Everybody knows… or do they?
Summer holidays leave one with time on one’s hands. The work the devil made for my idle hands this summer included encouraging me to explore the furthest flung fringes of internet political commentary about events in Ireland.
The website Gript.ie describes itself as an independent source of news, a site that claims to publish the news and opinion that matters and challenges the consensus. On 31 July, Gript published a piece[i] penned by its editor, John McGuirk, under the intriguing heading:
In Ireland, beware the things that everybody knows
Mr. McGuirk began with some reflections on the affair between the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey and the newspaper gossip columnist Terry Keane that is reputed to have endured over almost three decades in the second half of the last century.
Ms. Keane confessed to the affair to Gay Byrne on RTE’s Late Late Show in 1999 whereupon, according to Mr. McGuirk:
…everyone who was anyone in the upper tiers of Irish polite society took to their newspaper columns and guest slots on radio columns to say that everybody knew, of course.
Professing to have known it for years was presented as a commentary on the story, but it was, in almost every instance, a commentary on the speaker or writer themselves: I knew. I was in the kind of rarified circles where it was openly discussed.
Because most people, it is fair to say, did not know.
Paraphrasing Mr. McGuirk’s contention: at least some of the people who claimed publicly to “know” of the affair were only pretending they “knew” to project themselves as a “player” or as having an “inside track”. In fact, few people really knew of the affair.
I am not sure if this line of argument stacks up. Certainly, before Ms. Keane’s announcement, only a small number of people “knew” of the affair in the sense of having direct knowledge of it such as actually seeing the couple displaying mutual intimacy or having it confirmed to them directly by one of the parties. But it is possible to claim — reasonably — to know something to be a fact without having direct evidence.
For example, though I have never been near the place, I can confidently claim to know that Ulan Bator exists — because there is enough indirect evidence of the Mongolian capital’s existence for that fact to be true beyond reasonable doubt.
But it is possible to claim to know something to be true even where the evidence is altogether wispier. For example, it is not unreasonable to claim to know that Heaven and its chief denizen, God, exist even though I have no empirical evidence to support either contention.
The affair between Mr. Haughey and Ms. Keane was legitimately “known” beyond the couple’s immediate circle for several reasons. First, the belief was widespread around the country. Second, Ms. Keane dropped regular heavy hints of it in her regular column in a national newspaper. Third, neither participant did anything to dampen the speculation, an effect they could have achieved quickly without recourse to a blunt, direct denial.
Mr. McGuirk takes his case further though:
And any single one of the journalists and commentators who had known about it, as they assured us, with certainty, could at any time have made something of a name for themselves by reporting the story. Certainly, in the Ireland that existed when Haughey was in power, it would have been a massive and important story, and the journalist who broke it would have made a name for themselves.
In Mr. McGuirk’s view, there are two reasons why the story never broke. First, most people who claimed to know of the affair knew only of the rumour of the affair. Second, “rocking the boat” and blowing the cover on the affair would have sent one’s career into a nosedive.
I dismiss the second “reason” altogether as a simple assertion. It might carry some weight if Mr. McGuirk had presented examples of journalists crashing and burning from similar displays of bravery, but he does not.
The first reason he cites points the way to the real reason why the story never “broke” suddenly and incontrovertibly as happened with the public revelation of Bishop Eamon Casey’s affair in 1992.
The media and individual reporters flinched from publicising the Haughey-Keane story for fear of being sued for damages. Confronted by the denial that would inevitably have ensued, the author and the publication would have had either to “put up” or pay the parties a lot of money.
If anybody doubts that, reflect on the media’s failure to grapple seriously with Mr. Haughey’s financial affairs. Nobody could identify honest means by which Mr. Haughey became so rich so quickly, but nobody could establish a robust paper trail to explain how it was done. So, the media largely left it alone — though it was “common knowledge” that there was probably fire behind the visible smoke.
But Mr. McGuirk’s musings about the Haughey-Keane affair are only the foundation for building an argument about contemporary Ireland. He wrote his piece when Ireland’s media was suffering an attack of the vapours about the perceived level of violent crime in inner-city Dublin.
According to Mr. McGuirk:
The state of Dublin’s inner city has, it’s fair to say, been one of those things that everyone has known about for some time.
