Feckers (25 page)

If an Englishman’s home is his castle, an Irishman’s car is his chariot, his indispensable ally in moving about his benighted island home. In Dublin there is, for most people, no alternative to driving into the city. Visitors to our capital city choke in disbelief when informed that there is no rail link between Dublin city centre and Dublin airport, a neglect which has led to half of north Dublin being turned into a car park and made the process of parking a car at the airport more time-consuming than the air journey between Dublin and London. The very same authorities which recently introduced wheel clamping have for decades stonewalled attempts to progress with any form of underground or light rail system for Dublin. The same people who have wined and dined and winked and nodded with lobbyists for the road and motor industries, now lecture us about our dependency on the motor car.

The man to ultimately blame is Owen Keegan. From the very moment of his appointment as head of traffic with Dublin Corporation, it began to seem obvious that Mr Keegan did not like motor vehicles very much. He introduced a series of traffic restrictions in Dublin with no apparent purpose but to drive drivers mad. Once, for example, you could turn right from South Great George’s Street on to Dame Street. At a stroke of Mr Keegan’s pen, this simple manoeuvre was arbitrarily outlawed, and anyone wanting to access College Green from South Great George’s Street had to detour around Christ Church and up along the quays. In any other context, apparent doltishness would be seen for what it is, but Mr Keegan was knowingly playing to a gallery of bicycle-clipped commentators guaranteed to hail every attempt to stick it to the motorist, regardless of legality or sense.

For years, Irish car owners had been browbeaten into believing that they are a class of neo-criminals who poison the atmosphere, endanger public safety and block the roads. That they have been made to believe this, while simultaneously being forced to pay for these selfsame roads, was an awesome feat of public indoctrination. That car drivers had been persuaded that traffic chaos in Dublin and elsewhere was the result of their selfishness, their lack of public spirit, was one of the great wonders of the modern world.

In a modern society, a motor car is, for better or worse, an extension of the self, an essential means of getting about and taking care of business and responsibility. To clamp the motor vehicle of a citizen, therefore, is tantamount to withdrawing that person’s liberty for the purpose of revenue collection. It is unthinkable that even unelected bureaucrats like Owen Keegan could succeed in the reintroduction of the stocks. Yet citizens stand disconsolately by as this menace to society stealthily introduces a tyranny just as immobilizing of personal liberty, and therefore equally monstrous.

45
Ryan Tubridy

S
omewhere, deep in the pancreas of RTE is a memo which goes something like this: ‘If Gay Byrne’s contribution was to the modernization of Irish society, that of his successor must be to its postmodernization.’ Since there is dispute among cultural commentators about the precise meaning of the term, we should perhaps declare that an Irish postmodernist is someone who doesn’t give a shite about anything. In television terms, it is someone with a talent for running up and down steps carrying a phallus-shaped microphone, asking ‘wacky’ questions of the audience.

RTE, like most organizations in today’s Ireland, is run by fogeys of various ages, mostly the older variety, who desire, above all, to hold on to their positions of influence. But there is a problem: all these Young People are drifting about out there and feck knows what they’d be thinking about. All we know is they like comedy, drink, Internet chatrooms, headbanging music and drugs that make them jump about uncontrollably. Obviously, whoever would inherit the mantle of the Great Gaybo should be someone with some clue about what makes them feckers ‘tick’. The fogeys’ objective was to give the younger generations influence without power, so that fogeyism could remain in control until well into the third millennium.

Pat Kenny was half-right when, before he took it on and spent a decade driving it into the ground, he said that, following Gaybo’s departure,
The Late Late
should be ‘parked’. In fact, it should have been clamped, towed away, stripped to its chassis and melted down for scrap.

The ethos of
The Late Late
, up until the end of the second millennium, implied some level of concern about Irish society. For
The Late Late
to prosper, it was necessary for the audience to believe that Ireland was something more than a piece of ground on which various activities – work, drinking, dancing, sex – might take place. But nobody will ever again care as much about Ireland as the post-emergency generations who wasted their youths talking about it, and no future presenter of
The Late Late
could possibly tolerate the level of hype which Uncle Gaybo, acting as Father Confessor to this obsessive generation, brought to bear on the subject.

There was a time, coinciding with the heyday of
The Late Late
, when it was possible to talk without irony about television having an ‘impact’ on something called ‘Irish society’. Now it is not possible to talk without irony about anything. To retain credibility as a Young Person today, it is essential that you know as little as possible about issues of public importance. Knowing the name of the incumbent Taoiseach, never mind the names of his predecessors, is a complete no-no. Young people today don’t give a blogger’s fart about ‘Irish society’, still less know why they should spend their Friday nights watching it being impacted upon. Neither do they believe television has any business conducting ‘debates’. Television is there to make you laugh, to sell you things, to dull the ache in your left temple, to keep boredom at bay and to sober you up for the next party. This condition, which once we would have called apathy, has been formed largely by the fogeys’ determination to devolve use of the media without devolving power. To maintain fogery in power, the coming generation of fogeys is to be given fame without influence, to be allowed on television but not to put it to any use. And this suits the young fogeys fine.

Ryan Tubridy is the answer to the old fogeys’ wet dreams: a young fogey who is interested in the rewards of television without caring much about its power. He is a kind of postmodern Gaybo in that he has the patter down pat and much better than Pat.

