While Fintan O’Toole disappears into the kitchen of his comfortable Glasnevin home to make coffee, your Hot Press correspondent sneaks a peek at the Irish Times columnist’s overflowing bookshelves and untidy CD racks. His tastes are as eclectic as you might expect of the man described by the London Independent as “Ireland’s most interesting journalist” (the Irish version sarcastically dismisses him as “the full-time conscience of liberal Ireland”).

His two teenage sons probably own the Queens Of The Stone Age and Franz Ferdinand albums, but chances are that the Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Kate Bush, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan CDs are all Fintan’s. In amongst the various biographies and weighty political tomes adorning his bookshelves, Nick Cave’s And The Ass Saw The Angel rubs shoulders with Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Things Past; Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha sits alongside Nina Fitzpatrick’s Fables Of The Irish Intelligentsia.
A few of O’Toole’s own titles are there also. The 51-year-old Dublin intellectual has written numerous acclaimed books over the years – ranging from theatre criticism and historical biographies to journalism collections and political polemics.
His latest publication, Ship Of Fools, definitely falls into the latter category. It’s a short, scalpel-sharp, satirical and scathing examination of “how stupidity and corruption sank the Celtic Tiger.” It should be required reading for any Irish citizen currently struggling to pay a massive mortgage on a shoebox apartment, waiting on a trolley in a crowded hospital corridor, or queueing despondently down the welfare office.
OLAF TYARANSEN: When was the last time you punched somebody in the face, Fintan?
FINTAN O’TOOLE: Em... [laughs]. I’m sure it was when I was about nine or ten, and I would almost be certain it was my brother. Not an unusual answer! I was a very stupid kid, my brother was two-and-a-half years older than me and was quite – even apart from being older and therefore obviously stronger – he was also more strongly built than I was. And I always started fights with him and always got the shit kicked out of me – and would do the same thing the next day! Other than that, I’d say I’ve never punched anybody as an adult.
I ask that question only because I really felt like punching quite a lot of people by the time I’d finished reading your book.
I suppose this is my verbal equivalence of punching [smiles wryly].
Even though I already knew all of this stuff, it’s quite shocking when you read it as a straight polemic.
Yeah. I wrote it in a very concentrated period of five or six weeks over the summer and I found myself being shocked by stuff I already knew – and angry. It’s only when you actually think about it in that relatively structured way that... just the sheer scale of the stupidity and the corruption. It just hits you again and again and again that, of course, none of this was about stuff that we didn’t know. People were saying to me, “Well what’s new in the book, what’s it about?” and in a way everything, because we seem to know nothing, even though we did know it, everything was out there, and it was obvious.
They all learned from the master.
Charlie Haughey was a genius. He understood something about Ireland that every other really corrupt leader in Europe, and God knows there have been plenty of them, they always tried to hide it – and Bertie of course tried to hide it, you know, “I’m just an ordinary Joe, I just live in this nice little house, I’m not interested in more than that except Sky Sports and having a few pints.” But Charlie understood something really fundamental, which was that, in Ireland, if you rub people’s noses in it, they don’t see it – it becomes invisible.
You hide in plain sight.
Exactly, it just becomes a fact, it’s just part of the way reality works. And therefore, because it’s a fact, it’s absolutely unremarkable. Whereas if you tried to hide it, there might be a chance that you would get caught, and that the revelation itself would become a bit of an issue – although, as we discovered, even that’s kind of questionable. But, it’s not so much that Charlie created that culture, but that he understood it in a really fundamental way.
And when you think about that great moment in My Ireland, remember the television programme that he did when he was out of office in the early Eighties? It’s an absolute classic but Channel 4 were doing a series called My London or my whatever it is, and Haughey was doing My Ireland. But there was actually a scene in it where I’m surprised it was broadcast, it was like “Charlie at the races” and he was vaporing about Irish soul, or horse racing and the Irish soul, and Larry Hagman dressed as J.R. Ewing comes over to him with his 10-gallon hat and hands him a dud thousand dollar bill. And Charlie obviously had editing rights over this because they were personal views, and they were personal films, so he obviously decided to leave this in! And anybody else would have said, “Oh Jesus, get that out!” you know, knowing what Charlie knew about himself, but he obviously just thought it was really funny.
Maybe he just understood celebrity culture even then – you know, realised that ordinary people would be wildly impressed: “Wow, you met your man from Dallas!”
