And here goes just about the only RTÉ programme to which Kevin Myers is ever invited: Questions and Answers.
Last week, for the first time in nearly a year, I was asked to appear on it. To be sure, other cleverer, wittier, more incisive and more entertaining people have certainly been invited to appear more often over that period, and I suppose I should be grateful that in - no doubt - a slack week, and for want of anyone more interesting, Q & A sought me as a panellist.
And I declined. Why? Because Eamon Dunphy had been on the programme a couple of weeks before. Now in any proper society, with civilised standards, a serial drunk-driver such as Eamon Dunphy simply would not be brought on to a television programme to be consulted for his opinions on any matters of importance. But we behave differently in this wretched, sleaze-filled country. For, after being found guilty of driving offences for the ninth time, Eamon Dunphy both retained his radio programme on Today FM, and was promptly invited on to RTÉ in order to pontificate about the world.
Nobody expects television or radio pundits to be conspicuously better than most of the rest of us. But only in this country would someone who is so conspicuously worse than the mass of society be lionised, and his opinions sought as if he were a fountainhead of wisdom. He is not. He is a dangerous drunk. By his own confession, he has used cocaine: and had the Garda done a full blood test on him the night he was caught, yet again, drunk-driving, might it have yielded some interesting results?
Off the scale
In other cultures, such a person would not be treated as a colourful eccentric, but both a danger to road-users and an appalling example to others. His behaviour - not just in an unfortunate, unguarded moment, but systematically and repeatedly - really should disqualify him from the right to be taken seriously in public.For even though he is a fine broadcaster, and often a fearless journalist, do his deeds not suggest a certain amount of cant and hypocrisy?
And, of course, most journalists are hypocrites sooner or later: and I speak personally. But there is a scale to these things, and Eamon Dunphy has gone right off it.
Yet, far more troubling than his personal failings is the fact they have not caused him any professional inconvenience. He simply should not have been invited on to television almost directly after his conviction for drunk driving. And, if Today FM had any moral fibre, it would have decided it was impossible to allow his broadcasts for another minute: his contract should have been instantly terminated.
In any other country, Eamon Dunphy would have been thrown into jail the moment he was found guilty. In Ireland, by contrast, he was promptly invited on to Questions and Answers. Now this is not an alcohol and drugs rehabilitation programme: nor is it a confess-all, chest-beating forum in which sinners confess their sins. Quite the reverse. It would see itself as a medium for the discussion of serious ideas by serious people, and implicit in it all is the belief that a moral gravity lies at the heart of any discussion.
Yet a man whose conduct on the roads is conspicuously immoral, who has repeatedly endangered others, was treated as a serious guest whose opinions were worth hearing. Indeed, far from his drunkenness, both in studio during the World Cup, and behind the wheel of a car, damaging his career as broadcaster, it seems almost to have enhanced his attractiveness as a panellist.
The British equivalent, I suppose, would be for Jeffrey Archer to appear on "Question Time", and being taken seriously: but of course, we know that would never happen, just as we know that Angus Deayton's career as the presenter of "Have I got News for You" was abruptly ended simply because of allegations over prostitutes and cocaine.
The real issue, of course, isn't Eamon Dunphy, but how broadcasting organisations view his conduct. In not deciding to exclude him from programmes as a general statement of what is unacceptable, are they not reflecting some broader malaise about this country? Are we not now living in a society that lacks real moral standards or any core of integrity?
And so, in its desire to get Eamon Dunphy on air, RTÉ probably was fairly representing opinions and the standards of very many Irish people; they might well indeed think that a celebrity drunkenly cruising through crowded streets, or staggering into a television studio unable to speak his name, is no more than harmless fun.
National malaise
Therefore, it's not so much the pusillanimity displayed by Today FM and RTÉ that is deeply troubling as the realisation that this desire to appease the wrong-doer is now endemic within Irish life. Personal self-discipline is seen as precious and effete: our norms are set by the mob of drunken youths in any Irish town at midnight.
Moreover, in the new, post-Catholic, peace-process Ireland, to profess standards of any kind is to be "judgmental". The rule-book has been thrown out of the window. Thus terrorist chieftains dripping with blood of innocents are transformed into amiable, grinning grandfathers on the front pages of our newspapers; recidivist drunk drivers and drug-abusers are treated as sage old statesman. And all, naturally, are given almost open access to the taxpayer-subsidised airwaves: to which I, on the contrary, now bid a final farewell.