Righteous indignation and outrage: RIO. After the Estimates, there is more RIO washing around than there are floodwaters. Much of it is justified. It is righteous indignation, after all, which by definition must be outrage at some just cause, writes Breda O'Brien
Only, we seem to specialise in outrage, but not much else. We muster the same levels of RIO at the fate of trees in O'Connell Street as we do at the fact that schoolchildren will continue to be educated in rat-infested schools, or that elderly people will go on lying on trolleys in hospital corridors.
Don't get me wrong. I like trees. Most times, I would prefer to see them allowed to live rather than felled.
Yet somehow I thought that for years we had been full of RIO about the state of O'Connell Street - which now seems to have transferred itself seamlessly to the decision to renew the place.
John Hume was famous for years for the Single Transferable Speech. Recently, all we seem capable of is the Single Transferable Emotion, RIO. It attaches itself to the incendiary idea of the week and then is promptly forgotten, sometimes for months or even years, and replaced by the latest object of RIO.
Any voices trying to put across an alternative viewpoint can choose between being accused of "blaming the victim" or "being in the pocket of the oppressors" or "out of touch with reality". Faced with these alternatives, those who agree that there are problems, but who feel there is another side to the story, tend to subside quietly.
Let's look at the current cause of RIO. Some of the cutbacks are very regressive. But just for one lunatic moment, let's imagine that Charlie McCreevy declared that he had decided to continue with the same level of Government expenditure as heretofore, and that he was sure that the public would understand when the sums did not add up. Can you imagine the level of RIO which would result?
The fact is that the economy is not going to continue to grow at the level of the past few years, and therefore adjustments have to be made. For all their RIO posturing, the opposition know that - and are quietly thankful that it is not they who have to announce cutbacks. Sure, there is a valid argument that the cutbacks should have been targeted so that the usual suspects, those who are already struggling, should not bear the brunt of them.
But if you think the RIO washing about now is bad, imagine what it would be like if it had been leaked that those who had benefited most from the boom should now be taxed more.
We resort to RIO very readily, but if the solution to a problem involves personal sacrifice or discomfort, our RIO is exposed for the shallow thing that it often is.
In the past few years many people in Ireland have become substantially more comfortable. Of course there were sectors in our society that did not benefit, and their daily struggle should not be minimised. However, RIO does little to help those people anyway. For an emotion so freely indulged in by our society, it is rarely mustered on behalf of, say, people with multiple disabilities, or kids who drop out of our school system between primary and secondary level.
The other problem with RIO is that it is so intoxicating that the first casualty is usually balance. Therefore we cannot examine what appears to be happening in Donegal without deciding that the Garda is no longer a trustworthy organisation.
We cannot focus on a problem with Travellers who destroy the environment along the Dodder without all Travellers being seen as vandals with no civic spirit.
We cannot disagree with tactics used by ASTI without designating all teachers to the category of greedy wasters. We cannot investigate those who abuse asylum-seeking provisions without deciding that all asylum-seekers are bogus.
Nor can we tackle a problem with child abuse in a small number of clerics, and inexcusable inertia on the part of some of those who held positions of authority, without the entire Church being regarded with contempt.
Sometimes our RIO even acquires a lethal tinge. We cannot express our revulsion at the crime of paedophilia without baying for blood outside the temporary accommodation of a man who has completed a sentence for that crime.
Sometimes our RIO seems to demand denial that there is any positive aspect to an issue. Dr Tony Fahey of the ESRI roused some mild controversy at the Céifin conference in Clare by pointing out that there was some evidence that quality of life and social capital in Ireland had not declined as much as had been thought, but may instead have changed form.
At the very least, it's a provocative thesis worthy of further debate. Some of the audience seemed to believe that this suggestion somehow invalidated the real difficulties being experienced by some sectors in our society.
Yet there is no contradiction between saying that things may not be as black as we think, or even as black and white as we think, and continuing to work on behalf of those who are in need or difficulty.
The problem with RIO is that it often militates against slow, patient steps towards change, because the nature of RIO is that it wants change, and it wants it now, or at least until attention is diverted to the latest object of RIO.
Regular readers (and I would like to thank you both) will know that there are lots of issues which exercise me - everything from how cynical commercialism targets children to the way prisoners are treated, and many points between. I am not for one moment suggesting that we should stop casting a cold eye on our society, and pressing for change. All I am suggesting is that we need to bear in mind that an exclusive focus on what is wrong with our society has a corrosive effect, fostering a cynicism which saps the energy needed to work for unglamorous, incremental change.
The effect of RIO is not very different from that experienced after a visit to a junk-food outlet on O'Connell Street: easy, cheap gratification which leaves an empty feeling not long afterwards.