Sense and Sensibilities

Sigh.

You know, I'd hate for you to get your first glimpses of the world through the prism of your father's obsessions. On the other hand, you do have a mother too, and we will, apparently, be required to send you to school at some point.

So, you'll probably be alright.

Right then, obsessions.

The thing is the media (you remember we talked about them in this post). What about the media? Well, a lot of the time, they manufacture what passes for "news" themselves.

Here's a case in point.

Senatory Mary O'Rourke and friends

Last night, the former Minister for Public Enterprise, current Leader of the Seanad and all-round cuddly grande dame of Fianna Fáil, Mary O'Rourke won that party's nomination to run for election to the Dáil in the Longford-Westmeath seat that she lost in the last General Election in 2002.

This would have been a minor but genuine political news story in itself, especially since O'Rourke lost the seat amid some bitterness about the vote management strategy imposed by her party.

However, it has turned into a bigger story, entirely at the instigation of the media themselves. You see, during her acceptance speech Senator O'Rourke acknowledged the efforts of her campaign workers and declared that they had "worked like blacks".

Now, I'm going to have to elide a great deal of complexity here; there's a whole lot of history, politics and culture to do with race and racism that we can't go into here. Suffice it to say that we have in Ireland, for the most part, arrived at a situation where most people avoid the intentional use of language that is offensive to particular ethnic groups. This is a Good Thing.

If not out of personal moral conviction, people generally at least avoid racist language out of fear of social disapproval.

However, not all language that alludes to race is truly racist. Irish people have been talking about "working like blacks" for a long time, certainly for much longer than there has been more than a negligible number of black people actually living here.

It's a crude epithet. It carries very unpleasant connotations of colonialism and slavery. The problem is that it is also a phrase that has, through long usage, become concretised, so that when it used, it is often used thoughtlessly, without consciousness of its meaning and origins.

Granted, its meaning and origins could, with only a little education and reflection, easily be guessed at, so this is not to excuse its continued use. Indeed, most people no longer use the phrase for this very reason (and not, as you will hear certain conservative birdbrains repeatedly squawking today, because something called Political Correctness has Gone Mad.)

But some people, particularly people of Mary O'Rourke's age, do still lapse into this usage. It's thoughtless and disappointing, but it does occasionally happen.

And when it, or something similarly thoughtless and disappointing but above all insignificant, does happen, the media's story manufacturing equipment lurches predictably into life.

Senator O'Rourke's remarks were made late last night, after a long selection convention. This is why, under the by-line of Liam Reid in today's Irish Times, we read that "[l]ast night Peter O'Mahony, chief executive of the Irish Refugee Council, said the comment was "clearly ill-advised"".

From this, we can safely take it that, probably within minutes of the end of O'Rourke's speech, Liam Reid was on the phone to Peter O'Mahony. In all likelihood, he was looking for a quote that expressed some degree of "outrage" (always a favourite vocabulary item in such circumstances). It is to Peter O'Mahony's credit that he kept his response restrained and measured.

Nonetheless, his comments, even though they were almost certainly solicited by a journalist, fulful the minimal criteria for what the media like to call a "controversy" (they like the word "furore" even better, but I can't see them going quite that far in this case). Got a questionable remark from a politician? Check. Got a "reaction" from an interest group? Check. Congratulations, you've got yourself a "controversy", a front page story and coverage ad nauseam on radio and television for the rest of the so-called "news cycle".

The so-called "news" stories thus generated will give rise to secondary media noise in the form of bloated opinion columns, interviews with earnest activists and the reading out on air of text messages from listeners, some of them accusing Mary O'Rourke of being a unrepentant, racist thug (she's not) and others, depressingly familiar, accusing the Dublin 4 Liberal Elite (there's no such thing) of stifling ordinary and inoffensive language.

Meanwhile, the stuff that should be in the newspapers in the morning, and talked about for the rest of the day, like, say, the fact that the Government in which Senator O'Rourke's party is the majority partner is perpetrating a massive and cynical deceit by deliberately hoarding exchequer funding in the form of departmental underspending to splurge, probably irresponsibly, in their last pre-election budget.

Mind you, it's not like I can talk. Look what I've just spent this whole post talking about.