You met your man from Dallas, exactly! And he gave him a dud thousand dollar bill!
Did you watch the new comedy series Val Falvey TD on RTE last night?
Yeah, I just watched it last night. I thought it was quite funny. I’d certainly watch it again – which you don’t always say with RTE comedies. I thought some of the farcical stuff wasn’t very good in it, but there were some great lines. I loved Owen Roe particularly as the handler. I think he just gets something about the way that world operates and the set attitudes, and the put-upon weariness of it actually is really good for the times as well. I really hope it works. The first episodes of comedy are usually the worst anyway – if it develops it could actually be quite significant.
When you wrote your book about the Beef Tribunal [1994’s Meanwhile Back at the Ranch], it detailed a lot of serious top level political fraud and criminal activity – yet absolutely nothing happened, nothing at all. So what are you expecting to happen with this?
Well, in some ways, I’m still completely unconvinced that that culture of impunity has gone. I’ve just been writing a column for tomorrow about this guy – this is in 2009, June 2009, when we know the consequences of this sort of thing, the shit has hit the fan – this guy called Michael Clarke in Sligo, who was actually arrested for being in league with a corrupt Department of Agriculture official. There was a Department of Agriculture grant scheme, the official was issuing cheques to bogus farmers and this fella was cashing them. He had run as a Fianna Fail councillor before this, before he was prosecuted and had to spend two years in jail for fraud, which is quite an achievement in Ireland, not too many people manage to get jailed for fraud [laughs]. It was so flagrant; he went to jail for fraud, came out, stood in the local elections in June 2009 – and he topped the poll! It’s still going on, there’s still a sense of a public culture of impunity. It’s not just that the authorities don’t prosecute these people, and it’s never explained to us why not. But in a way, people like me can bang on about it, but the evidence is that the public don’t mind, they do re-elect these people.
That’s another issue you raise in Ship of Fools – that large swathes of the voting public are just as culpable because they actually allow this stuff to happen.
Absolutely, and you mentioned the Beef Tribunal stuff, and in a way, looking back on that now, I think I was kind of naive for having this belief that if only people knew what these people are up to, then things will have to change, people would be revolted by it. And by the fact that nothing changed, it’s actually worse. It isn’t just that nothing changes, it’s actually that, first of all, you take away that naive hope that things will change, but secondly, the message that goes out is, ‘You can do what you like, and you can get caught’. It used to be, ‘You could do what you like, and maybe if you got caught it might be a problem’. But what we establish in the culture is absolute impunity that you now know you can get away with it, and when you know you can get away with it, it actually gets worse. So the complete shamelessness... You look at guys like Michael Lowry. Just not even the slightest idea that they’d ever done anything wrong, or even the need to pay lip service to the idea.
Well, as Lowry himself told the Sindo, it was just that the “hob knobs” had it in for him.
Hob knobs, yeah! It’s all the hob knobs up in Dublin! And then I think it does feed down into local constituencies because you get this weird Irish logic, which is “Charlie Haughey got away with it; why are they going after poor Michael?” And then the localism kicks in: “Oh it’s because he’s a Tipperary man, it’s those fuckers up in Dublin are getting this Tipperary man!” And you get this very, very strange kind of thinking; the more impunity there is, the more unfair it seems if anybody does get prosecuted because they must be picking him out for some reason, and the more people then come to tolerate this, there’s a kind of vicious circle I think in relation to all that stuff that just became endemic.
You didn’t mention Beverley Flynn in the book. I would have thought she was a glaring example of that.
There were plenty of examples actually! [laughs] I mean you could go on... Actually I probably should have mentioned Beverley Flynn. The proudest moment of my life was when Beverley Flynn was being kicked out of the Fianna Fail party for convenience at that time when she lost the case against RTE, and it was widely reported that the main point in her speech to the paramilitary party against the idea that she should be kicked out was just to “think of how much pleasure it would give Fintan O’Toole if you expelled me from the party” [laughs]. That was kind of pleasing.
But, you know you can go through the examples again and again, or maybe put it the other way around, that there isn’t a single example of someone who was found to be corrupt, was found to be encouraging tax evasion as Flynn was, to be engaged in tax evasion, or any of those crimes, being punished for it, in electoral terms, never mind in legal terms.
The Bailey brothers spring to mind.
