Last Thursday night's Prime Time programme on RTÉ television was a fine example of public service broadcasting and a good argument for the licence fee, writes Fintan O'Toole.
Joe Little, who has covered the destruction of the Laffoy Commission so acutely, had a measured but deeply disturbing report on the Department of Education's uncomfortable relationship with the case of the serial abuser Donal Dunne. Richard Crowley reported from the Middle East, where he has done such authoritative work, bringing us a distinctive Irish perspective on the major international story.
The only problem was that fewer people were watching than normal. Why? Because Prime Time was moved out of its regular slot and delayed by an hour. Was there a huge global story on the scale of September 11th? Had an epoch-making figure - the Pope or Charlie Haughey, for example - died? In fact, the national broadcaster had taken the extraordinary decision to shove aside its flagship current affairs show for vastly more important reasons.
George, you see, had been given the job of choreographing a line dance in the Games Field and then he and Gavin and Tamara and Mary K had to make scarecrows out of straw and include them in the dance. And while the girls made a straw woman that looked like a normal female, George and Gavin, with a display of wit that has not been seen since Wilde and Whistler faced each other across the dinner tables of London high society, put a bra and panties on theirs and then filled the bra to bursting-point with more straw.
And then they were all tired so they had a few beers and a Chinese takeaway, and then Mary K got voted out but, showing all the dignity of Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and all the rapier-like repartee of Madame de Stael, she delighted the nation with her dazzling catch-phrase "Joke!"
A few days earlier another important public body, Dublin City Council, had announced a major initiative, again using substantial amounts of public money. The mayor, Royston Brady, a protégé of the Taoiseach, hosted a big press conference to announce that the citizens' cash was being devoted to the production of free buttock-shaped portable ashtrays, 20,000 of which are being distributed to the city's smokers. The campaign is called "Butt Out" and the advertising is based around what the marketing people presumably think is a hilarious double entendre.
Just to make it completely clear, however, the launch involved the mayor being flanked by female employees of the City Council who were then required to show their behinds to the cameras to reveal a slogan, again using the word "butt". So not only do we have public money being used to subsidise smokers, we also have the unbelievably crass spectacle of the backsides of female public servants being used to promote this idiotic scheme.
In the same week we also had perhaps the most important single expression of a distinctive Irish culture, the All-Ireland hurling final, polluted by tabloid attacks on the private life of an amateur sportsman, Kilkenny's captain D.J. Carey.
Disgusting as this was, however, it told us nothing we didn't already know. We've known for some years that the public realm in Ireland is being vulgarised, that the creepy values of the world's worst newspapers - the English tabloids - have been infecting common discourse here. In an open society, there's not much we can do about it.
What we can and must expect, however, is that public bodies - the Taoiseach, the democratic system, the national broadcaster - form a counterweight to these relentless waves of the infantile, the crude, the trivial and the nasty.
Triviality and vulgarity have their places in the great scheme of things, but when public institutions lose all sense of perspective, that place is lost. Instead of being a breath of fresh air, vulgarity becomes the air we breathe.
Hello! magazine gives a lot of people a lot of harmless fun, but when it can buy the Taoiseach as part of one of its celebrity packages, it's not funny any more.
Celebrity Farm, even if it was poorly made and exploitative, is clearly the sort of thing some people want to watch. But when the national broadcaster not merely displaces serious programming from its schedules to accommodate it but gives it blanket coverage across so much of its output (two Late Late Shows, Liveline, Gerry Ryan and more) the abject surrender of public values is complete.
The odd joke about arses is fine, but when the authority that runs the capital city thinks it's OK to parade the anatomies of its female employees, the citizens are dragged down to the level of bold five-year-olds.
All of this suggests a desperate lack of confidence. RTE is so terrified by the arrival of some decent competition for its Late Late cash cow that it decided to appeal to viewers, not on the basis of its track record of quality programming, but with a panicky dip into the bottom of the barrel. Dublin City Council has so little confidence in its ability to talk to its citizens about the cost of litter that it treats them like smutty kids.