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8 — village july 2009
John Drennan
How we are governed?
Here follows a short taste of the standard of
political wit and repartee during the great no
confidence motion that took place on Tuesday
June
th
. Churchillian it is not.
We begin with Enda Kenny who called Wil-
lie O’Dea, ‘‘the Groucho Marx of the govern-
ment.’’
Willie O’Dea: ‘”I … reject the Punch and
Judy to which FG has descended.’’
Alan Shatter: “They should not demean
[this house] with their political slap-stick.’’
Willie O’Dea to Alan Shatter: “Captain
Kirk’’ (For the curious, this is a reference to a
leaflet issued by Deputy Shatter where he ap-
peared dressed up as Captain Kirk from Star
Trek).
Fergus O’Dowd: ‘‘The Minister should be
beamed up.’’
Enda Kenny: “What tablets is the Minis-
ter on?”
The debate continued in a similar fashion
for another six hours. All Yer Man will say is
that these people are, or believe they should
be, in charge of us.
The fairest’s vocational ambitions
Dermot Ahern was in his usual moralistic
mode during the same recent confidence de-
bate. Sadly. ‘Mirror mirror on the wall who
is the fairest in Fianna Fáil?’ So went Ahern’s
musings about the evils of “X factor politics”,
where governments are changed “over every
local opinion, telephone, or text poll”. This
view has been irrevocably compromised by Mr
Ahern’s recent Law Society Gazette Interview.
In it the short snarly FF leadership contender
infamously noted of his political vocation that
“it’s a job. It puts bread on the table”.
Chinless Hypocrisy
We have seen some reprehensible sights
in Leinster House but even Yer Man never
thought we would see Fianna Fáil use the sto-
ry of the children who were routinely beat-
en and sodomised in state owned children’s
institutions during the long lazy watch of Mr
de Valera and Mr Lemass, as a stick to beat
the opposition with. Of course just when we
thought it was safe, the heroic Barry Andrews
whined primly about how dreadful the oppo-
sition was for holding their no confidence mo-
tion on the day that the victims of abuse were
bringing their petition for justice to the house.
And yes you’re absolutely right; young Barry
is the fellow who, when asked by Alan Shat-
ter about the most recent statistics for chil-
dren under threat of abuse in Ireland, admit-
ted he didn’t have official figures for the last
two years. Our hero didn’t appear to be too
upset about it either, but there were no camer-
as around on that particular happier day. Oh
and before you ask, Barry is also the guy who
released the report into the Monagheer trag-
edy where even the recommendations were
censored. And Yes, he’s another bloody dy-
nastic scion - he inherited the seat of that oth-
er chinless wonder David Andrews. All Yer
Man can say is that Barry definitely is his fa-
ther’s son.
Awake and sinless saint
Saint George of Dundrum certainly made
quite the stir on his debut after he outed Fi-
anna Fail’s three sleeping beauties. Howev-
er when it comes to the delights of indulging
in that which “knits up the ravell’d sleeve of
care”, there was a serpent in the Fine Gael gar-
den. So at least was the claim made by one
gentle FF Minister who told Yer Man that one
of Mr Lee’s backbench colleagues had been
enjoying an extended flirtation with the great
“balm of hurt minds … chief nourisher in life’s
feast”, during the sainted one’s debut. Sadly
Yer Man’s anguished wail of “name him, name
him!” was rebuffed by a murmur of “let him
without sin cast the first stone”. Reflecting on
this, Yer Man supposes Saint George will be
the only one throwing stones in this Dáil.
Reshuffling a pack of jokers
When it comes to Mr Cowen’s much anticipat-
ed cabinet re-shuffle Yer Man does have some
kindly advice for any of our readers who fear
their summer may be ruined by an uncontrol-
lable obsession over the future of Minister for
Arts, Sports and Tourism, Martin Cullen. The
essential conundrum of any cabinet reshuffle
is best summarised by the infamous riposte
by the sly farmer to the lost tourist: “Yerra if
you want to go there you shouldn’t be start-
ing from here”.
