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In Demand.

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:50:02 +0100

Bill on X-case Abortion Legislation Defeated.

I’m not pro-abortion.

Abortion isn’t pleasant, either as a concept or as a process. It is not a choice taken lightly. It is an invasive, difficult, and sometimes painful procedure, and it has complex emotional ramifications that are unique to the woman, or couple, who have chosen it. Abortion is not something women choose to undergo on a whim. It is not like popping to the doctor to fill a prescription.

Some people say that women deserve better than abortion. Of course we do. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need abortion. In an ideal world, there would always be a better choice.

In an ideal world, there would be no unwanted pregnancies. Sex education would be non-judgemental, comprehensive, and available to everyone. Contraception would be acceptable, accessible, affordable, and infallible.

In an ideal world, pregnancy would be a safe time for both mother and developing baby. Pregnancies would never be untenable. Foetuses would develop without complications. All babies would be born alive and healthy and capable of surviving outside the womb. Pregnancy would never endanger a woman’s life. Women would never develop complex health problems, like cancer, when pregnant. Women would never have to choose between their lives and the potential for life inside of them. Expectant parents would never have to choose between termination, and carrying a dying foetus to term.

In an ideal world, women who became pregnant would always be in a position, financially, physically and emotionally, to care for a baby. Men would not abandon their pregnant partners. Parents of pregnant girls and women would always be supportive. The community around the pregnant girl or woman would never be judgemental. The environment in which the pregnant girl or woman lived would never be hostile, harsh or dangerous. The world in which a pregnant girl or woman would be bringing new life into would always be accepting, nurturing and safe.

In an ideal world, women’s bodies would never work against them. Women would not be fertile whether or not they wanted to be, whether or not they were capable of understanding fertility. Girls’ and boys’ bodies would not mature before their minds. In an ideal world, people would not make mistakes. They would not take chances. They would not be convinced or coerced to take chances. They would not be afraid to speak up for and protect themselves.

In an ideal world, women and girls would never be made pregnant by rape. In an ideal world, evil, abusive people would not use sexual violence as a way of hurting, subjugating, or controlling women. Natural, female biology would not be seen as a method of oppression. Women would not be seen as second-class citizens because of their natural biological role. Little girls would not be viewed as sexual objects, as property, as vessels. Little boys would not be taught entitlement.

In an ideal world, a pregnant woman’s body would not become a political tool. In an ideal world, women would be trusted to make the decisions that are correct for their own personal circumstances, and they would be able to make these decisions in a world that wasn’t afraid of sex, afraid of women, afraid of anything outside of narrow personal experience.

But this is not an ideal world. People choose abortions for all sorts of reasons. None of the circumstances in which people choose abortion are enviable. Fornicating harlots are not skipping to abortion clinics to flush out the hangover from their latest one-night stand. Women, if given the freedom to choose their own paths, will not rush off to haphazardly sex-up the nearest man and then terminate any resulting pregnancy just for the hell of it.

Friends might think that this would be a tough one for me. I am the result of an unwanted pregnancy. I was adopted. Did I have the right to life? That's a loaded, blind-siding question, bordering absurdity. Of course it's easy for me to say now, but how could my potential life have been more important than the life of my biological mother? Would it have made any difference if I wasn't here? I'd never have known, would I? All I can say is that I hope the choice my biological mother made was the right one for her. It's not easy, thinking that your own existence could have ruined someone else's.

I dread to think of myself ever being in a situation where termination of a pregnancy would be the best option. I can’t even fathom what I would do, how I would cope. And if I can’t even fathom what I would do, how could I ever make another woman’s decision for her? How could I ever tell someone that they couldn’t have an abortion? What kind of heartless, arrogant fool could presume dominion over the lives of women he or she knows nothing about?

But I’m not pro-abortion. Nor am I anti-life.

I am pro-choice. In all good conscience, I could be no other way.

Tommy Gun

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:33:20 +0100

If you’re making a go of a career in the creative arts, common sense would suggest that you’ve got to be pretty sure of yourself. Feedback is important, obviously, because we all like to be told we’re doing the right thing, but feedback will only go so far as to reinforce what you already think of your abilities. If you don’t think you’re good at what you do – if you don’t look at your finished prose, or song, or painting and think “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” – no amount of positive feedback will convince you otherwise. The problem with artists is that they’re frequently underwhelmed by their own talent. The fleeting, fragile, that’ll-do-pig moments are but sweet shards of light cast guiltily into the murk of self-loathing. Every artist, you see, is his own mother-in-law.

I don’t trust my own abilities any more than I trust Enda Kenny’s, which is a state of affairs not wholly conducive to financial success. Every smooth run is but brief respite from the self-shovelled potholes I continue to propel myself over, as if my talent is a prototype I can afford to puncture. I can tell myself my writing is shit because I have perverted hope that the need to keep writing is innate and sturdy and able to negotiate potholed surfaces. I’d love to be confident about my writing. I’d love to be the self-promoter I know I fucking need to be. But my belief in my abilities is a brittle sort of belief, and for every porcine congratulation, there’s a hundred and twelve self-flagellation sessions, where I re-read and see clumsy phrases and similes I can’t remember the relevance of and obtuse interpretations of issues I really couldn’t give less of a fuck about. Really, that’s the mathematical ratio. 1:112.

This is why I cannot watch The Room.

And Oh, Buddha, I love The Room. I love everything about it. I love its earnest awfulness. I love how it’s essentially a straight-faced assassination of every sense that keeps you functional: visual, aural... common. To call The Room a terrible film is to do it a disservice, for you could spend a lifetime with the cleverest satirists on the planet trying to make the world’s worst movie, and never come close to anything as brain-combustingly appalling as The Room.

The Room is the vanity project of a shady character called Tommy Wiseau. No one knows where he came from, and no one knows how he managed to pull together enough money to make The Room. He went through something like four crews and endured numerous cast changes because most of the people he hired to make his movie exploded on contact with the script. The plot, which I don’t feel bad about calling a plot because it too is a legitimate space to grow vegetables, revolves around Wiseau’s Johnny, an All-American Armenian Albanian alien, who is led up the garden path by his inexplicably evil fiancée future-wife Lisa and his emotionally, socially, and developmentally conflicted best friend Mark.