Yeah. The most outstanding example in the book are the Bailey brothers, who are still the largest property developers in the country, who are still being funded by the tax payers – the tax payers are still giving these people money through Anglo-Irish Bank. We know they were engaged in bribery, we know they were engaged in massive tax evasion, we know they perjured themselves to the tribunals. All that’s established, but there’s not a single thing... there’s no shame, there’s no loss of connections with, say the Fianna Fail tent or anything, but also no legal action, no possibility of any kind of legal action, no one even asking, “Why is there no legal action against these guys?”
You were based in America for a year, when you worked as drama critic for the New York Daily News. Would you favour a more Americanised judicial approach to these matters?
Absolutely. There’s a lot wrong with America, but they take capitalism seriously, and therefore they believe that if you are manipulating the stock market, if you are cooking the books, or if you are involved in corruption, that these are serious offences. In order to run a capitalist system, you have to be seen to be serious about this sort of stuff, and that means that white collar crime is crime, it’s just crime in the same way as anything else. The contrast between that and our system is absolute.
I mean they have a piece of legislation in the States called, which was anti-mafia legislation, but I just love the title of it, which is the RICO Act – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisation Act. And Fianna Fail is RICO; it’s a racketeer influenced and corrupt organisation, and we don’t use that language. Again it’s part of this denial of the reality which stares us in the face, that we’ve had absolutely outrageous racketeering going on at very, very high levels for a very long time.
Personally I’m amazed that the public are continuing to take this shit. If this was France, the Dail would’ve been burnt to the ground a decade ago. The Irish people have this reputation as being ungovernable, wild and rebellious, but actually they’re the complete opposite. What are your feelings on that?
I think there is a paradox actually, which is that I think we are both incredibly passive and anarchic, but anarchic, not in a sort of good libertarian way, but we’re anarchic in a way that we still don’t believe in the public row, we still don’t believe that what happens around us is our business, we still don’t really believe in the law in any kind of fundamental way. There’s still an idea that the law is personal, it’s there to be manipulated, it’s there to be applied by all means to certain categories of people who are outside of us.
I know you have written really powerfully about the way the drug laws, for example, are framed and used in terms of social control and describing a certain kind of deviancy, and you can do all that, but when it comes to individuals, there’s still this absolute belief that if you have any power or any pull that the law can be manipulated.
On the one hand, there is a deep anarchism, there’s a lack of belief actually in impersonal institutions that operates regardless of who you are, and that there are some kind of neutral standards or objective standards that are applied to behaviour, and then on the other hand there’s this kind of...
Passivity.
Absolutely! A public passivity. So at the one hand, we kind of expect to get away with anything in that anarchic realm, and in the other realm, the quid pro quo for that is that we don’t want the public realm to bother us and in a way they’re sort of part of the same thing. But the anarchism is about you leave us alone, and we’ll do whatever we want, we’ll build a house wherever we want, we’ll drink and drive, we’ll bribe councillors, whatever has to happen, we’ll do, and the other side of that is, ‘We’ll leave you alone’ – that actually, we really don’t take ownership of and we don’t regard public institutions, politics, the state, as being ours. There’s still this kind of legacy of thinking of it as ‘them’, and therefore, however outrageously the state behaves, however outrageously corrupted it is, we still think, “Well, it’s somebody else’s business.” And you’re actually right about the lack of public protests about these shysters, the lack of public protests about NAMA I find very depressing.
You’ve written previously about the Shell to Sea protests in Mayo. Given that there’s billions of euros worth of oil and gas off the north-west coast for which, thanks to an obviously dodgy deal done by Ray Burke, the Irish people will receive not a single cent in royalties, do you feel that there should be an investigation or public inquiry?
Well, I’ve written about this quite a few times – that this again is part of the passivity. I remember writing a column saying, “it’s completely untrue to say that the Corrib Gas Field won’t build hospitals and schools and pensions, and have fantastic social results because it absolutely will – in Norway.” Because the Norwegians own a third of it, and the Norwegians use their oil money to put it away into huge funds and they use it over the long term to build social facilities and protect people’s pensions and all that sort of stuff. That’s what they’ve done with their own oil and then they buy it up elsewhere, including Corrib.