“Dermot Ahern: It’s
a job. It puts bread
on the table.”
outside the village
9
no coincidence that Eamon Gil-
more ruled out the option of his party shar-
ing government with Fianna Fáil as soon as
Fine Gael reached a new decade high of %
in recent polls. The rise in support for Enda
Kenny’s party, coupled with a slowdown to
Labour’s dramatic climb of just a few months
ago, has put something of a halt to Gilmore’s
gallop, and focused his party’s attention once
more on its future role as minority partners
in government. By cutting out any prospect
of entering government with FF the Labour
leader has also made it clear to voters that the
most likely alternative to the current crowd is
a Fine Gael led administration.
Once again, Labour has been panicked
into its historic role as lifesaver of the Blue-
shirts and is forced into repeating the crucial
surgery that saved the larger party from its
almost total demise after the elections
when Pat Rabbitte and Enda Kenny forged the
Mullingar accord. In late , Dick Spring
and his colleagues did the same for John Bru-
ton whose leadership of Fine Gael was on the
ropes before Labour jumped ship from gov-
ernment with Fianna Fáil over what, in hind-
sight, appears the flimsiest of reasons.
Since , the Labour Party has fought
two general elections as sidekick, or mud-
guard, to the larger right wing party without
resolving some of the fundamental contradic-
tions between its self professed social demo-
cratic vision, and the unabashed neo-liberal-
ism of Fine Gael. On certain social issues of
course, Enda Kenny and his colleagues can
concede to Labour as it did in the ’s when
Garrett Fitzgerald endorsed more egalitar-
ian policies on workers and women’s rights, in
particular, but many of these progressive im-
provements were coming down the line from
Europe at any rate.
In the midst of recession, with an unre-
solved banking crisis and unemployment
growing to more than half a million next year,
the fault line between the right wing economic
solutions of prospective FG ministers - such as
Richard Bruton, Leo Varadkar and, yes, even
George Lee - and Labour’s priorities, will be
more apparent than ever before. Should La-
bour enter into government as a minority
party, it will inevitably be forced to bow to
the economic and financial prognosis, and
the proposed solutions of its senior partners,
which in turn represent just a tweaking of the
disastrous approach of the current crisis rid-
den government.
In his speech at the James Connolly com-
memoration at Arbour Hill, Siptu general pres-
ident Jack O’Connor asked union members to
support Labour and other left wing parties in
the June elections. At the launch of his party’s
European election campaign Sinn Féin presi-
dent Gerry Adams called for an alliance of the
left as an alternative to the tweedledee and
tweedledum of governments led by the right
wing parties.
O’Connor’s call comes as his union cele-
brates its centenary year and is engaged in
reflection of its historic role in promoting
equality and a socialist vision of Irish society.
“Organising the Union”, a pictorial history of
the Irish Transport and General Workers Un-
ion published in May, traces the origin and de-
velopment of a radical organisation that rep-
resents up to , workers today. Over the
years the socialist and national vision of its
founders, Jim Larkin and James Larkin, has
been blurred by decades of counter revolution,
of inter union strife, and periodic recessions,
but its current leadership appears determined
to return to its revolutionary roots in order
to survive the present storm which has seen
an unprecedented attack on its members’ liv-
ing standards.
As right wing commentators line up to
persuade Labour to forge yet another accord
with Fine Gael in advance of a general elec-
tion, which will invariably take place within
the year, the debate concerning the possible
strategy and tactics of a real and radical alli-
ance for change has hardly begun.
With the exception of its positions on Eu-
rope (which are
changing by the
day as the govern-
ment seeks to as-
suage the concerns
of the anti-Lisbon
vote) the two big-
gest parties on the
left, Labour and
Sinn Féin, have lit-
tle disagreement
on the crucial eco-
nomic matters of
the day. They also
share the articulate
analysis of the likes
of O’Connor and
other trade union
leaders on the global and domestic causes of
the economic and financial meltdown.
These parties along with like-minded in-
dependents and the Green Party have the po-
tential at present to attract over % of the
vote in any forthcoming election. If there was
a carefully articulated strategy agreed with,
and endorsed, by unions and other progres-
sive forces - on issues such as wages, pensions,
“As right wing commentators line
up to persuade Labour to forge
yet another accord with Fine
Gael… the debate concerning the
possible strategy and tactics of
a real and radical alliance for
change has hardly begun.”
