From floods to broken banks

You know, there are some who regard the 1st of February as the start of Spring. This has always seemed fanciful to me. As a month, it is as untrustworthy as any, frequently entering like a lamb and leaving like a lion. But not this year. No, February 2002 howled into us with a storm, and then built to a crescendo of floods, gales and broken banks.

And, even though that’s not a reference to AIB, in another way it is. All kinds of things will be said in coming weeks about the rogue trading and cover-ups involved in AIB’s unbelievable losses of $750 million. I mean... is anybody home?

You know the tale. A trader in the bank’s foreign exchange department ran the debt up over a year until he was noticed. Having made losses in his Foreign Exchange trading, he built a virtual world of phantom deals and accounts to compensate.

All simple so far? Good. The thing is, he couldn’t hide it forever, and he was found out. Cue hysteria, a grand chase, much breathless media reportage, and even some old-fashioned tabloid-style door-stepping, but not much enlightenment.

Certain things are known, like how much money is gone. But as to what and why this guy did it, not a lot. For a fraud of this magnitude, we want to hear about vastly intelligent criminal masterminds, plotting for years to carry out one last fraud, one last con-job, one last heist.

But he’s just a bloke, a cypher. There’s no real story there, except that he was vastly more competent at covering his tracks than he was at trading! A bit like Nick Leeson. One feels some sympathy for him and, indeed, the bank officials involved.

That said, there is an evil side to people, a bad and reprehensible tendency to gloat when Masters of the Universe are brought low. We shouldn’t, but we do. Things get personalised and localised, and all the hurts and wrongs we have suffered at the hands of bankers and tax officials and teachers and capitalists come bursting forth in a torrent of bile and spite.

So, quite a lot of people will be sticking the boot in to AIB and its senior management. Similarly Liam Lawlor, himself a former Master of the Universe. It ain’t always pretty.

As the director of the Prison Service has pointed out, every prisoner is entitled to certain protections. In addition, Lawlor’s family has been caught up in the maelstrom. There is a jeering, gloating and triumphalist tone to much of the reporting and commentary and to radio interviews as well. The unspeakable in pursuit of the impeachable.

Many journalists appear to believe that they have a divine right to photographs and descriptions of prisoners. They don’t. They also want to show and describe, in the most graphic manner, Lawlor’s humiliation and abasement. One wonders why. Murderers are not hounded to this extent, nor are drug smugglers and gang leaders. There are child molesters in prison who have not been chased through the lanes of County Dublin for a photo.

You’d have to wonder – why Lawlor? Is it that he has eluded them so far? Is it that he’s a politician? And why is his family deemed fair game? Why were people like former judge Hugh O’Flaherty pursued in this way, a man who had, to all intents and purposes, led a far more moral life than some journalists. Where’s the sense of proportion?

Let’s be clear – I have no brief for Lawlor. He represents a kind of politics that I despise. If the Dail censures him, that’s fine with me. But, looking at the media’s pursuit, any sense of perspective and detachment is signally absent. It is deeply unpleasant.

Meanwhile, the streets and back-alleys of our country have been seeing real horrors. A young Chinese man is attacked and killed on Dublin’s North side. People are, almost routinely, knifed and shot. Women are assaulted and harassed. Drugs are peddled, as is clichéd and dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric. A young mother who went to the High Court to seek suitable care and accommodation for herself and her two children was found dead last week, in a laneway close to Dublin’s city centre, possibly of a drug overdose.

So who’s hounding who on this? I haven’t heard of a media posse chasing after the health board management trying to photograph them through their car windows, or hanging around their houses like hungry dogs outside a butcher’s shop. Yet, the care this extremely vulnerable young woman received since 1997, under the direction of these people, was described as “disastrous” by a psychiatrist quoted in the Irish Times on January 29th.

There is a great deal of personality-driven coverage of events and issues in the Irish media, and this includes the Liam Lawlor saga. But, for all the chasing and harrying and huffing and puffing, there is remarkably little anger, and certainly, there is little of the righteous, focused, crusading journalism that we need, now more than ever.

In these regards, getting a photo of Liam Lawlor swabbing out a jail cell is an ugly and unnecessary diversion. We don’t need it. Rather, we need depictions of the kinds of situations encountered by that unfortunate young woman described above, and the processes by which she is detached from Irish society and left vulnerable, exploited and, in the end, dead.

We need to question the self-satisfied and smug, even those who condemn Liam Lawlor and Charles Haughey. We need media that will oppose the consensus.