The great outpouring of emotion over the untimely death of Gerry Ryan tells us much about ourselves, writes MARIE MURRAY
THE MOOD of a nation is often revealed unexpectedly. The death of a public figure can be the catalyst. Private emotion is mediated publicly. Public emotion has multiple media through which it can be expressed.
The reality of life today is that who we are, what we think, how we feel, the impact of national and international events on us are media-conveyed, and they have more and more channels through which to reach us as we have, in turn, to respond in public fora.
More recently, through YouTube and Twitter and social networking sites, private individuals dictate public exchange.
They create the mood rather than receive it. The postmodern phenomenon of “hyper reality” which French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard identified for us as the blurring of the boundaries between private and public realities and between reality and fantasy as a result of technology is manifest.
This means that what happens in the public domain is increasingly felt emotionally in our private worlds and visa versa. It means that there is a proxy quality to our lives. It means that much of what we experience is vicarious rather than directly lived. It means that our emotions are as much public as they are private and as much publicly generated as privately felt.
There is a hyper real quality to events, experiences, relationships, to what concerns us and upsets us all of which is now conveyed reciprocally between broadcasters and ordinary people more than at any other time. We learn a great deal about ourselves from others. We know how we feel when others feel it too.
We put words on our experiences when others articulate them for us. We make emotional connections with public figures because of what is often no longer available in our private lives.
We can be personally upset by the death of someone whom we have never actually personally met.
If ever there was evidence of the role such figures have in our society broadcaster Gerry Ryan, beloved to so many, is proof of that.
His sudden, unfair, untimely death has evoked outpourings and tributes that have taken some by surprise at the range and extent, depth and strength of emotion expressed.
The proximity people have felt to his death has made mourning immediate. President Mary McAleese has paid tribute, politicians have eulogised, broadcasting colleagues have gathered to confirm the significance of his life in their lives. Everyone has acknowledged the loss for his loved ones alongside their own sense of bereavement.
Books in which to convey condolences have been organised in Montrose and the Mansion House. Thousands have queued to express their sympathy, to record their personal mourning of his loss.
A public wake has begun and what is emerging from the narratives is not just the liking for this man by those who knew him but the sociological significance of his public role with the personal presence and the meaning of that for people in this time of recession.
The descriptions of Gerry Ryan’s characteristics eulogised over the past two days could assist politicians in understanding exactly what it is that engages the public and what people need them to do at this time. Gerry Ryan’s voice came into peoples’ homes, into their kitchens, into their living rooms, their bedrooms, their cars and their lives and he asked them, at a time of unrest and recession about what mattered to them.
He listened to what they had to say. He shaped his programme to what was important to the people who tuned in, not to his own agenda. He raised issues of public concern, set out to redress them and did not mince his words about them.
He was generous in recognising talent and supporting it. He was “brave and bold”. He never pandered to public opinion, he was straight, he spoke what he believed and whether one liked it or not, he spoke his own truth.
He was trustworthy. He didn’t pretend. He was fair. Most of all he was “larger than life” and this is what leadership requires.
Gerry Ryan explored on his show all the “reasons to love Ireland” because he knew that in a time of deepest public disenchantment with our country, reminders of what we still loved about our country were important.
He tuned in to national depression and he listened and listened and listened to it, instead of insisting that people move on before they could express what they felt. In that he knew that stories have to be told before the future can be revised.
He was reassuring. His outrageousness reminded people that there was a place for fun.
His loss is more than the person, it provides information about what that person stood for, what this society is seeking now. It reveals how ordinary people feel and what matters to them.
As public grief competes with private mourning in the paradoxical present-day manner in which we witness the shock, denial, anger and fear that untimely death always brings to everyone, we do well to consider societal levels of depression, individual personal despair, the feeling of those who are unemployed and impoverished, the anxiety of those who are fearful of the future and the anguish of those who are resentful of what has happened in the past.
If the death of a broadcaster shows us what is happening emotionally in our society then Gerry Ryan has brought with his death, what he provided with his life, a larger than life look at who we are. That is, perhaps, why people are raging against the dying of the brightness of his light.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and author of several books including Living Our Timespublished by Gill and Macmillan