Planet A isn’t doing too well.
I have always been wary of reviews since I read the story of the first review written by Terence de Vere White. The author of 26 books of biography and fiction, Terence de Vere White bestrode the Irish literary world like a colossus for much of the last century, including a spell as literary editor of The Irish Times from 1961–1977.
Long before he ascended to that pantheon, he got a call from one of his predecessors in the job asking if he might be interested in reviewing a certain book. Mr. de Vere White mentioned that he’d never done any reviewing but he’d be willing to try.
I am indebted to the author and literary editor David Marcus[i] for this story, so I will let him take over:
‘That’s great,’ the literary editor said. ‘The only trouble, Terence, is that I need it rather in a hurry.’
‘Well,’ Terence answered, ‘I could read it tonight and review it tomorrow, or review it tonight and read it tomorrow.’
I am going to discuss a snippet from the radio review column by Mick Heaney in The Irish Times of 19 March about a conversation on the RTE Radio programme Liveline earlier that week. Without impugning Mr. Heaney’s integrity at all, I want to shout the caveat that we cannot always presume a review to be a full and accurate representation of its subject matter. So an implicit “According to Mr. Heaney” precedes every sentence of the summary I will provide.
And I must enter the second caveat that I detest Liveline intensely. For anybody whose connection with Ireland is so remote that they aren’t familiar with Liveline, it is in RTE’s own words:
…a radio interview and phone-in chat show broadcast on RTE Radio 1each weekday between 13.45and 15.00.
The programme has been running since 1985 and has been hosted by Joe Duffy since 1999.
It has the well-earned nickname Livewhine because that’s what it mainly is, a litany of moaning and complaint, the host invariably sympathetic to the complainants.
It is thoroughly in synch with the contemporary zeitgeist in two ways. First, it provides a forum for anybody who thinks they have a story to tell with the implication not only that they have the right to be heard but that we have some obligation to listen. Second, there is the unspoken implication that feeling one has a grievance or grouse about something constitutes a strong prima facie case that one’s grievance or grouse has at least some legitimacy. It is no surprise that the programme enjoys a very large audience. Ireland may not grow as many potatoes as formerly, but plenty of shoulders provide fertile ground for the cultivation of large chips.
So now to Mr. Heaney’s review.
For the previous couple of weeks, the Liveline atmosphere had been charged with anger over soaring energy bills the blame for which, according to Liveline callers, lay not with Mr. Putin or even greedy energy suppliers but the Green Party. The review continues:
Joe Duffy starts off Tuesday’s show by talking to Kerry pensioner Michael, who paints a vivid vignette of fuel poverty. Tight budgets mean Michael and his wife already ration fuel, using their oil-fired heating at a minimum: “We light the fire in the front room and sit there,” he says plaintively, “and put an extra duvet on the bed.”
This raises several points.
First, Mr. Heaney might as easily have employed the description “older Kerryman” rather than “Kerry pensioner”, but the term “pensioner” has a particular resonance in the Irish media. It is shorthand for “somebody who has worked hard all their lives, paid all their taxes along the way, lives frugally, has never taken a handout unless they were both fully entitled to and in dire need of it and, now, in the winter of their lives, are forgotten, neglected, ill-provided for, physically frail and mentally fragile.”
Some “pensioners” do tick some of those boxes, but not all. For example, the many Irish “pensioners” I saw enjoying themselves in the Andalusian seaside resort of Nerja last October were in rude health and anything but poverty stricken.
Second, I think it is fair to read into what Mr. Heaney says that his definition of fuel poverty is an inability to keep one’s entire dwelling as warm as one might wish so that one can perch anywhere within it at will in as little or as much clothing as one desires without experiencing any diminution in temperature. It may sound unseasonally Scrooge-like, but I’d call “poverty” an inability to keep oneself adequately warm at all, and if one can stay warm enough by remaining largely in one room, putting on an extra jumper and throwing an extra duvet on the bed, that doesn’t strike me as an immense hardship or deprivation.
Mr. Heaney continues with a passage that I was sure on first reading was tongue in cheek.
Clearly upset that people should still live in such conditions, Duffy presses for more details of penury, ascertaining that Michael’s wife buys own-brand butter rather than Kerrygold. “It’s a sad day when people can’t afford butter,” Duffy says mournfully, identifying dairy products as a key index to quality of life.
Maybe I’m missing something but Kerrygold is butter. So Michael’s wife is “reduced” only to having to substitute one form of butter for another, not to being unable to afford butter at all. Butter is essentially a commodity. Kerrygold is not better butter, just better known butter because of the lavish television ads for it.
But, Mr. Heaney is as serious as he is indignant:
The conversation is an indictment of how older people are let down in Ireland, particularly when they are less well-off.
Well, I thought Mr. Heaney’s job was to review radio programmes rather than parade his virtue to the world. But, the conversation he describes doesn’t seem to me to indict anybody except perhaps Michael from Kerry for his insistence that only Kerrygold will do, Joe Duffy for indulging him and Mr. Heaney himself for being so upset about it all.
Sweeping generalisations are as odious as they are lazy but it is at least as true to say that it is younger people who represent the let down class in our society these days rather than our cosseted pensioners. Young people today are saddled with paying for the pension entitlements and other benefits enjoyed by current pensioners which they themselves are unlikely to enjoy from the same age or in the same magnitude and for whom the prospects are dismal of securing affordable homes of any kind let alone ones that are permanently warm.
Older people attract sympathy not because economic disadvantage is their inevitable and sad lot, but because they are (statement of the obvious) closer to life’s eighteenth green than they are to its first tee. But we are all equal in the respect of making our way down the same course, even if we are all at different stages of it. Death remains the ultimate leveller.
Back to Michael from Kerry to steer us towards the Green Party.
Michael is unsurprisingly upset about the latest rises — “All I can see them doing is robbing the poor” — but he reserves his real ire for Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan, whom he dubs “that eejit in the Green Party”. Duffy demurs at the description, but the genie is out of the bottle. Another caller, John, expresses exasperation at how his commute costs more because of various carbon taxes, which he calls “a vanity project for the Green Party”.
This is why combating climate change is almost certainly doomed to disappointment. If it comes to a choice between preserving our creature comforts and saving the planet, the latter will always take a back seat. In a loose way, we want to be modern Saint Augustines. We are all in favour of radical action to curtail climate change, but not just yet, and certainly not if it costs or constrains us. We want fuel prices reduced, carbon taxes postponed, to continue to drive our cars as fast as we like, to fly cheaply to the Costa whenever it suits and to be able to wander at will around our dwellings dressed in t-shirts in the depth of winter enjoying only the best butter from the world’s greenest dairyland.
Can’t the kids sort it out later?
[i] From Oughtobiography — Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew
