This has been the most astonishingly dull election campaign in living memory, and that is not for want of interesting things to talk about. An immigration crisis rocks social cohesion, the nation’s security, particularly maritime, is understood to be unprecedentedly precarious and a trade shock to set the economy back years is potentially incoming.
Listening to the debates, though, you wouldn’t really know any of that. No, much of the election cycle has been spent discussing scandals and clickbait-y stories that have arisen over the course of the past three weeks. It makes sense that that’s so – better grounds upon which to attack your opponents, especially when there’s increasingly little to distinguish your platforms, other than which groups of people you’d throw money at.
As a result, we’ve had extensive discussion and dissection of who’d go into Government with who, Fine Gael’s Kanturk/John McGahon difficulties and Sinn Féin’s RTÉ objectivity pledge, with the usual smattering of low public priority topics like Israel-Gaza and climate change. Of the big three, Fianna Fáil and its helmsman Micheál Martin have hardly registered at all.
Like I’ve said, it suits the candidates well enough to duke it out on these grounds as they must be aware, on some level, that it puts the viewing public to sleep or encourages them to change the channel, and it gives them something easy to grip and beat their opponents with. Hence my weakly-held conviction that Mary Lou McDonald came out the victor of Tuesday night’s Leaders’ Debate, despite having done little to promote or defend her own party’s policies. All she had to do was take aim at “tweedledum and tweedledee” using the ample ammunition a century of watching them govern has given her party.
The intelligibility of this debate strategy does nothing to change the fact that it’s of unbearably poor quality, while the spectacle of it actually does much to shine a light on the disservice our “public service broadcaster” is doing us.
RTÉ’s performance over the past three weeks has been woeful, both in relation to the election and without. Take Katie Hannon’s dreadful moderation during last week’s party leader’s debate, which probed said leaders on immigration for roughly three minutes, without a mention of crime or anything more substantive than an economic shouting match.
Coupled with, as mentioned, Tuesday’s Leaders’ Debate, so usefully facilitated by RTÉ, which informed the viewer of nothing more than that they’re going to be stuck with at least one of these three for the next five years.
The reality is that both politicians and the public service broadcaster have settled into a comfortable pattern in Ireland that needs to be disrupted for the health of the country. We’re living in serious times. Everyone knows it. Other countries are acting accordingly. Our lot, bar a handful of exceptions, are campaigning as though it’s the early noughties, paying mere lip service to the troubles that they seem to believe can be pushed back beyond the horizon Friday represents.
This is being facilitated by the State broadcaster, whose ‘fiery’ debate style might have just passed in 2016, despite the winds of change blowing even then, but surely cannot be sanctioned now. The public appetites for scouring inquiry and political alternatives are unavoidable at this stage – indeed, this publication and the surge in contender parties dominating the alternative/social media spaces testify to that reality.
Don’t expect that reality to be heeded anytime soon. While it might seem tangential, I believe Patrick Kielty’s equally embarrassing performance last Friday night with British broadcaster Piers Morgan provided some useful insight into the sleepwalking going on around the halls of Montrose. No shifting sands as far as they’re concerned.
If you haven’t seen it, Kielty said that Morgan isn’t just controversial in his views, he’s outright “wrong”. Alarm bells must have started ringing in the Late Late presenter’s ears as Morgan responded, “Let’s test that theory”, before asking him to elaborate on which of Morgan’s views he finds “so wrong”.
Kielty was clearly caught flat-footed. His eyes widened and he played for time, looking at his watch and asking “how long have we got,” much to Morgan’s justified amusement.
The best Kielty could offer was the suggestion that Morgan supports Trump (a moral crime that a majority of American voters is guilty of, apparently), which Morgan regardless denied, clarifying that he thought Trump would win. Kielty followed this up with a bizarre question about whether or not the Englishman would take a job with Trump in the morning, were he offered it, which Morgan denied, saying “I’m a journalist. I don’t take jobs from administrations in government…absolutely not”.
I lay out the text of the exchange here not because I’m an enormous Piers Morgan fan, but because the ignorant righteousness of RTÉ’s flagship presenter was, quite simply, fantastical. If you haven’t watched the clip, I encourage you to do so – the body language only adds to the effect.
I use the word, “fantastical” because that’s precisely what it is – indicative of the liberal fantasy land the Irish elite still occupy. Leaving aside that Kielty couldn’t conjure any actual wrongthink to mind when pushed on it, he attacked the legitimate decision of the American people in their recent election. Whether you agree with that decision or not, it was born out of a national belief that their country is headed in a direction they no longer want to go in, and that Trump represents the best change-of-course available to them.
If you were to evaluate RTÉ off the previous three weeks alone, from a “public service” standpoint, you’d chalk it up as useless. Possibly worse than useless, because far from grilling the candidates they often get exclusive access to, they provide them with a stage to carry out business as usual nonsense.
There’s nothing “business as usual” about the times we’re living in, and what we’ve seen since the announcement of the general election is a complete system-failure as both candidates and the supposed guardians of the truth fail to acknowledge that and act accordingly. The failure of the next government and our outdated public bodies have been written all over this campaign, and something better is going to have to be salvaged from the ruins over the next five years.
A real “public service broadcaster” would have served the public over the status quo in recent weeks by sparing us the insipid deluge of slop we’ve been treated to. Our politicians hoping to extend their time in office, and those hoping to break in, could have been grilled on their failure, or their plans, to address the immigration crisis. The flight of our youth abroad. Outrageously wasteful public expenditure.
But we didn’t get any of that. They failed to hold them to account, and in doing so have failed to uphold their mandate.