination. People were doing things that no nude model should ever have to do. It was a relief to be able to go to bed.
This tv review originally appeared on Independent.ie on June 15
A Life Well Lived
In the early years of the last decade, Garret FitzGerald was at a dinner in New York when he spotted his old sparring partner Margaret Thatcher at a nearby table. They hadn’t seen each other for a while. FitzGerald, with the help of British civil servants and ministers, had persuaded Thatcher, against her better judgement, to sign the Anglo Irish agreement in 1985, something she quickly regretted, and just as quickly said so. They were both out of power many years at this point, but FitzGerald thought that – half in jest, half in earnest – he should give her a piece of his mind for her lack of support for a Treaty they had both signed in good faith. “What are you doing now, Garret?”, she asked him as he sat down beside her. “Like you, I’m didactic”, he replied.” As long as I can write and lecture, I’m happy”. And then he had a go at her about the agreement.
Garret Fitzgerald with Enda Kenny and David Puttnam
When he told this story on Newstalk a few years ago (the clip was replayed during the many hours of tribute following his death), you got a good sense of what Garret FitzGerald was like to deal with. In the 1980s, he was rather lazily stereotyped as a kind of absent-minded professor, who wore odd socks at important events, who had fallen into politics and leadership, and was therefore no match for ambitious career politicians like Thatcher and Charles Haughey. But nothing could have been further from the truth. From his arrival as a senior, serious politician in 1973, when he became Minister For Foreign Affairs, he treated the world as his oyster and those in it as his equals. He sensed the strengths and weaknesses of opponents early, and exploited both for political advantage. He was never fazed or intimidated by politics, despite the fusty image people had of him. It meant that he could wander over to Margaret Thatcher many years after their biggest falling out, and chastise her, almost mock her. He had his faults, like all politicians, but he was no shrinking violet.
His belief in his right to exist as an equal in the world of politics extended to everyone he met. Gemma Hussey, a former minister for education under Fitzgerald, described him as “the first man I met who was a natural feminist”. Frank Flannery, the Fine Gael campaign manager, said FitzGerald had a more “pluralist, multi-cultural, feminist” view of Ireland than his colleagues. That devotion to equality – to securing what he called “parity of esteem” for Northern Ireland’s nationalist community – was behind his determination to address the Troubles and his steel in persuading Thatcher to sign the 1985 agreement. In the Republic, it brought us the Constitutional Crusade.
Initially, FitzGerald’s ambition to remove sections of the constitution which he believed might be a barrier to Irish unity – such as Articles 2 and 3, which laid claim to the six counties of Ulster under British rule – came to nothing. Indeed he was savagely attacked for his “free state mentality” by elements in Fianna Fail, who portrayed him as somebody who liked to have his belly tickled by Margaret Thatcher. Politically, you might even describe his crusade as reckless, but it had a widespread effect. Suddenly, the notion that the constitution might in places be a sectarian document was being discussed seriously and widely; debates, sometimes civilised and respectful, about thorny issues of divorce, contraception and abortion were breaking out in the media and in wider society. In 1998, 17 years after the launch of the Constitutional Crusade, Ireland, North and South, voted for the Good Friday agreement which, amongst other things, led to the abolition of Articles 2 and 3. On that issue, Garret FitzGerald was a man ahead of his time.
One of the sad ironies of FitzGerald’s death was that for a while on Friday, his passing completely overshadowed the visit of Queen Elizabeth, an event which could not have happened without the energy he brought to attacking the problem of Northern Ireland in the 1980s. In the end, because his record on the economy – huge deficits and debts – was poor, it is the North which will go down as his greatest political achievement; as many have pointed out in the wake of his death, it is desperately sad that he could not have been in Dublin Castle to hear the Queen say her few words in Irish and then talk of forbearance and conciliation, two of his greatest qualities.
But perhaps his greatest achievement was that so many people liked him. Indeed, they might have liked him even more if they’d seen the side of him recalled on Friday by Maurice Manning, who spoke of FitzGerald’s “huge sense of fun” and his love of partying and socialising. Mary Robinson, the former president, remembered what a lot of us immediately recalled on hearing of the former Taoiseach’s death, his devotion to his late wife Joan, about whom he would wax lyrical with hardly any encouragement at all. “He had a great capacity for love and friendship, of his wife Joan and his large immediate family but also of a wide circle of friends, including children, who delighted in his company”, Robinson said. Ultimately, it seems, most people – maybe even Margaret Thatcher – will recall Garret FitzGerald as a very nice man. After a lifetime in politics, that really is some accomplishment.
*This piece originally appeared on Independent.ie on Friday May 19 2011 http://tinyurl.com/5w55d64
You Say It Best..
