Poor Michael Roche, managing editor of Independent Newspapers, wasted an evening last week criticising our libel laws to barristers. This is like complaining about the price of oil to the Sultan of Brunei. If there had been tears running down those barristerly cheeks, you could have put them in a pen and it would probably spell "Bliss"!
Actually, I don't blame Michael. I've done something similar, and with the futility of infantry advancing at Flanders. With that puny bayonet of the printed word, we are powerless against the big guns of the courts. Important truth doesn't emerge from the Irish media. It comes out of those howitzers called tribunals.
Why is this? Why do we prefer such expensive ways of revealing scandals? Why did we commission the Hamilton, the Moriarty, the McCracken, the Flood and the Lindsay tribunals? And will we now have a Campus Ireland swimming pool tribunal? I do hope so; I know a couple of poor barristers who haven't got a swimming pool yet.
Protecting libel laws
Tribunals are Dáil Éireann's way of protecting its libel laws, the most repressive laws in any free society anywhere. It would rather spend vast fortunes employing lawyers to open cans of worms than allow journalists do the work for which we are - albeit rather more modestly - paid.
So why did we get a beef tribunal? We got one because of media revelations about the beef-packing industry. Which media? Not the Irish media. We were too scared. We knew there was criminal activity in much of the beef-packing industry, but our legal advice was that if we said so, we'd be sued, we'd lose, and might face ruin. Moreover, a lost case might provide a precedent not merely for ruinous costs but also for what we may lawfully say. For just as the former have remorselessly risen, so has the latter with equal remorselessness receded, and for the same reason. Lawyers grow fat on litigation; and the more aggressive and repressive the libel laws, the fatter they grow.
But Granada Television, perhaps in blissful ignorance of the libel culture in Ireland, broadcast a documentary which revealed some of the scandals in our meat trade. The outcome wasn't an enquiry into why the Irish media were unable to tell the truth about corruption in Ireland, but a damage-limitation exercise under an ambitious and obliging judge who had his heart set on being Chief Justice.
Tribunalitis had arrived, enriching the legal profession even more than the libel laws were already doing. Of course, the libel laws didn't then go away, and they still enrich the legal profession mightily. The barristers win, heads or tails, and pocketing the guineas they saunter away, as we in the media cringe and fret and worry, and end up doing what we always do: paying up.
Ideas-free zone
But why is this? For the greater truth is that lawyers aren't to blame for keeping the money we give them. I'd do the same. Our libel laws are merely the journalistic thread I'm pulling at to unravel this particular garment. You can use any thread in your own lives, to comparable effect; all those threads come together to show that the Irish middle classes constitute an ideas-free zone, almost without the trip-wire of principle anywhere on their smugly manicured lawns.
You lot out there - there's nothing you really care about, is there? After all, for years you uncomplainingly tolerated the intolerable. The only reason that our laws now allow male homosexual activity, or the sale of condoms, or equal pay for women, or legal separation, or any of the natural rights which are taken for granted in any civilised country in Europe is that European courts insisted on their implementation here.
We had nothing to do with this. Nothing. We were on the receiving end of a juggernaut of money from the EEC, as it then was, and the quid pro quo for all those quids being parachuted over the country was that we had to obey European laws on civil liberties. We accepted them as meekly as we had accepted the repressive laws they replaced, without comment, question or fury.
Passive supinity
It's all rather pathetic; and for all that I might disagree with the Shinners or the Irish-language lobby, at least they have a passionate engagement with something. That's not true of most middle-class people in Ireland, who with passive supinity accept whatever government disposes.
It's not that people don't complain. They do. In pubs, but not publicly. For Irish people are uncomfortable speaking out about ideas or principles, which they have traditionally left for the church; so that even though the latter's influence is gone from most middle-class lives, nothing yet fills the vacuum remaining.
So we have an administrative class which seems immune to criticism or intelligence, and is utterly disconnected from both its political masters and its duties to the people it is meant to serve. Who cares? Nobody does. And we have a political class which is content to accept the congenital ineptitude of those it appoints to run the State, because it knows: there is no consequence for failure in ideas-free Ireland.
Thus year after year goes by, with departing visitors writing perplexed letters of complaint about our appalling roads, our dismal driving, our wretched signposts, our filthy beaches, our poorly run cities and towns, our polluted rivers, our crazy licensing laws, our invisible gardaí, yet nothing is ever done.
Our wretched libel laws aren't the problem, alas. They're merely one symptom of the malignant moral inertia of the Irish middle classes.
KEVIN MYERS