We love nostalgia in Ireland. Can’t get enough of it.
It’s there in our sad eyes as we gently weep into our Sunday suppers watching Reeling In The Years. Charlie Haughey leering ghostlike from the TV, telling us to tighten our belts for the zillionth time.
You can read about it in some of our world-renowned literature. Those often regretful and maudlin storylines centred on family events where things go unsaid for months amid mounting plates of untouched lemon drizzle cake.
Our traditional music too, although known worldwide for its jaunty, up-tempo giddiness, is counterbalanced by slow airs about emigration, death, and various stages of dampness.
There seems to be something in our make-up that keeps us looking back. Even now I can’t resist reminiscing about the beginning of this article with a warm pang of bittersweet sentimentality. My writing is just not the same four paragraphs in as it was at the intro. The innocence of my life back then. A sense of possibility that has evaporated since. Cue the uilleann pipes.
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Past events, that would have been consigned to history in other cultures for academics to revise and quibble about, are raked up and stewed over in Ireland ad nauseam. We are the dog that can’t stop looking into a pool of its own vomit.
I don’t know why this is. It could be the sad sequence of events that befell us over the course of generations. Monstrous colonial interference; the copious and never-ending tuberculosis; Saipan. Maybe we are just a bit wet?
Whatever the root cause, it has to stop. Professional athletes understand that constant obsessing over past occurrences is a disastrous mindset for anyone who wants to be successful. I know this from listening to Joe Schmidt interviews. Yes, you can still learn from mistakes, failings or an unfortunate incident, but you don’t allow them to define who you are.
If only all of us could do this when it comes to life, politics or even sport for that matter. Our nostalgic mindset, for example, hasn’t proven to be very effective in the way in which we publicly investigate our official cock-ups. Whatever the collective noun is for tribunals of inquiry (a plague, perhaps?) we’ve had our fair share over recent decades.
The Beef Tribunal, the Mahon Tribunal, the Holmes, Watson & Moriarty Tribunal, the Joint Committee of Inquiry Into the Moving Statues and now . . . drum roll please . . . the Banking Inquiry — a sort of “Where Are They Now?” glossy-floor, TV game show, parading many of the faces we had only just psychologically recovered from before our drawn and exhausted eyes.
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Unfortunately, it all comes a little too late. The public anger, which once arguably had the potential energy to be converted into social and political change, has since been corrupted into an old, familiar cynicism.
The truth is, the public now has little interest in a nuanced report on how banking failures can be prevented in the future. They wanted to see actual bankers, politicians and their cronies publicly humiliated in some kangaroo court five years ago, preferably ending with a crucifixion or two.
In recent weeks, as if to add insult to inquiry, there have been calls to have an independent inquiry into the Banking Inquiry because of allegations made by a whistleblower. An inquiry. Into the inquiry. You really couldn’t write it, even though I just did.
Of course, I’d be willing to believe that all the politicians involved in this are doing it for noble reasons if I wasn’t convinced that most of them are more interested in petty point scoring and potential electoral gain. I tried watching it on TV some while ago, but my mind shut itself down.
Now I recognise my attitude for what it is: crushing cynicism. And I refuse to give in to that, for the Joe Schmidt reasons cited above.
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So, in the run up to 2016, and bear with me here, what I would like to propose is one huge public inquiry. The tribunal to end all tribunals, or The Final Tribunal, if you will.
Simulcast live from The Mansion House on all terrestrial TV channels and existing digital platforms, as well as on big screens in all stadiums, this super inquiry should be chaired by somebody of unimpeachable moral integrity and unquestionable public standing. Mary Robinson perhaps, or the Brennan brothers. It could be held over the course of the early months of 2016 and the public should be invited to call before it, via an online vote, all the people and institutions we have any continuing gripes with.
The Troika, Thierry Henry, Jeremy Clarkson, Anglo Irish Bank, Westlife, all of them will be required to answer for their crimes against Ireland and the Irish, so we can finally wipe the slate clean once and for all.
Because it really is time to move on.