My first job in journalism, in The Sunday Journal, was also my most lucrative. I’d done a work placement there in the summer of 1981 and had made myself useful enough – buying the coffees during Charles and Diana’s wedding, for example – to be asked back on a full-time basis when college was over. Full of the idealism of youth, with all the usual plans to change the world, I arrived in the paper’s Parliament St offices - above what is now Thomas Read’s pub - on a Tuesday morning in June 1982 for my first full day as a newspaperman.
Those of you under 40 probably won’t remember The Sunday Journal. It was established in 1980 as a kind of Sunday World for farmers. (“This is Nuala. A few hours ago, she was washing the cows on her father’s farm. Now here she is in a nice blue bikini”). It had a very hard-working, underpaid staff who did a phenomenal job on scant resources, and who spent most of their time wondering if their paper had a future. What we all didn’t realise as we arrived in Parliament St for work that morning was that its future would last about two more hours. At 11.30am, the staff were gathered together and told the Sunday Journal was closing down.
The old Sunday Journal office
A few months later, I received a cheque in the post for £450, a phenomenal amount for a 19-year-old unemployed person in 1982. It was redundancy money from The Sunday Journal for my two hours work; at £225 per hour, it’s a rate I have never managed to match in the almost 30 years since. If I work for another 30, I probably won’t manage it, either.
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Sunday Journal, recently. My current theory about what I view now as a shambolic, mostly pointless, working life is that in the same way that some people are always trying to recreate their first love in their subsequent relationships, I seem to have developed an ongoing addiction to basketcase workplaces – like my first one – and that when I go to interviews for jobs in successful companies, I always make a mess of them because of my subconscious need to work on the Titanic. Over the years, I have evolved into the world’s worst jobseeker.
My last interview for a job, in April, was another disaster, one preceded over the years by employment in a series of unsuccessful papers and hapless attempts to leave them. After The Sunday Journal, I got work in a free newspaper in Kilkenny called The South-Eastern Express. It closed down. Then I went to Navan to work on The Meath Weekender. It closed down after a visit from the tax sheriff, who made off with all our desks and copy for the week, but opened up the following day as The Weekender, with new desks and hastily rewritten copy. I left there in 1989 and started work in Dublin Tribune – Vincent Browne’s greatest folly – in February 1990. It closed down in the Spring of 1991, although not before I had jumped ship to The Sunday Tribune, where I worked until February of this year, when it too closed down.
I loved the Tribune and miss it and all my friends there greatly. But it was always in financial trouble and, from time to time, I would make attempts to get out. They were always unsuccessful, always ruined by spectacularly bad interviews. One of the jobs, press officer for the Houses of the Oireachtas, required fluent Irish, a fact I managed to miss until the interviewer started quizzing me as Gaelige. That was the end of that. On another occasion, I got lost on the way to the interview, arriving with about two minutes to spare and in dire need of the bathroom. Instead of asking to use the facilities before the inquisition began, I said nothing and spent the 30 minutes of the interview squiriming and shifting in my seat like an epileptic drunk. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
The pattern seems to be continuing post-Tribune. That interview in April was my worst ever, perhaps the worst to be done by anybody in Ireland this year. In my defence, I had applied for another job with the organisation in question but was told that they wanted me to interview for this other position. “It’s a bigger job, a better job”, they said, when they rang me on my holidays summoning me for a chat 48 hours later. I didn’t feel I could say no, researched the job as best I could and arrived at the appointed place in reasonably hopeful form.
What the five people on the interview panel saw, I think, was somebody who was, simultaneously, not interested in the job and desperate to get it. That must have given a bad enough impression, but what really finished me off was my response to a question on how I would have advised particular individuals going on radio two days previously to debate a matter of current controversy.
What I should have said was this: “As you know, I was in Madrid on Monday when that controversy was raging, so I’m just not familiar enough with the way that debate shifted and changed over the course of the day to be able to confidently advise anybody. However, if you want to pick a topic from today, I’ll be able to answer that”. Instead, I said absolutely nothing. A long, increasingly embarrassing, silence filled the room as I struggled for an answer. For at least 30 seconds, not a word crossed my lips, an unusual approach to interviews I might have got away with had I used that thinking time to come up with a coherent and compelling answer. But when I finally started to speak, gibberish replaced the silence. Ten seconds after I’d finished, the interview came to a sudden end and the world’s worst job seeker was ushered out the door.