There is little point in going into further detail, because there aren’t sufficient words in the English language to express how transcendentally heinous this film is. Wiseau – actor, writer, director, producer – has the self-awareness every conscience-laden adult envies, which is to say, none at all. Whether it’s through snaking his pasty buttocks at the camera in a sex scene which couldn’t be any longer if it were stuck in an existential loop, directing his actors with the clear vision of a cataract-riddled potato, or awkwardly delivering lines that could only have been written by Google Translate, you can be sure that Tommy Wiseau genuinely has no idea of how fucking terrible he is. You’d almost feel bad for him, if you weren’t so sure that such sentiment would dribble off him like spittle off laminate. Tommy Wiseau is atrocious, but Tommy Wiseau will never, ever know about it.

The Room is 99 minutes of jaw-dropping horror, and we’ll never see its like again. It is almost absurdly fun to watch, despite the fact that you can’t allow yourself to laugh in case you miss the next abomination hurdling your way. But once the ordeal is over, once you’ve stopped choking on your own fist and finished wiping the tears of sociopathic mirth from your eyes, you’re left with the dawning, yawning, terrible reality that Tommy Wiseau made this dreadful mess from beginning to end – from the initial, unholy kernel that spawned the monster – without ever realising how apocalyptically incompetent he is.

Tommy Wiseau is to talent what waterboarding is to the hospitality industry. I know, with the same inborn conviction that reminds me when to breathe, that Tommy Wiseau possesses non-talent so pure, he may well have been conceived of ineptitude and spun together by mystical, supernatural shitness. It is difficult to find the words to describe just how bad Tommy Wiseau is. You have to get religious about him. Science can’t explain him. His mere existence proves that there is a god, because you couldn’t make him up. Tommy Wiseau is the Anti-Talent.

And he doesn’t know it. The Room is an irony-free zone.

This is why it’s so fucking toxic. I watch The Room, and it takes me days to recover from it; as a writer, every word I get past my fingertips is, all of a sudden, weighted with Wiseau, infected by him. What if... Oh dear God, what if I’m as shit as Tommy Wiseau and no one’s told me? What if I end up creating something as godawful as The Room, and no one is kind enough to euthanize it before it grows wings and savages me? And I think, Hey, calm down, you’re not as bad as Tommy Wiseau. You couldn’t be. You’ve appeared at arts festivals. Literary agents phone you to tell you you’re great (if not commercially viable, but we’ll get to that again). You string words together and people pay you money for them. But it’s no good. When I read back what I’ve written, it comes out in Tommy Wiseau’s death-drawl. The page is full of malapropisms, chasms of logic, changeling phrases I hesitate to smother because I can’t recall how they got onto the page in the first place.

It’s Wiseauitis. Watching The Room is, to me, akin to taking an entire forest floor of hallucinogenic fungi: I need to clear my diary for a week afterwards. It’s not the only creative fucksplosion that can do this to me – I get a similar reaction after reading The Eye Of Argon, or watching Cracked lists of amateur music videos on YouTube – but its effects are definitely the most extreme.

The first time I saw The Room, I feel hopelessly in love with it. One of the ways I chose to express this love was to create a desktop wallpaper for myself, based on this immortal image.

I had to take it down after a couple of days. The Wiseauitis wouldn’t abate with the wallpaper there, feeding it, every time I turned my laptop on. That wallpaper couldn’t exist on the same technological platform as my half-novels and articles. Just having it there made me feel so uncomfortable, so helpless, that it might well have been a segue from a Gaspar Noé film.

The love for The Room is still there. It’s a sick love, though. It’s a love I need to deny. Being a writer is so very fraught with danger at the best of times. To invoke Tommy Wiseau is to play with fire.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:52:09 +0100

The state the nation’s in is not our fault, says Enda, but we need to cough up to repair it, anyway, like a motorist rear-ended by an unlicensed juggernaut. And through the window of our finger-pointing, back-biting, scenery-chewing National Colossal Fuck-Up Support Group, peers a graceless, heavy-breathing doubt monster.

There’s blame, of course. There’s always blame. The initial problem may have blossomed in myriad directions, like an irradiated weed, but there’s still a root festering somewhere. That’s logical. No, what’s doubtful is the notion that this fuck-up can be fixed. Maybe it can’t be fixed because that root is too deep to be dug out. And we all rely on the soil around it, so we can’t poison the soil.

To permanently fix the issues that have led to this point, where all of us are suffering and accountability’s just a misspelled Leaving Cert subject, we would need a radical overhaul of the country. Its government, its state bodies, its collective mindset, its whole society. We’d be inviting Chaos in to trample on our Lego city and fuck its pretty bricks out the nearest window. None of us are ready for that. We want Change without personally having to change.

I’m not criticising this. I don’t want to personally have to change. I want things to be better, and I want to work at making things better, but I want to be able to control that process in such a way that I still have time and space to get up in the morning, make breakfast, drop the smallie to school, go to work...

That’s why things will not change.

Enda tells us that we are not to blame for this situation, where our government bludgeons us with taxes and sanctions and takes from us the things we worked so hard for. But in every recession, in every virtual dip in the virtual rollercoaster of virtual money, there are those who profit. This is no conspiracy theory; this is logic. There are people who are above States and Laws and Taxes. There are people who are dictating which rules the masses must bow to, so that they themselves can continue to accumulate and hoard. There has to be such people. If there wasn’t, why, that would mean that the governments of Europe are flailing around, managing virtual debt and virtual obligation to no fucking end at all, like massive apes throwing shit at one another because they can’t quite remember a time when they weren’t.

Who’s profiting from this shit-flinging? Who is stopping our elected representatives calling The Great Shit-Flinging Truce of 2011? Who’s fashioned shit-blinkers for Enda, and Angela, and Nicolas?

The Irish State is taking from its most vulnerable – children, the disabled, the elderly, the unemployed – to pay off a shadowy cabal whose motives Sheogorath would find perplexing. What is this? Sherwood Forest? It’s fucking ridiculous. We talk about the science of economics and how it’s necessary to prop up the banks so that the status quo can keep touring, as if the banks themselves, these inanimate objects wherein they practise the cunning art of speculation, are to blame for our financial serfdom. You can’t blame bricks and mortar for vampiric rampages. Bricks and mortar don’t feed.

