Amid the dark farce of our society, the Cowen caricatures packed far more than one punch line – with RTÉ's apology, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
SURELY THE point is not that RTÉ news should not have apologised for making us laugh, but that it doesn’t apologise enough. As the nation hangs on that well-worn cusp between tears and laughter, RTÉ news is pretty well guaranteed to render the licence-payer helpless with mirth – and not just when it is performing its devastatingly accurate impersonation of Soviet state television.
If RTÉ news had to apologise every time the Nine O'Clock Newsmade us laugh, there would be nothing but apologies until it was time for the weather forecast, one of the few items in factual programming at the moment which does not raise a giggle.
We are lucky enough to have plenty of side-splitting news items to choose from. Whether it is doors falling off vitally important ministerial helicopters. Or members of the Bank of Ireland's board apologising to their denuded shareholders for not being able to provide them with refreshments. Or the old age pensioners of Tipperary town being side-swiped by young men whom everyone in the town can name, but no gardaí ever seemed able to arrest until the whole saga was featured, a couple of times, on Liveline.
Or, on Drivetime, Feargal Keane listing the cuts which have been agreed by the various Government departments. Some departments are more advanced in this process than others. At the Department of Education, they seem to be fairly clipping along.
Keane started to list the reductions at that department: language support teachers, capitation grants to Traveller children, special needs teachers. Mary Wilson cut across him: everything to do with special needs, she summarised. Yes, agreed Keane sadly, everything to do with special needs.
Ah, the crack we do have.
Just when you are gasping in admiration at our rulers’ ability to ignore the long term, along comes a phosphorescent example of exactly how wonderfully accomplished they are at ignoring the short term as well.
As Orla Tinsley explained in this newspaper on Friday, the young cystic fibrosis sufferers of Ireland have been denied their permanent unit at St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin.
Tinsley went on Liveline that day to explain this situation further, listen to a recording of her now deceased young friend Louise and repeat the fact that she didn’t really understand what on earth was going on (Who does?).
The fantastic thing about the cystic fibrosis example is that when there were funds available to build the permanent unit it was never started, for reasons that have never been made clear. When help was offered with the construction of a unit – free gratis and for nothing – this offer was refused. Also for reasons that were never made clear. And now the funding has been taken away. It is the kind of perfect joke of which Joseph Heller would have been justifiably proud.
It is clear that I must stop listening to Liveline, although a couple of the subjects featured on RTÉ programmes last week reduced some of us to tears: the Bank of Ireland shareholders shouting “Out! Out! Out!” at the Bank of Ireland’s board, like student radicals chanting at Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s; the single parent in Tipperary town who, some years ago, on reporting another attack on her family to the Garda, was told to simply move house; and the mother of a cystic fibrosis sufferer who could not obtain an individual room for her panicked son until she got in touch with
her local TD, and her local TD then got in touch with hospital management.
There comes a point at which all you can do is laugh.
That point usually comes when . . . well, you can fill in your particular bugbears yourselves. Every citizen has a list of news items, situations or events which are guaranteed to make them snort with laughter. For example, the electronic voting machines that are stored in better conditions than our hospital patients; the amount of money paid to government advisers over the last decade; hearing journalists, who earn livings in that ever-narrowing gap which is rather lazily referred to as “freedom of speech”, go on the radio to say that the comic paintings of Brian Cowen should indeed have been apologised for, because they might have upset the Taoiseach’s wife and children. My, how we laugh.
It seems that we owe the artist Conor Casby a great debt. His snowball became an avalanche. There were four letters in Saturday's edition of the London Timesalone on the subject of the RTÉ apology to Cowen. Ireland didn't come out of those letters too well, to be honest with you. In fact, it emerged as what is vulgarly termed "a laughing stock", and no one had even mentioned the Celtic Tiger. This is a new joke.
In painting two comic pictures of the Taoiseach and quietly hanging them in public art galleries, Casby has made a joke not so much of Mr Cowen (political caricature is an ancient business, after all, and Mr Cowen does not seem over-sensitive) but of us. He has showed us up – quivering, self-conscious girlies that we are. Casby got us all, with one satiric touch.
Now that is funny.