So, why had the media ignored it then?
Because the other thing about Ireland’s chattering classes is that they love the Green Jersey. There are fewer more excommunicable offences than to be seen to talk down the country.
Two responses to that. First, Mr. McGuirk fails to explain why the media came suddenly to give the matter saturation coverage in mid-summer. Maybe he thinks the state of Dublin had shifted paradigmatically from being merely bad to being post-apocalyptic. Without telling us what Dublin was before, he asserts that the city has become a “kip”. But the assertion of such a dramatic metamorphosis surely requires the support of more than anecdotes and shouting it louder.
Second, Mr. McGuirk’s generalisation is simply untrue. The “media”, mainstream or fringe, traditional or on-line are never done “talking down the country”. You don’t need a metal detector to find examples of our national failings and shortcomings and the immediately available simple remedies to address them being paraded in our media. They come at you screaming thunderously like an onrushing train. I venture that you will find much more stuff in the media talking the country down than pumping it up.
Mr. McGuirk suggests two reasons why talking the country down is “taboo” which I am going to present in reverse order. The one which he specifies as less important is:
…it might make us look bad compared to the true enemy — the Brits.
As people say on Twitter when confronted with a claim so ludicrously ridiculous as to render comment as impossible as it is superfluous: “I’ll just leave that there.” If there was ever a moment in recent times when we felt obliged to scrub up and don a clean shirt (over our green jerseys) to look well before the Brits, that day is long gone.
In Mr. McGurk’s view, the more important reason for the taboo is this.
…it might give succour to political forces outside the ones we’re used to.
Mr. McGurk believes the violent incidents of mid-summer put the state of Dublin is up in lights in the orthodox media. It became permissible for everyone to talk openly about it and admit the horrors of the situation to the extent that the regular media were having to squirm vigorously to avoid conceding that some of these “dreadful far-right protestors” might have a point.
From here, he sidles sideways into the ruck of a new argument by introducing the subject of immigration.
It is also, by the way, something that everybody knows that the Irish Government’s immigration policy is deeply unpopular with the public. And that many of the facilities are over-crowded, and poorly managed. And that — to put it charitably — putting large numbers of idle young men into communities with few facilities to integrate them is leading to what we might charitably call “policing challenges”.
Four points on that tirade:
First, I am happy to concede that some facilities for refugees are over-crowded and not well managed. But the massive scale of refugee immigration over the past two years especially is a considerable mitigant.
Second, if there are large numbers of “idle” immigrants, it is less because they are unwilling to work than because not enough is being done to transition them into a labour market screaming for more hands on deck.
Third, Mr. McGuirk makes a snide sneer at “policing challenges” due to immigrants. Is there any evidence that immigrants feature disproportionately in crime in Dublin? Spoiler alert: the “ordinary decent people” of Ireland are well capable of criminality too.
But most important is Mr. McGuirk’s claim, for which he offers no evidence, that the government’s immigration policy is not only unpopular but is deeply unpopular with the public. Maybe there are public polls purporting to confirm this in which case, Mr. McGuirk’s “nod and wink” “everybody knows” is redundant. But if polls do constitute a form of “evidence”, they are not plebiscites. They are ephemeral.
Even if some people think the hard-right folks might have a point, I offer hard evidence that the general public might not think these right-wing “populist” lads (and they are mainly lads) have much of a point.
Elections are the gold standard for measuring public opinion. Opinion polls are cryptocurrency. Remember that the sanctity of the ballot box allows voters to express their opinions in total confidentiality and, therefore, total honesty. They do so also in the knowledge that they are not “wasting” their vote by indicating their true feelings in the allocation of their first preference, because the vote will go on to their next preference if the candidate is eliminated. So, voters have a “free hit”.
Accepting that the salience of immigration has grown since, in the last election of February 2020, loosely “right wing” parties: Irish Freedom, Renua and the National Party ran 32 candidates (presumably in constituencies they considered most receptive to their “policies”) attracting an average of less than 500 votes each and an aggregate vote of less than 1 per cent of the total national poll.
Everybody knows that is NOT a stellar performance.
[i] https://gript.ie/in-ireland-beware-the-things-that-everybody-knows/