On the other hand, we are the Irish State. We, collectively, have the power to dislodge our collective, stately head from the ethereal arse its searching for acceptance in, and repair our society. That’s logic, too, but logic is, by inverse nature, as easy to grasp as a bacterium between gloved fingers. Especially when we're encouraged to blame each other. There's no need to set the cat amongst the pigeons if the pigeons have been tricked into a suicide cult and are dunking each other's heads in the Kool Aid.

Any idiot can see that what’s happening right now, in the name of the common good, is fiscally short-sighted at best, Lovecraftian horror at worst. If we wanted to repair our economy, we would not be hitting the consumer, the taxpayer, the people who spend real money so that the world can continue running on the speculative dreams of investors, trading in futures and dealing wraiths to spectres. We are taking real money out of the pockets of real people to make up virtual money in a sphere chaired by masked men.

You couldn’t make it up.

We can all see it. Individually, we real people know that this is madness.

There’s no doubt there’s something in it for Nicolas and Angela and Enda. None are working for the people they were hired to represent.

Did we forget the definition of treason, or something? Have we retired it as a concept as well as a crime?

Witness The Witless

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:46:14 +0100

I’m much better on page than in person. I hate phonecalls. I hate meetings. I love emails, tweets and texts. I don’t love letters, because writing anything by hand makes these digital digits feel like they’ve spent an entire victory parade attached to the wrist of Queen Elizabeth II. Handwriting hurts. Still doesn’t hurt as much as jamming my foot in my mouth, which I’m obliged to do any time I open the bloody thing.

I spent the weekend in the old home-away-from-home, Cork (as opposed to my home-away-with-the-faries, Galway), during which I made many jaw-pas. I really can’t help myself. I’m a writer, not a talker. I have the verbal dexterity of a ham sandwich. People imagine that I’m biting and funny and sharp as a splintered toothpick, until they meet me and I’m all fumbling and giggly, like Hugh Grant getting felt up by an octopus. See? I’d never have thought of that in real life. I’d have said, “I’m all fumbling and giggly like ... you know some sort of thing that giggles a lot, with some fumbling as well for good measure. Something like that? Here, let me show you.” Whereupon I would inadvertently clatter them with my knuckles and have to be dragged away, wailing, “But a kiss with a fist is better than none!” I’m shit in real life, is what I’m saying. I’m Bella Swan crossed with a footstool.

I was interviewed in the US at the beginning of the year about my writing, and I was so uncomfortable and so not-at-all like the person I am on the page that I immediately forgot the very first question that was asked of me, and so I hummed and hawed as if I was thinking really hard of the answer, even though I was just desperately trying to remember the question, and in so doing gave the solemn audience the most awkward silence of the entire literary festival. This would never happen to Julian Gough.

Anyway, the weekend. I stayed with Louise, whose house is generally full of hipsters and gay people and gay hipsters, if you’re really lucky. We got bored and drank three bottles of Sauvignon Blanc on Friday, and ended up listening to lots of nineties Eurodance. Naturally, we thought this was fun and ironic of us, until one Amy, a slip of a thing at twenty-two years old, described us as being stuck in “a lot of shite music from the eighties.”

I responded with typical peeling wit by bawling, “Shut up, Amy! You’re like, twelve or something.” Should have written her a scathing limerick. That’d teach her for being so unintentionally cruel.

Then Mr. Gay Cork.com showed up (really; that’s his official title. It’s like having a dukedom or something) and I was terribly witty and we had this amazing rapid-fire debate. At least, that’s what I assumed had happened, until one of the lads followed up the next day with, “Jaysus, you were flaking for a fight yesterday, Lisa.”.

“Was not. I was being cultured and gracious and droll.”

“I dunno. You wouldn’t hear Stephen Fry roaring, Shut up or I’ll brain yeh! at Mr. Gay Cork.com.”

I take solace in the company of other writers, even when they don’t suffer from the same verbal inadequacies that render this one fucking useless in any live scenario. Other writers understand. Understanding is what writers do best, because they’re always pulling the world apart, thread by thread, and then weaving it all back together, but this time augmented in glorious Technicolor. In fact, that’s why you should distrust the absolute fuck out of a writer, especially if they’re looking all attentive and sympathetic.

“Cheek of yer wan Amy with her youthful vigour,” I said to Kevin, who is also a writer, except successful. “I’m going to call her ... I’m going to call her If You Seek Amy. Haha. That’s fucking mad witty.”

“I don’t get it. If you what Amy?”

“If you seek Amy. Like the Britney Spears song.”

“What? Why’s Britney seeking Amy?”

“No, like, F. U. C. K. Me. Get it? If you seek sounds like F.U.C. You know?”

“Britney wants to fuck someone called Amy?”

“No. Like, Me. Not Amy. K. Me. F. U. C. K. Me.”

“F. U. C.K. Amy?”

“No! Jesus! Listen, it’s If. You. Seek...”

“I don’t believe that’s a Britney Spears song.”

“Well it is. It fucking is. Look, I’ll Wiki it.”

See, if there’s one thing that tells you a witticism has died on its arse, it’s when you have to explain yourself at length afterwards, more so if you’re in a crowded beer garden and keep yowling “F.U.C.K. Me!” in the same person’s face. It makes you look like a stalker too embarrassed by her own vulgar trajectory to retire a misfiring hint. I should have just called the scamp Amy, “Lame-y” and called it a day. That wasn’t witty either, but at least it made some sort of sense.

Yeah, I should probably just bring a portable whiteboard with me whenever I mingle with social butterflies, so I can retort through my fingertips, exactly as I’m supposed to.

You again?!

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:36:22 +0100

The thing is, when you change location in the middle of a recession, people automatically believe it’s for economic reasons. That starvation, or disgruntled creditors, or creditors disgruntled by starvation chased me out of Cork. That coming back to South County Galway has a whiff of desperation to it, a contrail of choking sadness that rudely dilutes the smell of silage and Zetor fumes. After all, didn’t Cromwell say, “To hell or to Connacht”? That I’m in South County Galway instead of in the People’s Republic suggests lack of options and a foolhardiness not seen since my assumption that Jedward could win the Eurovision song contest.

But a hearty feck-the-fuck-off to that! I had tons of options. I am optioned out the wazoo. Oliver Cromwell didn’t like stones in his fields or lakes that had a habit of disappearing in the middle of the night, but I’m only thrilled with both phenomena. Coming home to South County Galway is coming home to South County Galway; there’s no more enthralling explanation than that. I like it here. I like a bit of limestone in my drinking water.