,
Frank Connolly
10 — village july 2009
engulf much of the media
here and elsewhere with consequences for
society and democracy that are incalculable.
Some of our national newspapers seem certain
to fail, the most vulnerable being The Sunday
Tribune which has lost over € million in the
last decade and a half. Quite some achievement
for a newspaper whose costs should hardly
have exceeded that in the period. Newstalk
-FM is probably vulnerable too. Denis
O’Brien is likely to be required by the Broad-
casting Commission of Ireland (BCI) to divest
himself of some of his national radio licences
and the obvious candidate is Newstalk, rather
than the profitable Today FM. If anybody is
willing to purchase Newstalk they are more
brave than calculating.
But other media are vulnerable too. In-
dependent News and Media (INM), the most
profitable media group on the island, is on
the verge of a crisis as it struggles to meet a
massive debt repayment by the end of June
and an even more massive debt repayment in
the next two years. This, as I wrote here re-
cently, largely because of the insistence by its
former controlling shareholder, Tony O’Reilly,
on paying out much of the sizeable profits in
dividends rather than to reduce the massive
borrowings. The Evening Herald could go
and perhaps some of the group’s local news-
papers.
It would be no harm were Newspread, the
newspaper and magazine distribution agency,
sold off to an unrelated group. The dominance
in the media market of INM has been and, so
far, remains a problem and if the crisis forces
a lessening of the dominance all the better.
Unfortunately, the other media monster
here, RTE, is probably immune from radical
change because of the € subsidy it gets
through a poll tax (aka the licence fee) every
year. RTE’s dominance barely leaves room for
another broadcasting medium to survive and
the negative effect of that dominance spills
over into the print media as well because of
the volume of scarce advertising spend RTE
is able to absorb across its range of outlets:
television channels, three radio channels, a
magazine and a lavishly resourced web site.
In keeping with the psychological condition
now afflicting the Green party, a syndrome
which propels them to show loyalty to their
captors, regardless of risk, even an emotion-
al attachment which causes them to defend
their captors, the Stockholm syndrome. The
Greens, unwittingly, do Fianna Fáil’s bidding
allowing the State owned media conglomerate
grow and proliferate, however damaging that
may be to others of the media species. Eamon
Ryan even thinks this was his idea.
Newspapers everywhere are imperilled.
In America The New York Times, The Phila-
delphia Enquirer, The Boston Globe, The San
Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times
and many more are in crisis. Many won’t sur-
vive. There is trouble too in the UK. The Inde-
pendent and The Independent on Sunday both,
owned for now by INM may expire soon. Lon-
don’s Evening Standard, recently bought by a
Russian billionaire, is already again in crisis.
And even if much of the print media sur-
vive this present financial catastrophe, the
medium-term future is bleak. Readers are mi-
grating to the web and migrating away alto-
gether from news. The web has proved a dis-
aster for the print media. Newspapers have
been forced to place most of their content on
the web and then they have failed to win reve-
nue from that, while losing sales of their print
editions.
Rupert Murdoch has spoken of charging
for access to newspaper web sites, in part be-
cause The Wall St Journal, which he also now
owns, has proved its capacity to earn revenue
through web subscriptions. But that experi-
ment is unlikely to be replicated easily else-
where and it is hard to see how subscription
web sites can succeed while the same mate-
rial is available free on other web sites – for
instance here via the RTE web site and in the
UK via the BBC web site.
A new idea has emerged recently in Amer-
ica via the hugely successful
books site, amazon.com. It
has devised an electronic book
reader, Kindle, which can also
download newspapers and
magazine from the web. But
the downloads come not via
the web-sites of their news-
papers and magazine but by
way of a protected document
format (PDF) – the whole newspaper or maga-
zine is downloaded in one go and automatical-
ly printed if required. The new Kindle device
is such that the newspaper or magazine can
be read in a format very similar to the print
editions.
Apparently customers are willing to pay
for these downloads, whereas they are un-
willing to pay for access to the web-site. Pilot
surveys are being conducted by The New York
Times and The Washington Post to determine
how popular this might be. The cost of supply-
ing the electronic device to would-be custom-
ers at a hugely-subsidised price suggests it will
be difficult for them.
