"The present looks proudly down on the past, which if it had come later would look proudly down on the present."
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
The recent avalanche of commentary occasioned by the announcement of the imminent retirement of Gay Byrne has been interesting on a number of counts.
First, there was the generally poor quality of the insight and analysis; second, the rather predictable focus on Gay Byrne's contribution to the "modernisation" of Irish society; third, and most fascinating, however, was the sense of an underlying awareness, for the first time, that the analysis is no longer entirely accurate or an occasion of more than perfunctory celebration.
Reading account after account of how Gay Byrne had led Ireland out of the depths of Stygian blackness, it was hard to suppress the yawns. Moreover, it was impossible not to observe that the commentators themselves were deeply bored with their own analyses. This is not surprising.
How much longer can it be possible for us to continue congratulating ourselves on the "opening up" of Irish society, without acknowledging that "opening up" implies also the destruction of the taboos which preserve the mysteries that separate us from the beasts of the fields?
For how long more can we continue to quantify only those aspects of modernisation which have been agreed as unambiguously virtuous, while ignoring the creeping consequences? And for how long can we continue to disregard the ambiguities of virtually every aspect of what we term progress?
There is a tendency, in reviewing the recent years of change and upheaval, to quantify all change as progress. Even matters which clearly indicate a decline of some kind - for example, the almost daily parade of financial scandals or child abuse cases - are regarded as evidence of society "opening up". Does it ever strike us as relevant that far more of these originated within the period since this "opening up" began to occur than in the period of national cultural repression? It is a plausible analysis that far from flushing out the septic secrets of our repressed past, we are reaping the whirlwind for the too-rapid destruction of many of our functioning taboos. To put it another way, do those who still list the achievement of contraception, divorce and abortion as evidence of the unambiguous advancement of our society really believe what they have to say is not now as jaded as it has long since seemed obvious? Moreover, missing from all such analyses is the possibility that there is anything wrong with our society now, in the present.
Nobody could look back at the vast span of Gay Byrne's broadcasting career and declare him an uncritical proponent of modernisation in the crude sense that some of his eulogisers have implied. But whenever mention is made of those elements of his work which do not fit into the overall analysis - his attitude to crime, for example - this is invariably put down as a "contradiction".
Gay Byrne is a complicated man, a broadcaster who was driven first of all by the desire to make interesting radio and television programmes. He did not, as is now suggested, set out to manipulate the material of a society in flux in order to bring about change more rapidly than would otherwise have occurred.
Tom O'Dea, writing in this newspaper on August 12th, got to the heart of the relationship between Gay Byrne and the modernisation of Irish society. Gay Byrne, he suggested, might be the first to query the kind of crude notions of progress which are celebrated so assiduously today. "I suspect," wrote O'Dea, "that Gay Byrne, with his years upon him, would tell those people two things. Firstly, that when changes have been wrought in your society, you have to teach yourself to live with them. Secondly, that the affluent and functioning Ireland that we hear so much about will present more problems for its people than the conservative old Ireland ever did."
This is not the pique of a conservative, but the astute observation of a thinking progressive. The problem with the kind of progress which is so loudly and pervasively celebrated in this society is not that it has occurred, but that it has occurred without a great deal of thought being applied to the complexities which change inevitably brings.
All the time we are reminded of how much Ireland has changed since that or this or then - since 1950, since Lemass, since Eamonn Casey packed his bags and headed for the airport. "Change", in fact, is one of the most over- and misused words in the lexicon of modern Ireland. Yes, Ireland is changing, just as everything changes. In some ways, things are changing a lot. The appearance of Ireland viewed from a moving car, for example, has changed radically in the past decade. But if you travel by rail from, say, Dublin to Westport, and view the countryside from a moving train, you might feel that Ireland has not changed much in a hundred years.
The question is: wherein lies the true nature of change? To take one of the most oft-quoted examples, is the fact that divorce is now on the statute books really such a major advance for our society? Because of the battle to put it there, we tend to believe so, but the relatively low numbers seeking divorces suggest it is not as important as we had led ourselves to believe.
So, when we talk about the importance of Gay Byrne's contribution, we require to be a little more specific. The change was not so much in the reality of Ireland as in the public perception of it. The change was that we began to say what was going on, in public, on live television, rather than simply thinking it or muttering about it among ourselves. The change was in the nature of talk, rather than in the nature of events, and sometimes the nature of such talk has been deceptive.
Those who now celebrate Gaybo, however, are not celebrating the increased capacity of Irish society to discuss issues of general concern. They are celebrating themselves and the success of their agenda, their victory in the moral civil war that convulsed this society in the past generation, but especially in the 1980s.
A lot of good things have happened in recent times. But a lot of bad things have happened as well, and it is by no means implausible to suggest that some of these resulted from too much "opening up". I don't remember much about the 1950s, but I suspect they were not as dull and grey as we are now led to believe. I also suspect that the next generation will have a similar image of the Ireland of the 1990s as we have of Ireland pre-1960.
The curious thing is that Gay Byrne might now more plausibly be identified with the Ireland that is passing than with the one to which he allegedly played midwife.