It has deeply perplexed my family.

“What are you going to do, though?” they ask, peering at me from the end of their poking sticks. “What? Are? You? Up to?” To which I smile mysteriously and stick the kettle on.

Because I’m assumed to have economic motives and a desperation so rigid Seán Gallagher could prop himself up with it, the next step from the quizzical is to suggest I get myself a job in one of the local establishments. Well, when I say establishments, I mean filling stations. There isn’t a lot else of great establishment in South County Galway, apart from a ludicrous amount of towers and keeps, as if the land was once ruled by warlike lunatics who thought the best way to protect their favourite stones was to build houses out of them. It’s a bit like Skyrim around here, minus the interesting climate and general happenings.

“Why don’t you ask if there are any hours going in the garage?” the family tell me, swapping poking sticks for seesawed eyebrows and cats-arse lips.

“I’m alright for the time being,” I reply. “I’m going to do a bit of freelancing.”

I think they believe freelancing to be some sort of fencing flourish, and have dismissed me accordingly. Certainly no one’s asked me to elaborate. Nor has anyone asked what exactly I used to do for the last half decade in Cork. What my skills are. Where I’d been taking them. You come home to South County Galway, and people automatically assume you’re on the lam and can best atone for your nefarious deeds by donning a bright red polo shirt and dinging a till for forty hours a week. To jail, or to Connacht: where questions shrivel and die.

But it’s not a bad place to be, South County Galway. The rents are cheap and the sunsets are spectacular. And it’s not a bad place to raise a smallie. Me and my cousins had a whole fantastical landscape to carve into; the Burren, the round tower, the woods, the river that keeps disappearing into dangerous swallow holes and caverns. The Famous Five had nothing on us, apart from fame and lashings of ginger beer, something I’ve never laid tongue to, in all my years masquerading as middle-class. I’m losing nothing by coming home, apart from half a Cork accent and pubs you’re not afraid to sit down in.

And I get more time to write now, and more breathing space to do it in. Hopefully the move home will be a productive one. Hopefully good things will spring from this, overnight, like a turlough around a startled cow.

Pop Goes The Update

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 13:47:23 +0100

You should know by now that just because I haven't been writing sulky pieces here, complaining about what fuckers my countrymen are, doesn't mean I haven't been busy over on Culch scribbling much fluffier posts about what fuckers the Kardashians are. I've also been delving into my past with a new and nostalgic feature on retro video games and how they were all harder than a frozen vindaloo, starting with Paperboy and followed, this week, with Gauntlet. More to come there. And lastly, I wrote a little tribute to Amy Winehouse, because damn it, I loved that girl.

I've also been working on something which may be a prologue to The Novel, or maybe a short story to post on here as a taster to the whole thing. I don't know. I'm still feeling it out; we'll see what happens.

[Insert pithy conclusion here; I've got a reel in my head]

Savaging Public Ryan

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:39:26 +0100

Ryan Tubridy: Can I talk to you about your last year? You’ve described it yourself as a nightmare year personally. In essence, what happened?

Ronan Keating: What happened … It was … it was a crazy year. I guess the press went pretty crazy on me and I think they were only too happy to jump. They were waiting for an opportunity, I guess, and they got it and they went crazy and, you know I’m … We’re just trying to move on positively now as a family, and, you know, move forward, you know? I love my family, I love my wife, I love my kids, and we’re just trying to work it out. You know and … em, and that’s where we are.

Ryan Tubridy: That’s it. You’re over the worst of what happened.

Ronan Keating: Please God.

Ryan Tubridy: Ok.

The relationship between pop culture icon and his or her Irish audience is one that’s fraught, at best. Carping and co-dependent. Savage, even. I whinged about the current of begrudgery that flows through the collective psyche last week. I whinged, too, about our lack of empathy, but it's not just failure we Irish disapprove of. Perversely, we don't much like success either. One is as despicably self-indugent as the other.

In fact, the more successful you are, the more likely it is that your countrymen will despise you. The only way around it is to develop a sense of scathing self-deprecation so as to disguise yourself as a disgruntled nobody, and liberally plaster same into every conversation you’re drawn into between first merited paycheck and the grave. This is why Irish people cannot take compliments.

“You’re looking well, Imelda!”

“Era naw, I’m at death’s door. The only reason death won’t let me in is my horrible spotty face’d put him off his dinner.”

Imelda doesn’t really think she looks that bad. But she’s terrified of being thought of as big-headed if she dares accept the compliment. Ours is not to simper thanks; ours is just to placate cranks.

In fact, the more successful you are, the more likely it is that your countrymen will despise you, and there’s no better example of the fine line that exists between “national ambassador” and “national embarrassment” than the tightrope trials of Ryan Tubridy, Ireland’s most prevalent broadcaster.

Tubridy, a consummate pro at the relatively young age of 38, had always been fairly well liked. Cheeky, yet inoffensive, ambitious, yet not a risky bet, Tubridy was handed the reins of Irish institution and world’s longest running chat show The Late Late Show in 2010, with the population presuming he’d put his own generational stamp on it whilst remaining reverent about its traditions.

But Tubs didn't perform as hoped. Blander than expected, he brought the show too far into the realm of light entertainment – The Late Late may be a chat show, but it’s always been a chat show deliciously likely to careen into shouting and sniping.

Unfortunately for Tubs, the gentle stagnation of the Late Late happened to coincide with the ferocious rise of Twitter in Ireland, and all of a sudden the voices of the disaffected could be heard whinging in the foreground about how meh the show was after getting. The Late Late may be seen as a dinosaur, a fixture for mammies and farming bachelors, but it turned out even the young and with-it expected it to be there, chugging on and bolshie as ever, if they were struck down with a dose of the stay-ins on a Friday night.

Things came to a head in recent months with Tubs’ interviewing Ronan Keating, Ireland’s blandest pop star. Keating had presented himself very successfully as the archetypal thirtysomething dad, scoring a lucrative deal with Nintendo to plug their family-oriented lifestyle products in a dazzling showhouse with his dazzling wife and dazzling kids. Then, perhaps hoping we’d be too dazzled to notice, he went and had an affair with one of his backing dancers. Ireland, the home of begrudgery and inconvenient irreverence, marked every tumble in this downfall with giddy glee. It was in this frame of mind the nation watched his interview on the Late Late, and when Tubs failed to grill him on his extra-marital shenanigans, there were howls of derision and disappointment that even George Lucas wouldn’t have been able to cope with. There were even demands for Tubridy’s resignation.