It’s probably too late to have an investigation in relation to Corrib, I think. The main point is we know that Ray Burke was corrupt. Even if this deal itself was not directly influenced by corruption – although all the evidence suggests that it was – we know it’s an outrageous deal, it’s the equivalent of, in the music industry and all those guys who had the hits in the early 1960s who signed a piece of paper that said this song was really written by my manager – and they ended up getting a hundred dollars and told to piss off. And then the record becomes a classic, multi-million seller that keeps selling over the years. Our oil deal is exactly like that.
I don’t think legally or morally that the contract that was signed with the oil companies at that time can stand up, and even if it could stand up legally, it shouldn’t be allowed to stand up politically. And there’s a sort of spinelessness in terms of saying, “Oh well, we have to be seen to honour these deals”, and I’ve talked to politicians about this who should know better, who have admitted to me, they’ve said, “It’s appalling, absolutely terrible, but it would be very bad for Ireland’s reputation if we were seen to be reneging on this deal.” Well no actually, it wouldn’t, it would actually be very good for our reputation, first of all in Ireland. It might do a lot of good [laughs].
Your book is highly critical of those people who talked up the market and inflated the property bubble. Was the Irish Times not as complicit as anyone else in making buying property seem very attractive and the right thing to do?
I think the Irish Times, as well as every other part of the Irish media, absolutely was parasitic on the property bubble; there’s no arguments about that, I think.
Well, as assistant editor of that newspaper, did you not raise your concerns about it?
I suppose there’s two things to be said. One is that the separation of the commercial from the editorial in the Irish Times is quite important actually, and I would be a great supporter of that, and it sort of works both ways [laughs]. So just as a journalist you don’t want the commercial side of the house interfering in the editorial decisions, it’s actually very difficult to then turn around and say, “Actually we would prefer if you didn’t make all this money out of the property bubble.” And to be quite honest about it, there’s also a sense that an institution like the Irish Times makes the money while it can, it can’t raise money any other way, and it makes it from advertising – property advertising was the low hanging fruit. Property and recruitment were the two things that it made money out of, which of course is why the downturn hit so quickly because they are the two things that went first.
So you do take some responsibility?
There’s a responsibility which is shared by the journalists in the place, and I include myself in that. The other thing I’d like to say is that it is also true that the Irish Times published a huge amount of critical material editorially during all that period – including stuff which actually led to direct threats from the property industry that they would pull their advertising, they’d do all of that sort of stuff. And to be fair, I know for a fact that those threats were completely seen off. Whether that balances out the property porn is a perfectly legitimate question I think.
There are certainly aspects to all of that that I think need to be really looked at internally, and we have looked, things like prices for example, there’s no question – we now know that the estate agents were manipulating the publication of prices, that they were basically giving newspapers, including the Irish Times, prices for things which had sold at auction which were completely untrue. So they were using the newspapers themselves to inflate the price, even at that level – leave aside the bigger sort of ideology of the property ladder – there was a very direct attempt to say, “this house down the road sold for five hundred thousand, the next week the next house will be sold for six hundred thousand.” And of course, the more people saw houses in an area going for, then the more the next one was going to be worth, supposedly. And that absolutely did have a snowball effect, and the Irish Times was suckered into that as much as anybody else was.
Again, the only excuse you can make is you can say the Irish Times was the institution which eventually called foul on that, and actually discovered what was going on, and stopped publishing these prices, and publicised the fact that they had been duped and apologised to the public for it, said, “Look, this is what’s been happening, we didn’t know it was happening at the time”, and did that before everybody else did. But you still have to take responsibility for the fact that undoubtedly people were misled throughout that process – and that’s a journalistic responsibility as well as a commercial one – and we all failed to spot what was going on there.
Was there much anger amongst Irish Times journalists over the paper’s disastrous purchase of the website myhome.ie [for a reported €50 million] shortly before the property crash?