Being hopeless at interviews was a luxury I could afford when I already had a job, but now that I’m unemployed, it’s a serious millstone. It seems to me to be more than the normal fear that most people have of being stuck in a room with strangers asking them stupid questions, and is rooted in some weird, self-destructive, hostility to working anywhere successful. It would probably take years with a shrink to work it all out, but if anybody has any advice in the meantime, I’d love to hear it.
Walking On Sunshine
Sunshine On The Far Shore
If we’ve learned one important fact about Enda Kenny this year, it’s that he’s big into symbolism. Every day as he walks into government buildings from his Dublin city apartment, people stop him on the street and urge him to create jobs and improve the economy. Being a symbolist, however, Enda hears something different. In the Taoiseach’s world, climate and scenery stand in for employment and the public finances. As he told it this week in an interview, what the people are actually saying to him on his symbolic stroll through Dublin 2 is: “We want to be able to see the sunlight on the far shore”.
Kenny’s early speeches as Taoiseach, in the Dail and in Washington on St Patrick’s Day, were full of symbolism. Even before his election, you couldn’t stop him. When TV3 threatened to replace him with an empty chair following his refusal to take part in a debate moderated by Vincent Browne, Kenny shot back that the seat could serve as a symbol of all those who had been forced to emigrate because of Fianna Fail economic policy. It sounded a bit false at the time. In other circumstances, during other controversies, the empty chair could have symbolised Mary Byrne’s absence from the X-Factor final, Giovanni Trapattoni’s refusal to give Andy Reid a place in the Irish soccer squad, or all the dead eagles which have been poisoned by Kerry farmers. But it did Kenny no harm. He romped to victory in the election; he’s had a strong start as Taoiseach. It’s strange to think that it’s only a few months since he was regarded as such a liability by Fine Gael that they wouldn’t let him in the same room as Browne. They still haven’t, funnily enough.
Kenny’s approach to his business does make a pleasant change from his predecessors, though. Brian Cowen was so focused on what he called substance over style that he had a fatal resistance to the black arts of public relations, spin, symbol and metaphor. Bertie Ahern probably thought symbol was the main character in The Lion King. Kenny and his handlers understand that words and actions, language and deeds, are important not just for the facts and information they give, but for the promise and the hope they can offer if they are used properly, cleverly and respectfully. Seeing sunlight on the far shore is not a bad way to put it. The hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland oppressed by problems of debt, unemployment and uncertain futures will immediately understand the symbolism. They might even put up with it if they believe it will be accompanied soon by some achievements.
Sometimes, as Enda Kenny may find out next week, symbolism can work against you. On Tuesday, he is due to announce his jobs initiative, the policy formerly known as the jobs budget. It was downgraded even further on Tuesday when the Taoiseach admitted that it mightn’t create any jobs, at least not in the short term. Expect the United Left Alliance and Fianna Fail to berate it as a cheap gimmick.
Also next week, maybe even on Tuesday if the government is in particularly careless form, Enda Kenny will announce his 11 nominees to the Seanad. Seven of these will be Fine Gael appointments; the other four are in the gift of Eamon Gilmore, the Labour Party leader. It doesn’t take a graduate from the school of symbolism to see how a cynic might contrast the enthusiasm for appointing party hacks to nicely paid jobs in the Senate with a programme that might, at some unspecified date in the future, take some people off the dole. The symboiism would be rotten: political friends being looked after while the 430,000 people on the live register are asked to put their hope in what looks like being a very vague set of proposals.
As somebody who enjoys symbols and symbolism almost as much as Enda Kenny, I’d therefore like to make a suggestion that might help him overcome whatever cynicism might be lying in wait for him next week. According to some reports, Labour and Fine Gael will choose one “non-political” Seanad nominee each. There had been speculation that these people might come from either side of the political divide in Northern Ireland, although Labour is said to be not so keen on that idea. It’s a tired old notion, in any case. Sectarianism in Northern Ireland is no longer a problem for the Republic to solve. They have their own government in Belfast now. Appointing Northerners to the Seanad only because they are Northerners would be an empty gesture, the worst kind of symbolism.
But why not use one of those non-political appointments to nominate a jobless person to the Seanad, somebody currently on the live register who could offer an expert view from the coalface when the Upper House got around to debating the unemployment problem? She or he would be a symbol of the government’s commitment to tackling the biggest problem facing its people. She or he would also be the first person the government could credibly claim had left the dole because of one of its decisions: the first of many, they could boast. The opposition would sneer, no doubt, but – as Enda Kenny will tell you – one man’s gimmick is another man’s symbol. If nothing else, it would be something for the Taoiseach to talk about as he wanders through Dublin’s streets searching for the sunlight on that faraway shore.
*This blog originally appeared on www.independent.ie http://tinyurl.com/6cxkmn7