Keating has never been afraid to begrudge the begrudgers their begrudgery, moaning about negativity without ever acknowledging that his arse-clenchingly awful songs might have caused some of it. That Tubs got a lash of the same curled-lip whip is as much to do with the interviewee as the interview; it’s bad enough that he gave someone an easy time of it on the Late Late, but that it was Ronan Keating? Unforgiveable.

So I wasn’t surprised to read that Tubs quit Twitter last week. A late convert to the micro-blogging behemoth, he had amassed an impressive 60,000 followers and was a passably regular tweeter, but the thing with Twitter – with social media in general – is that it goes both ways. Tubs had a platform to connect with his public, and they a platform to connect with him. Some of the messages, hashtags and @replies directed at him went beyond expressions of discontent; they were sneering, personal, nasty. Such is the way of things in the relative anonymity of the internet age. Through Twitter, we could tell Ryan Tubridy exactly what we thought of him without the courage necessary to say it to his face.

Tubs’ official stance is that he didn’t have the time for an online life, which seems fair enough. But no doubt the collective ire of the Irish mob didn’t make his Twitter trial much fun. They build you up to knock you down, it’s said. Imagine, then, coming from a country where everyone’s a cynic, and everyone's a judge, and where you must fight hardest for the love of the public after reaching celebrity status, not before. The Irish exist to teeter on the edge of dark thoughts and wanton jealousy, and need only the nudge from a stumbling celebrity to plunge, headfirst and headstrong, into the abyss. What would you be at, vying for the attention of such a contrary bunch?

Usually for Irish celebrities, the contrary bunch is held at bay by the self-congratulatory bubble of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the public service broadcaster whence all of our dignitaries must spring. I imagine that having RTE on your side is like spending your life in a floatation tank with only the sound of your accumulating fortune keeping you company. Maybe our contrary carry-on had nothing to do with Tubs’ abandoning Twitter. Or maybe it was that outside of the self-congratulatory bubble of RTE, Tubs at last saw his public, and didn’t like it one bit.

The Lament That Never Was

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:48:01 +0100

I don't remember what it was that sparked my national pride; for as long as I can remember I've been cheerfully smug about being Irish. I do recall being very, very small, and watching an Ireland vs. England match on TV with my oldies, and announcing that I was going to cheer for England because they had decided to cheer for Ireland.

"You can't do that," I was told. "You're Irish. You can't cheer for England."

This puzzled me; it was obviously before we learned the 800-years-chant at school (if there's one thing that will very quickly make you a nationalist, it's Ireland's tragic history). But this is the only time I can remember not being sure and proud of my nationality. It's drummed into you at a very young age to be proud of what you are, and what you are is Irish, and it's the greatest of boons and privileges.

When you saw American tourists in our streets, you knew they had come over to solidify a connection, so delighted they were to have traced at least one ancestral spring back to the ould sod. When you considered a holiday, you were confident you’d be welcomed whatever the destination, so loved was the Irish stereotype, so friendly we were perceived to be. When you thought about emigrating, following the weather or the adventure, you knew that your education and skills would have prospective employers slavering over you. Foreign beauties adored your accent. Unrelated party animals longed to share a Guinness with you. Diplomats and fat cats couldn’t wait to sink their talons into your banks. This, the general consensus as to how the rest of the world viewed their cheeky, cheery Irish cousins. Perhaps some of us still think this; I don’t know. I certainly don’t, not since I wiped my vision clear of our romantic rolling mists and syringed the ballads out of my ears.

Being Irish is a huge part of who I am. My nationality has shaped me, my way of looking at the world, my likes and dislikes, my wit; one’s cultural background is the bedrock on which balances one’s individuality. I would never deny being Irish. We have such a high opinion of ourselves, romanticised by our ballads, sung low in sorrow for the noble dead or the Irish diaspora. And we're so, so witty, with our indigenous back-answers and t-shirt slogans and slang. And I based my pride on nothing more solid than that.

I’ve become aware of our collective failings as I’ve grown older. Collective is the key word here; individual Irish are as delightful or as hopeless as any other class of person. We take all too beautifully to Mob Rule, though, don’t we? Once we have validation in numbers, we’re a fucking nightmare.

The self-imposed label is that we’re a nation of begrudgers. This hypothesis is wheeled out by celebrity after businessman after sports personality: the Irish don’t like to see one of their own elevated. Rise your head above the parapet and you’re likely to have it knocked off by the sheer force of those beneath you, hauling on your ankles, till your chin slams onto the brickwork and slices your lower jaw into the air like a fucking boomerang. They’ll decapitate you so you don’t get ahead of yourself.

Well, yes. That’s begrudgery. And we are guilty of it, and in general it’s a trait treated as a joke, something twee and old-fashioned, something characteristic of ould wans in bingo cults, something we’re all headed for. Lamented, but inevitable and accepted. But now that we’re in economic recession, and now that the mistakes made by government and business have become apparent in the day-to-day struggles of those who got caught in the landslide, I’m noticing a bit more than the petty begrudgery we jokingly agree defines us. Something nastier, not confined to fuddy-duddies or the common-or-garden whingers jealous of the success of others. We have come to be defined by a staggering lack of empathy for our fellow countrymen and women.

Lost your job? It’s your own fault. Struggling to raise your children after losing said job? Your own fault for having children. Had to sell your car and are now confined to the local vicinity when hunting to replace the lost job? Pity about you. Why’d you buy a car if you couldn’t afford to run it?

This lack of empathy is down to a heavy-handed smugness rather than mass sociopathic tendencies. We cannot cluck sympathetically at the misfortune of others because we don’t seem to believe in misfortune. If our neighbour is going through a black time, we sift through their rubbish until we can find a reason, however flimsy, to place the blame on them. Shit happens, but it happens for a reason, and I’m doing everything right, so shit won’t happen to me. It’s almost a defence mechanism, as if throwing light on the misfortune of others may cause that misfortune to seep into our own lives, if we don’t hurry to reason why it couldn’t ever possibly.