I think there was certainly a lot of scepticism, not so much anger at the time because nobody quite realised just how serious all this was going to get, but I think there was a lot of scepticism. Probably a sense that, given that the Irish Times was so dependent on the property market already in terms of revenue, I think people certainly questioned whether it was a good idea to become even more dependent by diversifying into the same market [laughs]. The rationale for it, I know, was a very immediate sense that if the Irish Times didn’t buy it, that the Guardian was going to buy it or one of the major British papers was going to buy it, and that the Irish Times would then find itself squeezed out of the online property developing market. I simply don’t know the truth of that, I genuinely don’t know whether somebody else was about to come in and buy myhome.ie. But even if that were true, I suppose the question then was always on people’s minds was, well even if you want to do that, the Irish Times itself is presumably a pretty strong brand and had an online presence. There would be an argument that the paper should have done that stuff itself if that was the way it was going to go. But there was definitely no question that there was this sense that property advertising is quite important and we have to hold onto it whatever happens. And I suppose, again I was making excuses, but the whole newspaper industry is deeply neurotic about online – nobody knows what the hell anybody’s doing in relation to it. The commercial models just don’t exist, and it’s not just in Ireland; I mean nobody knows.
What’s your opinion on blogging?
I don’t understand the difference between blogging and writing columns [laughs].
The pay cheque!
Yeah, it seems, very largely to be a way of getting people to do a lot of work for nothing. And people have asked me on occasion, “why don’t you have a blog?” – why on earth would I write more, do more of the same work, for no money? Maybe I’m missing something but I can perfectly understand why people who don’t have access... I’m obviously very privileged in that I do have access to mainstream media so it’s kind of easy for me to be complacent about it, and I could perfectly understand why, if I didn’t have a job in mainstream journalism I probably would be blogging. But there is also a sense that once you call it ‘blogging’ it means that it’s somehow supposed to be different, to me it’s just opinion columning, and it’s either good or bad in exactly the same way that opinion columning is. There are certainly some blogs which are better than the stuff in newspapers and there is certainly stuff that appears in newspapers that’s better than the average blog.
Do you read any blogs?
Not in any kind of consistent way, to be honest. I would sort of surf in odd moments and look at stuff, but there’s not a single blog that I read religiously, no.
Were you dismayed when the Times got into bed with the Mail for the Metro freesheet?
I suppose, my own view would be... not so much bothered about getting into bed with the Mail because if you’re doing commercial operations you’d probably get into bed with whatever substantial commercial partner is there. Metro was an existing model, that was the way to do it. I’m kind of sceptical about doing freesheets as a general principle, because I think if we are giving away newspapers in physical form, and at the same time we are giving away the online editions free, what’s the point of anyone paying for the printed edition of the paper which is still, for all the change, it’s still basically what we do? I think, And this is true of the Times, and this is true more generally – because we panicked, everybody panicked, we sort of undervalue for the public, we don’t place our value on what it is we do, which is producing independent journalism, or trying to do that, however well or badly we’re doing it, but that’s what we’re trying to do. And we sort of, in a way, colluded in a lie, which is that you can produce any journalism cheap or that you can give it away free, but you can’t – it has to be paid for. So my own scepticism would have been more to do with the fact that I’m not a big fan of the idea of giving away newspapers, rather than necessarily the Daily Mail, which was already in that market place. I suppose that made some kind of sense. And there were all sorts of considerations at the time about printing contracts and various other things like that that made some commercial sense at the time.
In your last Hot Press interview, you jokingly described yourself as an archbishop of Dublin, in that your Irish Times column is a kind of pulpit. I’m just wondering do you feel like you have to live your own personal life in a certain way because of the public opinions you express?
Yeah, absolutely I do, yeah. First of all, I think if you express opinions then you have to prepared to be judged by the same standards. And I think the opinions I express are reasonably coherent and consistent, which makes it even more the case. Like some columnists... if you change your opinions on a regular basis it’s not easy to judge you by which particular standards are you holding onto this week? [laughs] I suppose mine have been pretty much the same since... well, I’ve written a column for 21 years so, yeah, it’s absolutely reasonable.
Last year, a rival newspaper ran a story about the fact that you had planning permission problems with a second home in the west of Ireland. Would having a second home not be somewhat slightly at odds with the image of yourself that you portray?
I don’t think building a house in the west of Ireland is sinful. We were very, very careful about how we built, where we built, about the environmental sustainability of what we’ve done, I’ll go through it if you want. All of it’s paid for by two P.A.Y.E. salaries, so we’re not getting tax breaks, we weren’t exploiting anything in relation to it, and the purpose of building a house is, in the short term, having a place to work, which I need, and in the long term it’s a place to live, we fully intend to live there. It’s a place we’ve got a lot of connections with and I’m involved with various things down there, and really at the time it was an existing cottage which was for sale and it was in a place we particularly liked, so we decided to buy it and eventually we decided to extend it, and Ship of Fools was written there [laughs]. I don’t live an extravagant lifestyle, I don’t have a car...
