Four journalists, four books and four interpretations of what brought us to the edge. Just why would 1,200 people pay to hear them speak? KATHY SHERIDANwent to the National Concert Hall to find out
WHAT DOES it say about the state we’re in that 1,200 people are willing to abandon family and fire on a miserable Wednesday and pay €25 each to watch four non-celebrities do a two-hour sales pitch for their books? What is even more startling is that all four authors are journalists by trade. This, remember, is a breed that consistently vies with politicians for bottom place in “who do you trust?” polls. “The whole thing is a reflection on the other theatre across the way”, muttered a gentleman not unconnected with Leinster House.
Pat Leahy, Angry Man and political editor of the Sunday Business Postcalled it downright "peculiar" that 1,200 people would turn up at the magnificent National Concert Hall "to hear four men who can't sing, can't play and don't look too good", and drew parallels with our current "major exports", the X Factor Grimes twins – "two would-be pop stars who can't sing, can't play. . ."
So what were the punters expecting for their €25? A bit less about the past, a bit more about the future, seemed to be the consensus, which was odd considering that all four books are definitively about what got us here – the past. Two cheerful 19-year-olds from Letterkenny, Co Donegal, David McHale, a first-year student at St Patrick’s teacher training college and Ross Harvey, a UCD fresher, sipped costly fizzy orange and said they had had to save up for the tickets; they were hoping to hear about solutions.
Dearbhla Gillman, a stylish financial controller for a company “with links to the construction industry”, was hoping to hear “if there is a viable alternative to Nama. . .”, to have an answer for political callers.
Why this lot though? “These boys have been monitoring this for years. They were speaking out when times were good – I think they knew instinctively that things were flawed”. The entertainment would come, she said happily,from watching “how four egos are going to cope on one stage”.
Jim Glennon, former Fianna Fáil TD, now chairman of Edelman Ireland, was there with his wife, Helen (who bought the tickets), and looking forward to “two hours of debate. That’s more than you get on radio or TV, because of the interrogative nature and the set number of minutes a subject gets.”
Prof Michael O’Keefe, consultant ophthalmologist at the Mater, was anticipating some witty, entertaining insights into how the angry men sourced their stories, “and, for example, how Anglo Irish got in with the Dublin Docklands Authority and how Bertie Ahern managed to neuter the unions by putting them on State boards”. But above all, he reckoned, people wanted to be entertained.
Master of ceremonies, Gráinne Seoige, declared that the Four Angry Men would be exposing "the culprits who brought us from boom to bust". Fintan O'Toole's pithy summation of his book, Ship of Fools– "a good old-fashioned jeremiad about the bastards who got us into this mess" – summed it up for all of them, in one way or another.
The big themes that emerged were connectedness and untouchability. Unravelling the various calamitous threads between our masters and the culture and hubris that led to Ireland’s pratfall, O’Toole cited a revenue official’s report of a developer who built up assets of €125m plus a €3.9m home in D4, without paying a cent of tax.
Shane Ross summed up his oeuvre and anger with the words : “Banks are too powerful to be punished”. Worse, nothing has changed. “Nama is a great victory for them. . . And yes, the oligarchy has been replaced – but with clones of themselves”.
Pat Leahy’s subject was “the politics of the boom and bust. . .” where instead of fulfilling their sacred duty, our politicians “chose the path of short-term sectional gain”. The media and voters carried their share of the blame too. “They wanted to be promised things. . . ,” he said quoting wild election promises from all sides on the cusp of disaster in 2007.
“We need a new seriousness in our politics, a new grown-up awareness that politics is not just a blood sport”.
For broadcaster and columnist, Matt Cooper, the last seven years between 4.30pm and 7pm each weekday have been “an experiment in anger management”. There was wholesale denial and now a failure to take responsibility. Big players were not prepared to say on air what they had been admitting in private. But when commentators like himself sounded warning bells they were admonished for “TALKING us into trouble”.
It could be argued, he said “that all the books here are talking about the past. But you have to understand what has gone on to know if the people who are supposed to lead us out of this are able to do so”.
He didn’t sound optimistic. Citing for example the proposed €460m development in Tipperary promoted by Michael Lowry and anchored on the old idea of a “super-casino”, he concluded: “The same people are going to be able to do all this again”. But he counselled against hopelessness. “We have a RIGHT to be angry. But you cannot let that tip over into despair. We’ve got to confront the powerful, make them accountable for what they’ve done and find a way out of this”.
In the second hour, devoted to a question and answer session, Fintan O’Toole described a “real need to engage with the underlying cause. . . We are not going to get out of this without refounding Irish democracy. Anger is not a policy but it’s a very good starting point for a policy”.
For questioner Mark Walshe, a member of the People Before Profit Alliance, the speakers had identified “a common enemy”. Fintan O’Toole called it the “aristocracy”, Shane Ross called it the “oligarchy”, Pat Leahy called it “Fianna Fáil”, Matt Cooper called it “deference to people with capital”. But where was the social force that would take them on, he asked, wondering if the trade unions might be best placed to do so? O’Toole agreed the unions would have a role but it “had to be much broader than that. . . We have to fight the idea that there is no alternative”.
Pat Leahy’s comment that the unions are “an institution/power centre as well”, whose “sectional interest” should not be mistaken for the “national interest” drew a big round of applause. The strong ovation for Matt Cooper’s admonition – “I don’t think the trade unions should get a free pass either” – confirmed what seemed like an anti-union sense in the hall.
There were questions about bank nationalisation, a gloomy exchange about the tendency of the electorate to embrace the most corrupt and a swipe at people like Ben Dunne – known at one time for his payments to politicians but who has somehow become “the rent-a-quote hero for the people”, in Cooper’s words.
A teacher’s question about pay cuts was met with a steely answer from Pat Leahy: “You should ask your union, is your job going to be sacrificed by the union to maintain pay levels?”
O’Toole suggested that the governing strategy “is to generate a civil war” between public and private.
Suddenly, a mic-less voice was roaring about the media, its property supplements and its evasion of responsibility for the state we're in. O'Toole took it on, saying newspapers were funded by advertising and "that's the reality. . . But The Irish Timesconsistently published highly critical pieces in relation to the property boom. It gave a page to Morgan Kelly in 2006, who was saying there was a bubble. The reaction in much of the mainstream media was that he shouldn't have been allowed to say that. . . There were huge threats from advertisers," he said, before asking, "would you pay €3.50 for The Irish Times? Because that's what it would cost without advertising."
THE PROGRAMME WENT 20 MINUTES over time. Afterwards, the two Donegal students, armed with a signed copy of Cooper’s book, declared it “well worth the money, even just to see there are people who do care”.
Financial journalist, Jill Kirby, would have liked to hear the four men answer the question, “have we run out of time?”
Prof Michael O’Keefe was rather “underwhelmed. . . I was hoping to hear specific examples, not a political diatribe. There were some good people among the developers and entrepreneurs. They are needed; to lump them all together is dangerous. . . I’d also have liked more wit and humour. There is a huge sense of desperation in society, I don’t know how much more of this people can take”.
The audience filed out quietly, a bit wearily. There was no sense it might storm the Bastille/Leinster House gates on the way home. Many queued up for books, which left the clever old organisers, Penguin Ireland, publishers of three of the four authors, looking pretty pleased with themselves. A good night for book sales, said Michael McLoughlin, its MD. And for a fat profit on the sold-out event?
“Not as much as you’re thinking, not at all. I’d never want to be an impresario. . . We’ll have a good meal out for a dozen people, that’s it”.