“Newspapers everywhere are
imperilled”
Vincent Browne
11
ago, I got a good slagging from
a Sunday newspaper for suggesting that per-
haps society needs to find a non-commercial
means of subsidising good but unprofitable
print journalism, in part-compensation for
the limitations of the market.
Oh, I guess I had the slag coming to me,
since it smacked of special pleading and was
made in the pages of unprofitable Village. In
my own small way I embody a sort of State
subsidy to journalism. My day job teaching
and studying journalism in a public institution
not only informs my writing in spaces such
as this one, it also makes it financially viable
for me to devote bits of my own time to doing
journalistic work that, however interesting,
would never feed and clothe a family if it were
my sole source of income.
In any case, in the journalistic cries
for help have been coming thick and fast. It
is now suddenly a commonplace observation
across the Western world that print jour-
nalism is, in effect, a charity case. Newspa-
pers from provincial Ireland to metropolitan
America have been going out of business; a bill
has appeared in the US senate that would al-
low them to become non-profit enterprises
and avail of a more favourable tax regime.
The New York Times, in the midst of its
own money crisis, recently sent its star colum-
nist Maureen Dowd careering across a conti-
nent to see if there were any “business models”
out there that could save not only newspapers,
but the profession of journalism itself.
Closer to home, Independent News and
Media keeps finding itself in the news for all
the wrong reasons, and the financial troubles
at the Irish Times are sure to be a bigger public
talking point in the coming months.
Few and far between, suddenly, are the
pundits who voice confidence that the market
will sort this all out. Even journalists who are
allergic to the idea of state support are turn-
ing to charitable backing: the biggest investi-
gative newsroom in the United States, with an
editor who came from the Wall Street Journal,
belongs not to a commercial outfit but to Pro-
Publica, funded by foundation donations.
There is, however, not enough of this sort
of money to go around, especially in a finan-
cial crisis, and we haven’t yet got the full mea-
sure of the strings that are surely attached to
charitable funding.
Now that the mainstream chorus has come
belatedly to sing the song about journalism’s
possibly terminal trouble, I’m sorely tempt-
ed to change my tune. The great Anglo-Irish-
American journalist Alexander Cockburn, so
often a model of contrarian good sense, advis-
es, in effect, a joyful dance on the sepulchres
of the mainstream papers. In a recent arti-
cle on his CounterPunch website, he quotes
Bruce Anderson, an “alternative-press” edi-
tor: “I don’t even want them to rest in peace.
I want them to twist and turn in their graves
eternally.”
Our newspapers are, it is true, a sorry ex-
cuse for journalism. The last time I did one
of those morning-radio panels where we talk
through the newspapers, I swore I would nev-
er do it again – not because I hate the sound of
my own voice, but because the papers them-
selves are such a dispiriting spectacle. They
are bad, and getting worse.
A case in point, well documented here by
Miriam Cotton last month, is the disgraceful,
Garda-fed coverage of the Shell shenanigans.
(The head of the Garda Press Office in Dublin
is fresh from duty in Belmullet, making him
an old hand at this story.) When it comes to
Mayo and other stories involving the Garda
– a force that can and does, af-
ter all, occasionally use lethal
force, making close scrutiny
of it an urgent necessity – you
could count on one hand the
number of relevant reporters
in this country who don’t rou-
tinely treat Garda statements
as fact.
And yet… bearing in mind
the warning from the great In-
dian reporter P Sainath, who
warned not to confuse news-
papers with journalism, I find
it hard to share Cockburn’s
revolutionary optimism. Very
fine journalists have, after all, been employed
by even the lousiest of newspapers. When
newspapers die, who will pay them?
The recent cases of young journalists,
working freelance or for marginal outlets, get-
ting locked up in Iran and North Korea, re-
mind us that some substantial institutional ad-
vice and back-up is vital when a reporter finds
herself doing a potentially dangerous story.
As such institutions dissolve, too much real
journalistic wisdom could die with them.
“in 2009 the journalistic cries
for help have been coming
thick and fast”
—
Harry Browne
