OPINION:Vincent Keaney is a graffiti artist whose mischief articulates the plight of the powerless, writes JOHN FLEMING
A YOUTUBE clip shows lottery winner Vincent Keaney dancing on the grave of a former taoiseach. It is a deeply disrespectful and highly provocative act of agitprop, but a debate has been sparked. We reached for our phones and called Joe Duffy. We hammered out messages for the video-hosting site. Within minutes, viewers of the controversial nine-minute clip leapt from 54 to 300. By yesterday afternoon it had been viewed more than 20,000 times on YouTube.
What is it about? The clip opens with Keaney at Buswell’s Hotel in Dublin. He brandishes the Constitution, says he wants to see its ideas in practice. Evoking Jim Larkin as an inspiration and a force of change, Keaney calls on Brian Cowen to let the people decide on Nama. Producing a €10 note, he complains that Cowen is asking us “to pay for the mistakes of a golden 100” and for a “poisoned” bank. Voting for Nama is voting for “the chaos ahead”. This is heartfelt, if vague, polemic, using the crude podium of amateur video.
We finish in a graveyard. We close in on Charles J Haughey’s tombstone. Keaney reads his epitaph (“Be my epitaph writ on my country’s mind/He served his country and loved his kind”). He alleges that Haughey’s “kind” are “the greatest crooks that we are now paying for, all those Nama golden 100”; they are “filth in limousines”. Keaney likens Haughey to Judas, and dances a jig of mockery on the grave. “I want the country to wake up at how . . . this guy’s psychology caused every crooked banker and every crooked developer and every crooked dealer . . . to follow in his footsteps.”
Alienating many with his disrespect for the dead, Keaney is nevertheless a graffiti artist: his mischief is a subversive act that articulates the plight of the powerless. A moment in time had been caught.
What did the nation think? Not much.
Livelinecallers and web posters declared the act an offence to taste and decency. It lacked respect. Is nothing sacred? Hadn't Keaney desecrated a grave?
But the nation missed the point. In choreography worthy of Busby Berkeley, we embarked on our own can-can dance of radio and internet outrage, locked in to questions of “respect” and the Haughey family’s justifiable feelings of hurt and outrage. But Keaney was protesting at ordinary people being taken to the cleaners by negative equity, at TDs and expenses, at Nama, and struggling households bailing out banks. He focused on a dead man who asked us to tighten our belts over his Charvet shirts.
We don’t do protest. Instead we call radio stations or complain in the pub. On air daily, we hear individuals whose personal misfortune and suffering at the harsh hands of those running the economy inspire others to phone in too: “Something has to be done, Joe. The people of Ireland can’t take it any more.”
The dull reaction to Keaney’s act showed how lame we really are. The performance was provocative; it was offensive (like the Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at Bush), but inspired. The man held up to scrutiny our slavish respect for agents of graft; he aired our national veneration of people who can be bought – of people who buy and sell us.
A few nights earlier, RTÉ’s Freefall documentary framed the days before the bank guarantee. It summarised the nexus of global and local events, and reminded us of the foggy yarn of lousy banking. But it elevated the flawed figures who drove Ireland on to the rocks. It did so through “respect”: we were invited to imagine how hard it was for the chief executives and chairmen of AIB and Bank of Ireland to walk the corridors of Government Buildings to ask for a dig-out for their incompetence. We got “respectful” point-of-view footage of that fateful walk. Shameful moments were painted into a hagiographic history; analysis was tarnished by the attempt to dramatise.
Keaney’s lo-fi, and, yes, disrespectful dance is arguably a clearer statement of where we are. It is the dirty germ of an agent of change.
John Fleming is an Irish Times journalist