Rocca case exposes the myth of the "beautiful people"

PRIGGISH. Po faced. Holier than thou. Out of touch. Snooty. Patronising. Stuckup snobs who think that a bit of scandal is all right for themselves but that the great unwashed can't be trusted with it.

Politically correct do gooders who think they know what's best for the plain people of Ireland. Official Ireland covering up for its own. The Dublin 4 elite afraid to show the truth behind the opulent facades of the nouveaux riches.

Two faced liberals who dive on every little failing by churchmen but who turn a blind eye to the moral decadence that has resulted from their constant sniping at faith, fatherland and family.

You can write them yourself, the many and various attacks that would have followed a decision by The Irish Times to play down the Michelle Rocca civil action in the High Court. And none of them would have been necessarily less convincing or less well founded than the actual attacks from Charlie McCreevy, from Vincent Browne and from Eilis O'Hanlon which have followed the newspaper's decision to give extensive and detailed coverage to the case.

When, as in this instance, each alternative that faces you is one that leaves you open to justified criticism, it's a sure sign that something significant is going on.

In spite of some of the more fatuous comments on the coverage of the Rocca case by The Irish Times, what's going on has nothing to do with the invasion of privacy. The case was a public trial before one of the central institutions of the State. Any member of the public was entitled to walk in off the street and listen to the evidence.

To try to put coverage of that public event on the same level as the decision to expose the expulsion of a minor from school or the decision to deal with an industrial dispute in Aer Lingus by indulging in crude sexual innuendo about the workers is absurd.

But just because an event is public, of course, this newspaper does not have to devote two pages to covering it. Hundreds of public events get no coverage at all. A choice has been made, a judgment about which of the innumerable events that happen every day are to be written about. The question is whether that choice can be justified by anything other than mere prurience. I think it can.

The Rocca case is interesting for the same reason that the O.J. Simpson case was interesting. In neither case did the alleged actions of the defendants fall into the category of news. That two people were murdered in California is not, for Irish readers, a news story. That a fracas took place in a bedroom in a house in Clane is not a news story.

That people get murdered in California or that women suffer from violence should be no revelation to anyone. In that sense, complaints about skewed news values miss the point - whatever else is at stake, it is not news.

What O.J. Simpson and Michelle Rocca have in common is their status as celebrities. Newspapers have always been concerned with famous people, and a glance at any 18th century newspaper published in Britain or Ireland will take in court gossip and stories about actors, gentlemen about town and famous beauties.

But one of the defining things about late 20th century culture is that fame is no longer a mere adjunct to public affairs, no longer light relief from the serious business of political and economic power. It has become a transcendent quality that subsumes everything into itself. Increasingly, people in the public realm are famous first and whatever else - politician, poet, president, journalist - second.

AND politicians have taken an active part in this process, not only spending a great deal of time and money creating photo opportunities in which their fame, rather than their ideas, are put before the public, but also searching for famous people to be their candidates.

Just this week, the Progressive Democrats party was promising "big names" in its list of candidates. What are "big names" except celebrities?

And where is the dividing line between public affairs and the mere glamour of the famous when one of the qualifications for an election candidate is fame?

The problem with all of this is that fame is entirely amoral. The gap between fame and infamy is, at the end of the 20th century, a hairline fissure. O.J. Simpson as a possible murderer is even more famous than O.J. Simpson the footballer. From the point of view of celebrity, there can appear to be little distinction between Fred West and Mother Teresa.

When, in the 1960s, John Lennon said the Beatles were more famous than Christ, people were outraged. Now, it just seems like a statement of fact.

And in that obliteration of moral distinctions, dangerous myths are allowed to breed. In hi5[ Begrudger's Guide to Irish Politics, the late Breandan 6 hEithir told the story of a west Cork blacksmith's reply to the news that, on the foundation of the new State, Ireland would be blessed with a native elite: "We will in our arse have our own gentry."

But in recent years, a gentry has been invented for us. And, like the old aristocracy, it justifies its ascendancy by the notion that it is somehow more refined - its sensibilities are more highly developed than those of the great unwashed.

What this new gentry actually does - the gap between the image on the gossip pages and the life from which it is drawn - is, therefore, worth knowing. The Rocca case brings human realities - pain, children, money - to bear on a world that is paraded before us every week as a carnival of fabulous personalities flitting from Lillie's Bordello to Leeson Street.

In the same way that sexual scandals have removed the untouchability of church power, it punctures the aura of glamour that surrounds the new hierarchy. And just as the abstract, totalitarian morality of the church needed to be brought up against the complex, painful contingencies of real life, so does the way of life of the celebrity culture.

The evidence in the Rocca case has already demythologised the "beautiful people". Far from feeding the prurience of the gossip columns, the case has exposed them fully. Instead of glamorising celebrities, it has reminded us that no amount of glamour can wash away the need for respect and dignity in the relations between men and women.

Far from encouraging the tendency to gawk at the rich and famous, it has suggested that there is nothing worth gawking at.

Rather than trivialising public affairs, it has provided the most devastating demonstration of the hollowness of trivial journalism. A newspaper that decided, in the name of serious reportage, to ignore that revelation would be doing bad journalism a mighty favour. {CORRECTION} 97021200005