Well, yes, people who bought houses at the height of the boom have only themselves to blame because they clearly bought houses bigger than they needed. They should have bought a three-bed terraced, like I did. And who did they think they were, going off on that honeymoon to Antigua? I went on honeymoon to Edinburgh and I had just a good a time. And what were they thinking, enrolling their children in ballet classes? Mine scratch in the dirt outside and they get just as much enjoyment from that.

Far from semi-ds and foreign holidays and extra-curricular activities they were reared.

People made mistakes. People bought houses they now cannot afford because they didn’t see the property crash coming, or thought that their job was secure. People made mistakes and some of them are paying for it horribly. What cost a bit of empathy? What internal harm does it do the begrudger to say: Shit, yes, that sucks, poor you, I hope you can pick yourself up and carry on? What good does it do anyone to sneer at those whose luck has run out, because they dared to think that they could have two cars in the family and bring their kids horse-riding? Maybe their dreams were built on what was unrealistic, but they didn’t ask you to pay for them whilst they were dreaming them, and they aren’t asking you to subsidise their return now.

People make mistakes.

I read a column on the Herald’s website, a couple of months ago. Helen McCormack wrote eloquently about the job she loved and how it felt to be downsized, and then finally made redundant. What struck me, though, was the last two paragraphs, in which McCormack angrily justifies everything she’d already explained so well.

I did everything I was supposed to. I may be one of the Celtic Tiger cubs but I worked bloody hard. I did seven-day weeks for the first year and a half of my working life and 10 and 11-hour days after that. I slept, went to work, slept. I never earned massive wages, I don't own designer shoes.

If I had dreams, they were modest. I hoped that one day we would own a three-bed house (four-bed if we were lucky) in a nice area in Dublin and have our 2.5 kids. I had a right to that. Yes, I know some people are starving in this world but I was born in a First-World country. I had the right to expect that.

And you know what? She’s right. Why should she be sneered at for losing her job, or for daring to think she might one day buy a house with her fiancé? Why should she be chastised for daring to actually want something? Is it un-Irish to be aspirational, or something?

I read comments online, every day, from people who seem angry that other citizens have dared to fall on hard times. People who, after watching footage of the homeless man in Dublin who jumped into the Liffey to save his pet rabbit after a nasty bastard threw it over the bridge, sneered that the emergency services had better things to be doing than looking after the welfare of one wet junkie (a few, referring to the man’s pet dog, asked whether the dog was licensed. Who fucking cares whether the dog was licensed? What had licensing the dog got to do with the story of a nasty asshole who threw a pet over a bridge?). People who complain about benefit frauds, as if we are terrorised by roaming gangs of able-bodied villains clothed entirely in sewn-together rent receipts and hats made out of medical cards. People who think the unemployed should be forced into internships to learn how to make tea for those lucky enough to still have jobs. People who believe the downtrodden should be made suffer because ... they’re suffering already?

I’m not exempt. I’ve done it myself – tried to validate bad luck by being petty and sneering about those who used to have plenty but have now been recalled to my own level, the working class, the struggling martyrs. Why did I act such a way? Personally, because of my own insecurities. In a social sense, because the Irish love a whinge, and give weight to suffering, rather than achievement. Onedownmanship, you could call it.

“Lost your job? I lost my job, half my left leg, a fiver, and my virginity to a madman, and you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

It is as if we can only prove our personal resilience by belittling the problems of others.

God, do we hate those who never seem to struggle. And we rejoice like honking geese if those who never struggled finally fall from their pedestals.

Why, if we love Ireland so much, if we’re so fucking proud of being Irish, can’t we support our struggling countrymen? Where the hell is the solidarity? Why are we, the proud patriots, the rebels, the poets, so keen to turn on each other?

A few people, on hearing news of protest in other EU countries, have said to me, “That’ll be Ireland, soon. We’re close to it. We’ll rise up and make our voices heard.”

We won’t, though. To do so you would need a sense of community and a strong belief in shared disadvantage. And in Ireland we’re too busy distancing ourselves from the fallen to create that.

And that’s why I’m asking myself: is it wrong that I lament the Ireland I was taught to be proud of? Is it wrong because that Ireland never was?

*Watching the comments fly on social media and comment boards about the UK riots made me wonder if the English aren’t just as petty as we are when it comes to bitching out their brethren. And that makes me wonder if it isn’t just a nasty human trait. Wonderful as individuals, and in families. But whenever there’s enough of us to provide the cover of anonymity, we turn into uniform arseholes. Mob rule. Collective antipathy. You don’t have to look too far into world history to find examples of that mob mentality going wildly, wildly wrong.

** I feel, too, that I should state that I'm aware not all people will take to Mob rule, or be disdainful of the misfortune of others. The post generalises wildly, it's true. It's an attempt at understanding the localised nastiness I see from my countrymen and women every day on the internet, where people who've never met can argue about which of them is the most plucky in the face of adversary.

Guest Post: Why Norris Had To Jump, And Who Pushed Him.

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:30:23 +0100

It is with more than a measure of dismay I watched David Norris' presidential campaign fall apart over the last few days. I had been eager to see his name on the ballot paper and thought that he would bring a warm, likeable vigour to the role of our head of state. While I was agonising over how to put into words how I felt about the weekend's revelations, the brilliant Sinéad Keogh saved me the hassle. ~ Lisa

As Joycean scholar David Norris would know, the old Ulysses quote goes that "Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof". With the presidential candidate having dropped out of the race, Sinéad Keogh asks if our newspapers have been sufficient in the weekend that saw Norris fall spectacularly in the polls, and who is really to blame for the so called 'witch hunt'?

On Saturday morning while still in bed, (you see, you can be an authority from anywhere on the internet), I watched the David Norris saga begin to unfold on Twitter and said the following: “All this mystery from the #Norris campaign team resigning on twitter smacks of immaturity and inexperience. State your case or shut up.” Retweets, rebuttals and a wound-up campaign later, I stand over every word.

