Feckers

by John Waters

  In fact, The Late Late was never any good except when you didn’t see it. You could sit week after week watching a monotonous parade of mediocrities and then, Lent over and your penance completed, the one week you skipped out to the pub you could be sure that nobody would talk about anything else except what had happened on The Late Late. This suggested that either you were unlucky to always go out on the wrong nights, or The Late Late was never as scintillating in reality as was subsequently ‘remembered’. It was afterwards, in the days following certain shows, rather than on the screen on Saturday or, later, Friday night, that the legend was created.

  Of course, in the beginning nobody expected The Late Late to be anything other than a mildly diverting talk show. Its ‘importance’ was not an issue until the 1980s, when it was adapted as part of the apparatus of modernization employed to propel us forward from the ignorance of pre-television Ireland. It then became the main springboard used to catapult us out of a mythical and distorted version of our past, which had been caricatured to provide the maximum quality of propulsion. Since reality was much more complex than this caricature required, it was necessary for those who sought to bring about certain changes in Irish society to manipulate the evidence so as to increase our desire to ‘progress’ by making the past seem as revolting as possible.

  It is even taken half seriously by some people, that, as the Fine Gael TD Oliver J. Flanagan once jokingly put it in a Dail speech, ‘there was no sex in Ireland until Teilifis Eireann went on the air’. In truth, there was far more sex in Ireland before The Late Late, if only because people had nothing else to do in the long evenings. Declining fertility rates in recent decades suggest that people started having less sex from about the time The Late Late Show went on the air.

  A researcher on The Late Late once related how, when he compiled a selection of the programme’s greatest hits for some anniversary or other, he was afterwards assailed by people wondering why he had not included the episode known as ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’. He asked them if they knew precisely what this item entailed, and they responded with claims that this was one of the seminal moments in Irish television history. Yes, he said, but do you know that in the episode of ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’ there was no bishop and no nightie?

  All that occurred on the screen on the night in February 1966, when this stirring tale of modern Ireland unfolded, was that a woman, taking part in a light-hearted party game based on a format ‘borrowed’ from another TV station, when asked what colour nightie she had been wearing on the night of her honeymoon, replied ‘none’, before quickly adding ‘white’.

  It can hardly have been news, even in the most ‘traditional’ parts of Ireland, in 1966, that people sometimes took their clothes off before going to bed together, but this did not prevent the Bishop of Clonfert from immediately contacting the Sunday newspapers to inform them that he would be preaching a sermon in Loughrea on the following day in which he would denounce The Late Late Show as immoral and request his flock not to watch it again. The newspapers insisted on presenting the issue as a major moral confrontation, and the story was a front-page lead on Sunday and Monday. On the night of the programme, only three people rang the station to complain about the broadcast, and two of these were exercised because the idea had been ripped off from another TV network. Thus, only one person in the country felt sufficiently morally outraged by the item to pick up a telephone and complain, and this person was the secretary of the Bishop of Clonfert. Only through the intervention of the media did the event become one of the groundbreaking episodes in the creation of modern Ireland. Something banal would be said on the show, and some publicity-hungry cleric or county councillor would make it into a federal issue. A ‘national debate’ would ensue about the decline in moral values or some such nonsense. This suited the agenda of the modernizers because the impression was thus given that they were hard at work confronting the dark forces, when in reality nobody but a handful of lunatics was in the slightest bit bothered. The Late Late did not, as is suggested, ‘open up’ Irish society: what it ‘opened up’, more often than not, were the ample mouths of some of the more ridiculous of our public figures. If we are to judge from what we ‘remember’ about it, the alleged ‘influence’ of The Late Late Show was all over and done with within five years of first going on air.

  Indeed, ‘The Bishop and the Nightie’ affair was regarded as such a seminal feature of Ireland’s socio-sexual development that, in the late 1970s, when RTE was spring-cleaning its vaults, that particular programme, along with virtually all other Late Lates over the previous two decades, was wiped. It is probably just as well for those seeking to elevate the importance of Gaybo and his show that nothing of these supposedly earth-shaking episodes is preserved: if it was, we would today be able to perceive their utter tedium and banality.

  So, when we talk about the importance of Gay Byrne’s contribution to Irish society, we should be a little more specific. The change was not so much in the reality of Ireland as in the public perception of it. The change was that we began to say what was going on, in public, on live television, rather than simply thinking it or muttering about it among ourselves. The change was in the nature of talk, rather than in the nature of events. Those who celebrate the influence of The Late Late are celebrating themselves and the success of their particular agenda.

  And, yet, nobody could look back at the vast span of Gay Byrne’s broadcasting career and declare him an uncritical proponent of modernization in the crude sense that some of his eulogizers have implied. Gay Byrne was and is a complicated man, a broadcaster who was driven first of all by the desire to make interesting radio and television programmes. He did not, as is now suggested, set out to manipulate the material of a society in flux in order to bring about change more rapidly than would otherwise have occurred. He would also be the first to propose that some of the ‘opening up’ he is credited with facilitating has had as many baneful consequences as beneficial ones.

