John Waters asked a friend of his, a young woman with no interest in current affairs, what comes into her mind when she thinks of Ireland. Her answer was unhesitating: "Shops!"
Although smarter than 98 per cent of those with votes in the Seanad election, she does not read newspapers, listen to radio or watch TV. She has a vague idea who Charles Haughey is, but otherwise could not name a single politician.
Many people of a certain age, when they think of Ireland, think of a range of iconic representations of its public life: e.g. Government Buildings, the Phoenix Park, Bunreacht na hÉireann or Brian Farrell. It surprises, even shocks such people to find that others do not think like this at all.
My friend is very beautiful and likes to buy nice clothes, which she wears once or twice before donating them to Oxfam. She does not demur when I describe this as an addiction, but offers that everyone is addicted to something: others are addicted to watching moronic television programmes or mooching around charity shops in search of bargains. She is right. Much of what we do, other than what we must, is compulsive or addictive. And perhaps the greatest compulsion of modern times is what we term current affairs.
Once upon a time, I don't doubt, an interest in public affairs and politics betokened an attitude of deep maturity, a consuming concern for the condition of one's society and its institutions. This must have been true of a time when information travelled so slowly that you had to be genuinely interested if you were to find out anything. The news on the wireless confined itself to a terse summary of important events, without comment or colour.
Newspapers, comprising long columns of dense type, demanded the utmost seriousness from their readers. Most news was passed by word of mouth. Accounts of what Dev said at the church gates in Crossmolina spread in the same way as influenza, and people occupied themselves by passing information along to other anoraks of the national condition, which included nearly everyone. In those days, you voted unless you were dead, and sometimes even then.
Nowadays, although current affairs has become the most pervasive and slickly-packaged product in the marketplace, hardly anyone is interested in the welfare of society in the solemn manner of our forefathers. Fewer people bother voting with each election, and six out of 10 so-called citizens couldn't name the Minister for Justice. A few anoraks remain, of course, to duly snap up the audience tickets for Questions and Answers; but most people, while pretending, (even to themselves) a consuming interest in the public life of Ireland, are in reality simply addicted to information. Current affairs has become a soap opera, in which the activity of public life is organised into a daily storyline to keep the public watching, listening or reading.
Thus, these mid-summer days, when we wait to see the list of Ansbacher names, we affect to be gravely concerned about the solemn implications of fiscal non-compliancy, but in reality are just gagging to find out who these bastards are who've been getting away with murder while we've been paying through the nose. It's not that there is any lack of outrage, but the outrage is born not, as of old, of a genuine civic-mindedness, but of deep personal animus fuelled by the distinctly salacious and spiteful edge to the media's reporting of events. What editorial writers call "the public interest" is really a form of emotional pornography. If you study any soap drama, you will notice that the hook of virtually every scene is not the action or the dialogue, but the close-up of a face at the end of an exchange.
Rita has discovered why Bet has been avoiding her, and we read the horror of realisation in her eyes. Mike has been confronted, accused or given a bit of bad news, and we see in his face the range of possible implications for the next episode. The viewer speculates and invents, second-guessing the script-writers, who themselves are second-guessing the viewer. This close-up, in which the possibilities are encapsulated, is the soap opera equivalent of what pornographers call "the come shot".
An interest in current affairs is nowadays a disguise for a craving for new information, developments and titillation, and really confers no more virtue on the addict than a compulsion to shop. The greatest public outrage usually occurs when the public is denied the gratification of scrutinising the visage of a public wrongdoer, as happened some months ago when an official was all but lynched for helping Liam Lawlor avoid a media scrum at Dublin Airport. Public life is a series of constantly-changing plotlines: Who is on the Ansbacher list? Will Roy and Mick kiss and make up? Is Nora truly devastated at losing her Dáil seat? It's no accident that journalists refer to these as "stories". While enabling a pretence of civic concern, they simply fuel our craving for gossip and distraction.
Later this week, as we scrutinise the Ansbacher list and cheer the door-steppers as they seek to drag the suspects before us, we will mouth our outrage at the terrible culture of tax evasion which persisted under our noses. But really we'll be getting our rocks off watching them squirm. We like to think of ourselves as being engaged in a meaningful relationship with our society, but in truth we just like to watch.