PRESENT TENSE:WE NEED to start imposing some kind of fine on any taxi drivers, commentators or pedestrians found griping about the country to foreign journalists, writes SHANE HEGARTY
It’s bad enough that we spend the days obsessing about our own collapse, and others’ failures to prevent it, but a couple of years into this sorry mess it would be nice if we could stop being such an international freak show, stop being a fairy tale to scare the neighbours. Just smile. Say everything’s grand. We had enough practice before. It should be second nature.
The Guardianwas the latest to pay us a visit, this week ticking itself off the growing list of major newspapers to have written the death-of-the-Celtic-Tiger piece. Its lead picture said it all: sagging green-and-white bunting in a ghost estate. The sky was not as blue as it has been this week. Inside was a large photograph of an apparently abandoned half-built house, with horses snuffling around. This allowed the Guardianto fulfil the requirement that dictates "when writing from Ireland, make sure to get some horses in there".
Actually, it wasn't the worst piece yet written about the death of the Celtic Tiger. No, the worst piece yet written remains one from the Sunday Timesmagazine last year. It actually used the word Paddies in a casual way. It also got through booze, religion and horses (remember, there must be horses) in a piece that built its foundations on cliche.
The newspaper has an Oirish office. Surely they could have chucked it Paddy’s way – and if he had been sober enough to read it, then a few changes might have been made.
The Guardian’s piece was better than that but still had a ruthless predictability about it. Not just in how it too called at the door of John FitzGerald – his office at the ESRI seems to be over-run by foreign hacks, like a cornfield in the path of single-minded locusts – but in how it knew what it wanted and wouldn’t leave without it. It seemed to have been written before the journalist landed at the airport, so it was just a case of throwing in a few supporting quotes.
It was gripe-heavy. The Guardianinterviewed a taxi driver who said he had to work seven days a week to pay off his mortgage. I don't doubt the source, but I would suggest there is a greater challenge to find any taxi driver in the past 20 years who didn't plead poverty.
And there were only glimpses of a country trying to find a way out. We were presented as being stuck in a quagmire and making a few quips as we sank without trace. Among those interviewed was David McWilliams. We can’t know how much he said to the journalist, and how it was edited, but for someone so four-square behind Farmleigh, the current campaign to get us out of this rut and to reinvigorate “brand Ireland”, on this occasion he only briefly touched on the future and was instead presented as yet another commentator still going on about the old brand.
We can kick ourselves hard enough and shouldn’t complain when others gather around to watch us bloodied and concussed.
If there is a more pertinent analogy, perhaps it is that we are the Yvonne and Ronan of the international stage. When times were good we showed off, flaunted ourselves, held
ourselves up as models of excellence that other countries could aspire towards being. We were happy with the glossy articles praising our thrust and excitement. Our landscape, sharp and blinding, was Ronan’s teeth in all of this.
Okay, the analogy is falling apart, but you know where I’m going with this. We got the good publicity; it’s time to take the bad when things go wrong.
The Guardian's article wasn't unfair, as such; it grated only because it was a bit off, very much read as the view of someone who did their research in Britain, landed for a few days and got out again. (Still, it's not as strange as the Sunday Times's decision to use an British writer instead of one of its Irish journalists to tell an Irish story.) This, though, is the consequence of being an international attraction.
This is how Iceland and Greece feel. We’re a curiosity, a talking point, a morality tale. More importantly, we present an easy headline and a simple pitch.
Publications dispatch journalists here, and most have a very strong narrative worked out before they even book their flights. The details can be a bit wonky; the quotes don’t always come from the widest range of sources; and they’re intent on placing a narrative on the whole thing.
Everything they ask is with the clear intention of getting one answer. And each of them has to get a horse in there somewhere. Such is the consequence of international ignominy.