Can you drive?
No [laughs]. I think I’m still probably the only person who takes part in these debates who has declared my salary on air, which I’m quite prepared to do...
How much is your salary?
It’s somewhat less than it was, it was about €90,000 this time last year... It was a very interesting experience, it was on Questions and Answers and people were pontificating about pay cuts for everybody else and it just struck me at the time – Jesus, I’m not going to have another discussion about pay cuts where everybody is earning vastly more than the average industrial wage – and I said “well, this is what I earn”, and I fully expected everybody else was going to say, “Well, actually, okay, I earn this and I earn that” and it was like I’d farted loudly on air! I mean you don’t talk about money, you don’t talk about what you earn, and I am well paid, I earn about eighty five thousand a year now. You can argue whatever, but by the standards of parts of the Irish media it’s not extravagant, and I live within those means and I don’t think building a house in and of itself is bad. My problem, and I do write about it in the book, was the building of houses purely for taxation purposes. So a huge amount of the building was done...
To shelter money rather than people.
Yeah. To shelter money; it was nothing to do with people’s personal desires or people’s personal plans, it was nothing to do with the idea of people actually living in these places, and it was nothing to do really with any sense of place. So that’s what my problem is, and I don’t think having a second house myself is inconsistent with that.
Well, my question really is do you feel under a certain amount of pressure being a public commentator with consistent views... You know, would you be embarrassed to be seen eating in L’Ecrivain or somewhere like that?
I’ve a certain sympathy with Karl Marx who got off the train in Manchester at one stage and vast numbers of people were waiting to greet him and were shocked to see Marx emerge from a first-class carriage! And he said, “but comrades, it’s the second class carriage that we are trying to abolish!” which is self-serving of course. But I don’t think that issues around social justice or issues around class come down to whether somebody eats in an expensive restaurant or has a nice house. I’m very strongly committed to the ideas of equality and I don’t think equality is ever going to express itself in everybody living exactly the same lifestyle or using their money in exactly the same way. As I said, my wife’s a teacher, I work for the Irish Times, that’s the income we have. We’ve comfortable middle-class incomes and we live within that, and absolutely, I eat in Chapter One, three or four times a year.
Sorry, I thought you were going to say week there. You’ve really lost touch!
No [laughs]. We go out, we blow money stupidly... I did, by the way, I don’t know if you really want full public disclosure, we did go on holiday to Venice and the best hundred euro I’ve ever spent was we got the water taxi from the airport into Venice. And knowingly, I’d say it’s the best hundred euro you will ever waste because it is just fucking brilliant! The sensation of arriving from water into Venice – or even better is leaving Venice. And I’ve no problem saying I will spend money like that. I think money should be spent on pleasure absolutely. I’m not a puritan, and I’ve never pretended to be. And similarly, I don’t care what Pat Kenny’s house is like or what people spend their money on, the issues are sort of much more serious than that I think and there are structural issues and issues around the capacity of some people to have choices and the incapacity of other people to have them, and they are structural in the way that they are distributed within the society.
Do you think it was wrong for Eoghan Harris to accept a Seanad seat from Bertie Ahern?
Yeah, I think it’s problematic for a columnist to take that kind of gift from a politician, and particularly I think, in the context where it was obviously a personal gift and Bertie was quite upfront about it, that it was in return for the fact that Eoghan Harris had protected him and defended him in the media.
That’s kind of scandalous in itself.
That capacity just shouldn’t exist anyway. The whole set-up in the Senate is part of the problem.
Do you think it should be abolished?
I would give 12 months to fundamentally and radically reform it and if at the end of the 12 months it’s not fundamentally and radically reformed then it should go, yeah, absolutely. They’ve talked about reform since I was a teenager and probably before that and have done shag all about it, have no interest in doing anything about it because it is like a club, and if it’s going to be a club then it’d be much better if it didn’t exist. I think there is a good case for a second chamber that is consciously constructed to include a lot of different voices in our society. I think you could have a really interesting second chamber in Ireland actually, which included, just quite consciously accepted groups of people who would never ever get representation through the Dail system. Travellers, for example; travellers are a significant minority in our society and there’s never been a public representative beyond the level – I think there’s one or two councillors in Limerick – but you’ll never get a national public representative. There’s ways you could construct a second chamber that would be actually genuinely useful, and genuinely had the capacity to bring in different kinds of people, and that gets to grips with legislation and does all of that, but that’s not what we have. I don’t think it helps if Seanad seats are used in the way that Bertie used them, I think it reinforces the idea that this is basically a kind of sinecure.
