Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
The matter of Charles Haughey’s relationship with the then Sunday Independent gossip columnist, Terry Keane, is one of the most important stories to know, if one wants to understand Ireland’s chattering classes. The relationship itself was, of course, of no particular importance – what is important is the fact that it was one of those things that “everybody knew”.
When the news broke, in 1999, everyone who was anyone in the upper tiers of Irish polite society took to their newspaper columns and guest slots on radio columns to say that everybody knew, of course.
It was an open secret. It was well known. Professing to have known it for years was presented as a commentary on the story, but it was, in almost every instance, a commentary on the speaker or writer themselves: I knew. I was in the kind of rarified circles where it was openly discussed.
Because most people, it is fair to say, did not know. And any single one of the journalists and commentators who had known about it, as they assured us, with certainty, could at any time have made something of a name for themselves by reporting the story. Certainly, in the Ireland that existed when Haughey was in power, it would have been a massive and important story, and the journalist who broke it would have made a name for themselves. But, of course, at a price. Rocking the boat and saying out loud the thing that everyone knows is, in Irish journalism, a good way of putting yourself on a one-way trip to the career doghouse. As Don Corleone says, in The Godfather: Never tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking, again.
This all comes to mind in the context of the ongoing great national conversation about crime in Dublin. The state of Dublin’s inner city has, it’s fair to say, been one of those things that everyone has known about for some time. And yet, until recently, to mention it was to identify yourself as a sort of right wing crank, looking for something to be annoyed about.
Because the other thing about Ireland’s chattering classes is that they love the Green Jersey. There are fewer more excommunicable offences than to be seen to talk down the country. Talking down the country is taboo for two reasons: First, and most importantly, that it might give succour to political forces outside the ones we’re used to. Nobody wants to be the journalist who says “Dublin is a Kip”, only to see Justin Barrett, or someone only vaguely less awful, win a City Council seat on a “Dublin is a kip” platform. Because we all know who’d get the blame for that – the poor sap who legitimised Barrett’s campaign. Second, and almost as importantly, it might make us look bad compared to the true enemy – the Brits.
And so, for years, Dublin went on becoming a worse and worse kip, and the chattering classes were absolutely determined to look the other way on the basis that being the one to loudly identify a problem and call it what it is ranks up there with criticising Sinead O’Connor in the week of her death as “bad career moves” in Irish journalism. It wasn’t until an American got attacked, and people outside Ireland started talking about Dublin being a kip, that our lot were allowed to talk about it as well.
And now they can’t stop talking about it. Because it is now permitted to talk about it, so they can get it all off their chests – that’s why we now have articles in national newspapers talking about the “air of menace” in Dublin City Centre, as if this is just something they only noticed yesterday. For the record, the Headquarters of the Irish Times is smack bang in the middle of the City Centre. They knew full well.
It is also, by the way, something that everybody knows that the Irish Government’s immigration policy is deeply unpopular with the public. And that many of the facilities are over-crowded, and poorly managed. And that – to put it charitably – putting large numbers of idle young men into communities with few facilities to integrate them is leading to what we might charitably call “policing challenges”.
But like Terry Keane, and like the state of Dublin, it is dangerous to say aloud the things that everybody knows. Specifically with regards to immigration, how does an ambitious young, or middle aged reporter frankly discuss a problem, without appearing to also say that some of those dreadful far right protestors have a point? It’s very hard to do that, and maintain a career in newsrooms where it is de-rigeur to publish, as the Examiner did this weekend, hysterical screeds comparing the Catholic Church to the Taliban. If you value your bread, then you must learn what side the butter is on.
But everybody knows these things. And eventually, when it is safe to say so, every last one of them will be on the radio, as they were in 1999, and they are this week, to say exactly that: Everybody knew, really.
This will close in 10 seconds