Once upon a time we ‘got’ things and our default position was to assume others would ‘get’ them as well
THE FUSS about Enda Kenny’s “plagiarising” of Barack Obama represents a new frontier for the moralism that infects Irish politics and public discussion and gets worse every passing day.
“If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Ireland is a place where all things are possible,” Kenny declared to the crowd at Dublin’s College Green on Monday evening, “who still wonders if the dream of our ancestors is alive in our time, who still questions our capacity to restore ourselves, to reinvent ourselves and to prosper, well, today is your answer.”
As several media organisations, including this one, have been at pains to inform us, this sentence is similar to a passage in Obama’s acceptance speech on his election as US president in November 2008.
A radio station got some of its grown-up staff members to splice together sections from the Obama and Kenny speeches.
One newspaper said that Kenny had “confessed” that the words were from Obama’s victory address, others published the quotations side by side and invited readers to “spot the difference”.
The Taoiseach had to expend breath and time explaining to journalists that he intended the reference “very deliberately” to be understood as a tribute and that he thought the passage so well known that he felt no reason to attribute it.
This was so obvious that I am amazed the Taoiseach didn’t just tell his interrogators to go get themselves a cop-on transplant.
“My speech was 470 words and the first 40 were a direct quote from Barack Obama in 2008, putting in ‘Ireland’ instead of ‘America’,” the Taoiseach explained, very slowly, to RTÉ.
Please reassure me there isn’t one person in the country who believes that Enda Kenny intended to pass off these words as his own.
Please tell me that the years of being pummelled with moralistic self-righteousness and PC nonsense has not finally caused us all to lose any scintilla of common sense we may once have possessed.
Even if you did not immediately connect the passage to Obama, something about Kenny’s construction surely offered a clue.
In November 2008, Obama was talking about his election as America’s first black president. On Monday evening, Kenny was talking about a flying visit by that black president to the country of his ancestors.
Even if you didn’t cop Kenny’s source, the equation of Obama’s visit to Ireland with some hoped-for turnaround in national fortunes was so disproportionate as to communicate that the Taoiseach was engaging in some kind of playful pastiche.
If he hadn’t been, it would have been crass and stupid, but if you watch the clip of his speech, it is clear that he was speaking with a twinkle in his arched-eyebrow, delivering a nod of tribute to someone he admires.
This is so obvious that I shudder at the necessity to write it down.
An Irish Timesreport forensically explained: "The section of [Obama's] speech refers to the doubts of a people, to its dreams and possibilities and to overcoming the doubts.
“Mr Kenny’s speech closely followed the words of Mr Obama’s 2008 speech but with one or two small amendments, and the addition of a longer sub-clause.”
Tell me, I beg you: I have slept through summer, autumn and winter and awoken on April 1st, 2012.
We were once an intelligent people. We had wit and cop-on. We did not need everything spelt out. We understood understatement and irony and knew the difference between allusion and larceny. We did not take everything literally. We had a lightness of touch that was second nature.
We “got” things. Not only did we “get” things, but our default position was to assume other people would “get” them as well. We nodded and winked and allowed ambiguities to lie unmentioned and undisturbed. Common sense was common. We were simple but not stupid.
If there’s anyone out there who still thinks Ireland is a place where common sense is possible – you have had your answer.
We awake to find that the raillery of our ancestors has been obliterated and everything rendered literal, leaden and clunky.
Worse, the point of virtually every analysis of public phenomena is the levelling of an accusation, however preposterous, the unearthing of the “sin”, the locating of the theme that enables the accusers to gain the readiest access to the high moral ground. And, if in doubt, dumb down.
We congratulate ourselves on having shaken off the humourless judgmentalism of “traditional” Irish Catholicism, seemingly unaware that the worst aspects of this former dreariness have transmogrified and reasserted themselves in more banal and toxic forms.
Ironic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with na gCopaleen in the grave.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I should point out that the last sentence is not an original composition. It is based on a repeated line in September 1913, a poem by William Butler Yeats.
I have changed several details, substituting the word “romantic” in the original with the word “ironic”.
I have also, by way of achieving a more contemporary resonance, inserted a reference to the late satirist Myles na gCopaleen [1911-1966], instead of that in Yeats’s poem to the Fenian agitator John O’Leary [1830-1907]).