  11 Pope John Paul II

  The marking of the anniversary, in September 2009, of the 1979 visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland comprised part nostalgia and part self-satisfaction, the nostalgia being less for the Pope than for the feeling of innocence which had come to be associated with those times. The analysis went something like this: the Pope, personable but representing an outmoded form of thinking, came to Ireland at approximately the moment when we began to wake up and smell the cappuccino. After the Pope left, the Church fell apart, and Irish society ‘matured’ into new understandings.

  The numbers who turned out to see the Pope were remembered thirty years later as evidence of the vigour of Irish Catholicism at the time. It was, we were repeatedly told, the end of an era, or as one dissident priest crudely put it, ‘the last sting of a dying wasp’. Conventional wisdom assumes that Irish Catholicism remained vibrant until the emergence of the clerical scandals of the 1990s, starting with Bishop Eamonn Casey (one of the stars of the papal visit) and his American squeeze, and then continuing in a way that very rapidly cast Casey’s adventuring in an increasingly benign light.

  There is another way of looking at it: that really the papal visit was simply a splurge of sentimentalism, empty of any real engagement with the mission of this rather remarkable Pope, or even any understanding of what he stood for. A deeper assessment also suggests that the later public scandals became pretexts for the many who were already failing to find an engagement with Catholicism to declare publicly their alienation. It was far easier to ‘explain’ your disillusionment by reference to a betrayal than to look deeper into the condition and ask questions that might indicate a more complex picture.

  The real problem, prevailing long before the arrival of John Paul II, related to the reduction, over the previous century or so, of Christianity as expressed in Irish Catholicism into two thin strands: moralizing and emotionalism. The Church had become a moral police force, and Christ, seeming incompatible with this function, had been externalized and suffused in an a
ura of sentimentality. Christianity had become separated from reality, except in so far as reality consisted of rules and rituals. Strangely, the mass media persona of John Paul II seems, oddly, to have embodied both the characteristics of these two strands infecting the Irish Church. This was nothing like the full truth of John Paul, but mass communications are poorly adapted for complex truth-telling. By turns, the Pope came across as avuncular and finger-wagging, smiling and stern, doctrinaire and affectionate, and in doing so dramatized precisely the condition of the culture he was addressing. He had to his personality three distinct elements: the charismatic ‘pop star’; the philosopher poet and the stern bearer of simple injunctions. But he also gave rise to a certain ‘à la carte’ tendency in his audience, which warmly embraced his personality while overlooking his message and remaining deeply ignorant of its roots in reason and human experience.

  Nothing about his Irish visit managed to transcend the dualisms provoked by his public personality. In his various homilies that weekend in September, the Pope talked about peace, family values, the law of God. But, for all the positive emotionalism unleashed by his persona, his language served mainly to underline the emerging sense that Christianity was unlikely to be in harmony with the coming times. The words the Pope used were designed to shore up something that really no longer existed, if it ever had. For all his brilliance, John Paul was slightly behind what, deeper down the culture was trying to comprehend. John Paul II is remembered with the deepest affection in Ireland, even by some who otherwise have nothing good to say for Catholicism. But it is largely his charisma that is remembered, rather than his more enduring qualities: his understanding of human nature, his clarity of moral vision and his insistent repudiation of utopianism.

  An unfavourable comparison is often made in Irish conversation between Benedict XVI and the man who preceded him. This is almost entirely spurious. Few who praise John Paul and seek to bury Benedict as ‘reactionary’, ‘right-wing’, ‘dogmatic’, could name a single point of theological or philosophical difference between them. Of the two, Pope Benedict is by far the more tuned-in to the condition of modern culture. He has a profound grasp of what has happened to Christian societies, including Ireland, beset by a shrivelling of reality through ideology and language. What is called secularism, operating in a pincer movement with the reduction of Christianity to morals and sentiment, has removed from our cultures the means for a human being to access in reality a total definition of himself. Modern man remains secure only for as long as he can remain within his own constructs, but even a glance out the window, at the horizon of knowable reality, casts him into a dizzying terror. His only hope lies in distraction: money, intoxicants, false ideas of freedom and cultures renovated to minimize the human exposure to the Absolute. This is the secret history of the Celtic Tiger and a condensed explanation for the rage and grief that has followed it.

  John Paul, of course, recognized these conditions too, and diagnosed them in his writings. But in his more generalized public utterances he tended to offer a simplified solution: a return to lost values and humbler aspirations. His public patronized him and cheered him, but remained certain that he was a kind old man whose ideas had passed their sell-by date.

  A few years after the visit of Pope John Paul II, Ireland was briefly convulsed by a summer-long spate of quasi-religious phenomena in which, all around the country, public statues of Christian icons – in particular at shrines to the Blessed Virgin dating from the Marian Year of three decades previously – were said to have moved and danced and shimmied. For months on end, the nation seemed to speak of little else, as new reports came through on almost a daily basis. Even convinced atheists went along and said that they had seen the statues move. Undoubtedly this odd phenomenon spoke of something deep in the heart or soul of the Irish people, perhaps by way of articulating a feeling that could not be spoken otherwise: that despite the surface shift towards what has been acclaimed as an increasingly ‘rational’ worldview, the desires of the human heart continue to seek a correspondence for themselves. A quarter-century and another recession later, these questions are more ‘live’ than ever.