Even before he got the job, Ryan Tubridy talked about not wanting to have ‘long-winded current affairs debates’ on his
Late Late
. Then, in the next breath, he insisted that he was a serious guy. Tubridy is extremely bright, in the sense that he has a sharp intelligence and a natural curiosity. He is extraordinarily, genuinely, likeable, and this allows him to get away with things almost nobody else could. His personality conceals how hard he has worked to make himself look like a natural. He also knows something about stuff – politics, books, movies, celebrity fluff – but perhaps not enough about anything to be really lethal. On the debit side, he seems far too concerned about what people think of him, especially people of his own generation, most of whom he seems to think brighter than himself. This creates a wariness of depth that causes his hoe more often to merely scratch the surface of things, where Gaybo’s cut deep and sure. This tendency has emerged in his very first programme, in an interview with the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, when Tubridy seemed more interested in asking hard questions than getting interesting answers.

In his very first show as
Late Late
presenter, in September 2009, he interviewed Brian Cowen, on the defensive after a rough fifteen months as Taoiseach. It was, on the surface, an uncompromising interview. Tubridy asked several are-you-still-beating-your-wife questions. Was he sorry for anything? Would he apologize for his mistakes? Was that an apology or not? Cowen was asked about NAMA and Bertie’s perfect timing and whether he, Cowen, actually enjoyed being Taoiseach. Did he ever wake up and ask, ‘Why me?’

But often it seemed that Tubridy was asking questions for the sake of asking them, rather than for the answers – as though he wanted above all to avoid the accusation that he had dodged putting his man on the spot. A potentially car-crash question about the Taoiseach’s drinking came wrapped up in a standard ‘what-do-you-say-to-those-who . . .?’ formulation, with Tubridy fingering a Sunday newspaper for already raising the issue, and then all but apologizing for asking. Was he, he wondered aloud, annoying Cowen? Maybe, he mused just as Cowen started to answer, it was too personal a question? It was impossible to avoid the suspicion that Tubridy seemed to want to retain Cowen’s affections more than he needed to get real answers. And yet, the ostensible impression was of a tough interview in which Cowen was asked things he hadn’t been asked before.

The core problem with Tubridy is that he seems to be aware mainly of the prestige and celebrity status of his position as
Late Late
host, as opposed to having a sense of the meaning and importance of the show as a cultural lever. He wants to be an Irish Letterman, but without any sense of what, other than imitation, this might involve. Tubridy always wanted to be a broadcaster, but it is as yet by no means clear what he wanted to be a broadcaster for. There is no sense of a mission, other than to be ‘on the radio’ or ‘on the telly’, saying stuff. He is extremely good at it, at effecting an impersonation of a great broadcaster operating at the centre of his society, but he has yet to discover what he wants to do with that power.

In this he is quintessentially representative of his generation, which is fascinated with the cultural mechanisms it inherited but unable to put them to any use. Tubridy will never become the greatest Irish broadcaster of the twenty-first century by coasting in the slipstream created by the giants who preceded him, never taking anything seriously enough to seem ‘uncool’. He may go on being able to fake it for a while. But unless, while that red light glows, he engages with the stuff of the society – the very things that, glancing towards his gallery, he dismisses as ‘long-winded’ – he will never be anything but a magpie who picks up fascinating thoughts, looks at them in wry wonder and throws them away. And in a while it will show. Nobody will be able to say what the problem is, but one day people will begin to mutter that Ryan Tubridy, who once seemed so promising, has become sooo yesterday.

46
Seanie FitzPatrick

R
eviewing the damage done in hard currency, and perceiving the disaster in terms of its final playing out, it would be possible, without attracting much in the way of criticism or dissent, to fill any list of fifty feckers who fecked up Ireland with the names of fifty bankers.

In the case of Seanie FitzPatrick, former Chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, the amounts of folding stuff involved are so gargantuan as to make it a plausible proposition that Seanie was single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the Irish economy and the pauperizing of at least two generations of Irish people.

To make it worse, if such were possible, it emerged that Seanie had for years been doctoring the accounts at Anglo Irish Bank to make it appear that the bank was more solvent than it was. Sleights of hand were used to ‘flatter’ the balance sheets, with major customers being encouraged to make short-term lodgements coming up to the end of the financial year. These ‘bed and breakfast’ arrangements gave the impression of a healthy rate of deposits, which kept the regulators and credit agencies happy.

It gradually emerged that this practice of ‘balance sheet management’ was widespread in the Irish banking sector. Seanie, of course, not being a man to do things by halves, had taken the device to the level of high art. He had himself borrowed some
€
85 million from his own bank, of which
€
68 million had been written off by the obliging management. Other directors had borrowed a total of
€
56 million, of which some
€
40 million had been written off.

It’s known as the ‘Celtic Chernobyl’. The figures, no matter how you cut them, were beyond belief. The banking crisis would cost every family in Ireland something like
€
2,000 a year for far longer than anyone could foresee, the equivalent of
€
50,000 added to every mortgage in the land. All Irish banks were disaster areas, but Anglo Irish was the worst, accounting for debts of
€
40 billion and rising by the day. It was as if nothing that had happened in Ireland for the previous fifteen years – or indeed for the seventy-five years or so before that – had had any purpose or merit at all. Everything had come not just to nothing, but to a lot less than nothing.