There’s a lot in the book about the new celebrity culture, and how Bertie Ahern, in particular, has cleverly used bread, circuses and the soap opera aspects of his life to distract people from reality. In a week when you have Jedward getting kicked off The X Factor, and the handball incident in Paris, do you find it depressing that most people get more worked up about these things than they do about things that actually affect their lives?
Yeah, I’m an absolute hypocrite about this I have to say because I got terribly excited about the match and I relentlessly watched Jedward through up to last night [laughs]. I’ve stopped watching X Factor now because I just found Jedward absolutely riveting, jaw-dropping stuff. But of course it’s bread and circuses, of course it is, and of course the construction of contemporary media culture is incredibly powerful at distracting people from their own realities, so that’s creating safety valves in a way for public emotions that become kind of privatised and become infantilised through all of this stuff.
Just take a really simple thing like the act of voting. The act of voting was something that people died for, to get to a point where it’s not so much that people have stopped voting, on the contrary probably more people are voting more regularly now than they ever were, but instead of voting in serious political elections, you text into X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent or whatever, the numerous, very expensive ways in which you can vote for all this stuff, so it’s like there’s been a kind of hijacking of very serious acts, never mind ideas and actual activities that are part of public life, being subsumed into this... And it is kind of infantile ultimately, there’s a huge place for things that are not serious, there’s a huge place for triviality, but the relationship between triviality and seriousness has been reversed. It used to be that triviality was a relief from the basic seriousness of public life, and now it’s like seriousness is a marginal exception to the general triviality.
Quite a corrosive thing...
It is corrosive, it does have long-term effects because, as I said, the Bertie thing is really interesting, the way in which Bertie was able to – you mentioned this idea of him projecting himself as a soap character, with all that implied about how all these things just kind of happened to him, like they were part of the plot, rather than him having any kind of responsibility for them. And the way in which then he, for all his hypocrisy about his private life, “Oh, I don’t want people talking about my private life”, he uses his private life all the time, he manipulates the interest in his private life as the way which he would connect to the public, rather than through policies or through serious discussion about what’s happening in the place and what’s going to happen over the next ten years. It was frighteningly effective, it really worked, the Bertie character was a big hit, and to some extent still is, there’s still that kind of residual sense that he doesn’t exist as a real person at all, that it’s just Bertie.
When he finally passes on, do you think Bertie Ahern will deserve a state funeral?
No, I actually don’t [laughs]. I genuinely think that nobody who accepts money from private individuals while holding public office should ever be accorded a state funeral, or should ever be recorded with honour. I know that a lot of people will find that very harsh but... There is a sense of – honour matters, as a concept in terms of the way people support themselves in public service, never mind high level public life. I just remember, about two years ago, those two firemen in Bray, who were part-time firemen, they were getting €25 for getting called out, were killed going into a blaze in Bray, and it was around the same time that Bertie was going into the tribunal talking about how he won money on the horses.
I don’t want to sentimentalise public servants – at the moment that’s not likely! – but you can’t run a country if you don’t have a significant number of people who believe in the idea of public service, who believe in the idea that it’s not the same as just looking out for your own interests, there is such a thing as the public interest and that those ideas of doing everything you can to try to improve the place, of having a sense of responsibility, of putting yourself on the line, doing that extra bit that you’re not necessarily required to do, all of these really matter. And when you get people like Bertie, who have the incredible privilege of holding public office, who are incredibly well paid for doing it. People forget that the original reason for paying politicians in the first place was so that they wouldn’t be corrupt, the whole argument in the nineteenth century – because they weren’t paid originally – was if you pay them then they can resist temptation to misuse public office, and then of course this went wild in Ireland, they were being paid astonishing amounts of money. They were being very, very well paid not to be corrupt, and they were being very, very well paid to serve the public – and instead of them saying, “well, this should make me devote myself to public service in a really fundamental way”, it actually has the opposite effect which is that they begin to identify themselves with the very wealthy and want to lead the same kind of lifestyles.