My knowledge of David Norris and his career, like Eily Kilbride’s knowledge of breakfast, is coldly limited. I know that he’s a Joycean scholar because you always hear him on the radio around Bloomsday. I know that he supports the Privacy Bill because I had to write a media law essay once. I know that he’s witty and affable because I’ve seen him on the telly. I know that he was on Operation Transformation because it was a quiz question in the Children's Books Ireland table quiz once – the clue being that the participant in question lived across the street from their offices and my brain somehow marrying the fact that they were based on North Great Georges Street with the knowledge gleaned from somewhere that that was also his address. I know that he has done great work in the area of human rights because it’s the go-to positive Norris fact when comment is required. I know that he is gay because the defining fact of his life seems to be, as regards how the public view it, that he is gay.

I suspect that outside of those who work in or have a large interest in politics, the general public’s knowledge of David Norris’ life isn’t any greater than mine, and that’s alright. We don’t seek out information that we don’t need. Those tidbits that we pick up in the media fall into a self-styled hierarchy in our brains of what’s important and to be held onto and what can fall away without consequence. Up until now, most people have never been required to make a decision on their opinion of whether they would like David Norris to occupy a position in public life unless they were an alumnus of Trinity College, his Seanad electorate, so up until now we haven’t needed to hold onto all of the pertinent facts that we might need to make such a judgement.

Online at least, which is predominantly where I read my news and the only place I can really comment on, the unfolding Norris story, from back when it was the Helen Lucy Burke interview to now when it is the Ezra Yizhak Nawi letters, has been referred to as a gay witch hunt, a smear campaign and the battering ram of homophobes looking for a more palatable excuse to debar his presidential run. Perhaps from some corners that is the intent, but you can’t shoot a man without ammunition and Norris provided his own. Undoubtedly, political news provides endless opportunities for spin, as was easy to watch play out in the case of the Helen Lucy Burke interview as war waged between pro-Norris and anti-Norris camps with regard to what was really said and how it should be interpreted. As to the fact that these stories surfaced and re-surfaced years after the fact, does that make it a witch hunt? The Burke interview was published and forgotten and we were reminded. The Nawi letters, without knowing how they came to light, are pertinent to our making up our minds on voting for Norris irrespective of the intent of those who discovered them. The media are the intermediary for when we need to know the facts but can’t do our own digging.

So has Norris been treated unfairly? No he has not. A thorough digging is to be expected when you put yourself forward to hold a position that must be beyond reproach.

But have the electorate been treated unfairly? You might say we have. Unless there is nothing to know about Mary Davis, Michael D Higgins, Gay Mitchell or Seán Gallagher then reporting has been unduly weighted. Indeed, maybe there is nothing as sensational as comments on pedastry or writing letters of appeal for clemency, but if one political career can yield unpleasant finds with a bit of digging then they all must. It’s true that it’s certainly the time for such a story. Between the recent publishing of the Cloyne Report and Enda’s speech in response, the nation is feeling particularly sensitive about and protective toward its children. However, it remains the duty of the media to inform its public, not just to throw us the juiciest bone and wait until we’ve gnawed it away before giving us anything else. You could say that we’ll always be hungry dogs if the keeper of the key to the food press isn’t benevolent but we ought remember that the relationship isn’t quite a simple as all that. We’re hungry dogs that pay for our food and we’ve taught our media that we’ll pay for sensationalism. We bay for blood.

So what of the original comment? “All this mystery from the #Norris campaign team resigning on twitter smacks of immaturity and inexperience. State your case or shut up.” A keen observation of how political players ought to conduct themselves? Hardly. I was enjoying watching it play out as much as the next person. I wanted more information. The internet is a shooting gallery where the crowd clap at the smallest hit and it’s made us all commentators who feel our opinions matter more and more. But it wasn’t just a volley at those who were saying just enough to whet our appetites but denying us the big reveal, it was a genuine observation regarding what the campaign team were doing to the campaign itself.

Who are Norris’ supporters, or, who were they? Are they human rights activists? Are they privacy bill supports? Are they otherwise politically active? Do they have to be? It’s a theory with nothing substantial behind it, but I put forward that they were people who wanted Ireland to have the first gay president. Young, forward-thinking, progressive and well-meaning. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no need for the presidential candidate to be steeped in politics, indeed better if they’re not. However, a platform president seems just as bad as a political one. Norris himself wasn’t running on a gay ticket, but it seems that’s why his supports wanted him to win, and it’s a nice idea. He’s affable, he’s witty, he’d hit the headlines for being first at something and shine a spotlight on us and our progressive actions. When your supporters and campaign team are made up of the Nice Idea Society, though, maybe they haven’t got the political savvy to carry you through.

Obviously, the big name resignations of Norris’ Director of Communications and Director of Elections would have sounded warning bells anyway, but the Twitter resignations of other members of the campaign kept the commentary flowing. Those who did resign online have been defended with comments regarding the likelihood of a confidentiality agreement or how understandable it was to want to distance themselves from what was coming. It’s been said that they’re deserving of sympathy because they were let down by Norris more than any of us – they had worked for him and he hadn’t been completely honest with them. While all of that stands true, and it can equally be said that they had no more chance of knowing about the Nawi letters than the rest of us, that only means there was no cause or gain to be had from publicly disassociating themselves from the campaign via social media. If you can’t give full facts, stand back and speak when you can speak with authority. The public can’t judge you with regard to information you didn’t have and if they’re going to, they’ll do it irrespective of when you quit.

The reality is that Norris seems just as lacking in media savvy as his former and current team. He should have reacted much sooner, he should have expected the digging. He should have fully informed his team and had a tighter rein on his communications so that his team didn’t speak before he did. Had he carried on through without this revelation, would we only have discovered down the line that his presidency was supported by a haphazard and amateur support network? Maybe it’s a naïve interpretation of politics based entirely on The West Wing talking, but it seems true that your campaign team become your team when in office, and I don’t want my president or his team to be elected on the platform of a Nice Idea and turn out to be poorly able to handle their role when it comes down to what the office of president really is in this country – an ambassador to the world and a person beyond reproach who doesn’t have faux pas.