  12 Charles J. Haughey

  There is a phrase from Ben Dunne’s testimony to the Dunne Payment Tribunal that goes some way to explaining the scale of the cultural phenomenon that once was Charles J. Haughey. Dunne, son of the eponymous founder of Dunnes Stores, told the tribunal about his understanding that there had been a plan by those seeking to raise money on Mr Haughey’s behalf to approach a number of businessmen with a view to obtaining donations of perhaps £150,000 from each. Mr Dunne said that, when approached, he volunteered to meet the target of £1 million in full. He recalled for the benefit of the tribunal his reactions at the time: ‘I think Haughey is making a mistake trying to get six or seven people together. Christ picked twelve apostles and one of them crucified him.’

  That a leading businessman should in 1997 make a connection between a top politician and the Son of God would in practically any other country be enough to discredit his testimony as the ramblings of a lunatic. But in Ireland the reference resonated something in the cultural perception of Charles Haughey in a way that made it slightly less than ridiculous.

  Irish politicians have not until recently been mere human beings. They were, in the past, Gods, Devils, Chieftains, Popes and Anti-Christs. This condition of political quasi-superhumanness was one of the things the modernizing forces sought to erase, and was the main reason why Charles Haughey came so often into their sights. That battle was played out in issues like the North, the economy or the liberal agenda, but the succinct truth is that Haughey became the most controversial figure in twentieth-century Irish politics because he alone on the Irish political landscape played to the old culture. He was the last great tribal chieftain of a people being dragged into what was tendentiously termed ‘the modern world’. Nobody was as adept at playing off the two worlds, at tapping into the sensibilities of both. Charles Haughey lived and ruled through an era when old values were being dissolved and turned into money. Bereft of a personal vision, he tried to simulate the appearance of a visionary by aping ancient values and their adherents, even while he was up to his oxters in the green slime of the material world. He used money to create the illusion of magic.

  Like the fat chieftain whose reputation for qualities of leadership rests on the irrefutable evidence that he is able to feed himself and will therefore be able to feed his tribe, Haughey played to the deep insecurities of his post-colonial people by suggesting that what he could do on his own behalf, he could do on theirs. We looked at his (metaphorical) ample belly and felt reassured. This was the ‘secret’ of Charles Haughey’s political success: because he was rich, we imagined, sneakily and at the back of our minds, he could make the rest of us rich as well.

  He delivered, too – up to a point. If our previous financial embarrassment bore a passing resemblance to Mr de Valera’s notions of frugal comfort, our subsequent Celtic Tiger-period shut-your-face-and-take-a-look-at-my-wad style of prosperity was undoubtedly closer to Charles Haughey’s brass-necked approach to the management of money.

  When Haughey walked into Government Buildings in February 1987, Ireland was on the verge of bankruptcy. A decade later, the Irish economy was the envy of Europe. It scarcely needs pointing out that this turnaround in the national fortunes had far more in common with the manner of Charles Haughey’s own enrichment than with the careful, muddling husbandry of his political rivals.

  Charles Haughey did to the public finances in office – particularly from 1987 to 1992 – what the McCracken Tribunal would reveal he had been doing to his private finances for several decades. Consider the following key elements of the strategy employed:

  (1) Borrowing: The strange thing is that Mr Haughey was a late and reluctant convert to adapting this particular methodology to the running of the national economy. In 1974 he warned that ‘We should be very conscious however of the fact that we must not come to accept budgets w
hich are, as a matter of course, going to finish up with a deficit which has to be borrowed.’ It was actually his great arch-rival, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who first promoted the idea of national borrowing on a grand scale. In 1966, a deficit/GNP ratio of nearly 1 per cent was regarded as a serious crisis; eleven years later, the ratio was roughly ten times that figure and Dr FitzGerald was fretting publicly that we might not be borrowing enough. Following that infamous January 1980 TV appearance, in which he lectured the public about living beyond its means, Mr Haughey took a leaf out of his rival’s book and settled into running the country along much the same lines as he ran his personal finances: borrowing from Peter to pay back Paul.

  (2) Begging: On reclaiming office in 1987, Haughey found his borrowing options considerably circumscribed and diverted his energies to adapting his private talents for begging to the global economic arena. In consequence, in each year of the 1990s, Ireland Inc. received transfers from the European Union amounting to an average of 7 per cent of GDP.

  (3) Inducements: During this period also, foreign industrialists and bankers were offered irresistible inducements to locate here rather than someplace else. Thus was Ireland Inc. transformed into a money-laundering operation for multinational capital.

  It’s a most peculiar thing that, even in the prosperous Tiger years, we seemed only too delighted to accept the benefits of Mr Haughey’s philosophy and efforts in the public sphere, and yet excoriated him for the time he spent perfecting the arts of begging, borrowing and stroking in private before he came to be in a position to exercise these talents in our interests.