While the media have clamped their jaw around the story, there’s no doubt that we’ve supported their effort and if we’re to suggest that they’re on a witch hunt then we have to acknowledge that we’re all gathered around the village noose waiting for the hanging to commence. Leaving aside the spin, the reaction, the media, the social media, examine your view of David Norris’ actions, which are all that really matter in your decision about whether or not he should be president or whether or not he should even run. If we accept, and you might not, that he doesn’t believe in pedastry and that what he did wrong was jump to the defence of someone that he loved, then I believe that his actions, while understandable, were still wrong. He abused his position, and it’s not like it hasn’t been done by politicians before but that doesn’t mean calling him on it is a witch hunt, it just means we’ve been too lenient on every other occasion. No you should not defend anyone who abuses a child, no matter your reason or position, no matter if you’re a TD scrounging votes in your locality or a senator defending someone that you love. The state does not approve of the action, your representations on behalf of the state your work for should not imply that it does. Secondary to that, his ability to handle the reaction has been poor and we don’t need a president about whom there is whispering and uncertainty and a marked inability to exercise good judgement in matters private or public. David Norris, like the schoolbooks say about Charles Stewart Parnell and the last relationship we didn’t approve of, is the architect of his own demise.

But all that said, the fact is that there are two stories above the fold today, in the Irish Times at least. Firstly, the Norris campaign and secondly a story about social services cuts putting children at risk. Two stories, which, if weekend commentary is be believed, are about the necessity to put our children first.

At nine o’clock this morning Radio One were discussing addiction to the internet and how we’re all out for instant gratification and celebrity with our constant publication of opinions via social networks. Ryan Tubridy on 2FM was discussing whether or not Norris could or should still run. Nobody was discussion social services cuts which affect hundreds of children every day. On TheJournal.ie, today’s Norris update has over 800 views at time of writing while the social services story had just over 100. Oh yeah, we really care about the children.

The Norris saga hasn’t just highlighted wrongdoing by a potential presidential candidate, it’s highlighted a deep inconsistency within our society. Unless we acknowledge the true reasoning behind our opinions, unless we scrutinise all of our presidential candidates, unless we act of belief aside from being populist then today isn’t just a bad day to be gay or a bad day to be a Norris supporter, it’s a bad day for all of us because we’ve become conditioned to be outraged without even being consistent enough to elicit any kind of change. No, we can't lay this at the media's door and call it a witch hunt. Norris wasn't hanged for something he didn't do - it was something he did. His trial wasn't by media alone, it was by a vocal public, and the threads of an inexperienced campaign just couldn't hang together in the face of it all.

Sinéad Keogh is commander-in-chief of Irish pop culture blog Culch.ie, and edits books in real life. @SineadKeogh

Death Weight

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:51:43 +0100

Last weekend left a lot of us battling with conflicting empathic traumas, once removed from personal experience and filtered through the lenses of strangers.

In Norway, a broken terrorist successfully carried out a cold, horrific plan to take the lives of those he considered a threat to his warped ideals. In England, a brilliant young musician died after years of well-publicised struggles with dependency and self-harm.

Both events were subject to immediate media dissemination and public consumption. No sooner had the bomb gone off in Oslo than we here in Ireland were phoning Norwegian colleagues and friends for confirmation that they were ok. The world had reportedly known that Amy Winehouse was gone before her father, Mitch, who was on a plane to New York when her death was confirmed. Through social media, we knew about both tragedies almost as soon as they happened, and it was through social media we immediately began to discuss, rationalise and mourn.

And compare and contrast. When news broke of Amy’s death, some people were a little prickly about the whole thing. Was it fair, they asked, to give as much coverage to the death of a singer as to a major terrorist attack on a democratic state, and therefore, democracy as a whole? Was it fair to give equal weight to an unexpected massacre of innocent teenagers as to the death of an addict who’d been chipping away at her life for as long as we’d known about her?

In the great conversations that followed, flowing in and out of one another, from IM to Facebook to Twitter, many made the point that, being complex emotional beings, we are well capable of plucking sorrow from more than one topic at a time – even different kinds of sorrow. We can mourn for the loss of innocent lives at the same time as mourning the loss of a talented artist; it’s not difficult. Experiencing one doesn’t diminish the other. We’re capable of loving more than one person at a time, are we not? Why, then, aren’t we capable of mourning two separate tragedies?

Well, point made there.

What bothered me more than the question of whether or not we were complex enough to care about two things at the same time was the suggestion that musicians are creatures far too trivial to cry about in the first place. That if we got upset about the death of Amy Winehouse, we were a little bit tapped. Needing our priorities ironed. Weak, or childish. It’s not as if we knew her personally, after all. Less of the keening and wailing, please. And so on.

But this is the thing about the relationship between artist and fan. An artist needs to create, first off, but she also needs someone to appreciate what she’s made. No point in writing a novel, if no one ever reads it. No value to a song, if no one ever hears it. No reason to make a movie, if no one can ever watch it. Art is made to be consumed. And that handover between artist and consumer unites the two. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

It’s a valid relationship, and the benefit is weighted on the side of the fan. The artist, if she’s lucky, will benefit with status and material wealth, but what the fan gains is something you can’t put a price on. I think that once an artist creates something – be it a song or a story, whatever – once it’s created and sent out there, it ceases to belong to the artist. Now, I don’t mean that the artist shouldn’t retain copyright or that they shouldn’t be paid for the work they do! I mean that the art becomes bigger than the artist. It starts meaning something to people the artist will never meet. People put their own slant on what the piece means, or add personal significance. They take passages from their favourite novels and read them at their weddings. They nominate a soundtrack for a period in their lives which needed defining in words they didn’t have themselves. They take a movie scene and quote from it whenever they want to feel better.

In the case of Amy Winehouse, her fans weren’t just appreciating her songs because they were lyrically adept and well arranged. The songs meant something to each fan, on a private and personal level. To one person, Back To Black might have echoed exactly how they felt about a damaging relationship of their own. To another, it might be their favourite karaoke song. To another, it might have been a song they played non-stop while studying for an exam. So on, so forth, so reasonable, right? And while most of Amy’s fans had never met her, and more again knew nothing of what she was like, outside of the voice and the snippets she offered up in her lyrics, there are plenty of people out there for whom she was very, very important. Maybe she articulated what they were going through. Maybe they just loved how she sounded. It doesn’t matter. She would have been a friend, and not too far off the regular definition, either. Someone to rely on. Someone who’s got your back. Someone always there, no matter how ethereal the concept.

You can’t just rubbish someone’s mourning the passing of an artist they loved. To do so is to diminish art in its entirety. And I might go so far as to suggest that those sneering at the distress of Amy’s fans ... probably don’t get art at all. Probably don’t get anything much, really. Yeah, I might go that far. In fact .... yeah, fuck it, I just did.