PARTINGS are part of life. Just as the nation bids farewell to the coalition government that rescued it, on a slightly more modest scale I must bid farewell to the television deflector service from Chorus. The company has been bought by Richard Branson’s Virgin Media organisation, and seems no longer interested in doing business with rural me. Auf wiedersehen, Dick. Au revoir, Chorus. And most of all, arrivederci UTV Ireland, perhaps the most dreadful television station this side of Uzbekistan.
UTV Ireland began life with many promises about its brilliant home programming to come. What we got was Pat Kenny and some pre-recorded chat shows. I didn’t catch them all, having slipped into a coma quite early on. But I believe there was an equal opportunities ventriloquist who signed for his deaf-mute dummy, as was his right, and also the late Maria Goretti reciting five decades of rosary with an apple under her chin. And who could forget the great Brian O’Driscoll, yes, the turf cutter from the Bog of Allen, who showed us fully five ways to use a loy? Gripping stuff. Yet the show was cancelled after all 15 viewers were found dead in an HSE geriatric ward, where a nurse had left the television on in 2009 and then forgotten about them.
Undaunted, UTV Ireland still offers Uzbek-style afternoon television round the clock, interrupted with compelling adverts from Seamus the window cleaner and your local chip shop. Last Saturday, the real UTV showed a docu-drama about Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, UTV Ireland broadcast an Ant and Dec programme from ITV4, probably acquired for the price of a cracked teapot and two paperclips.
Similarly, on Christmas Day, the proper UTV showed the final episode of Downton Abbey, but our one transmitted an episode from Midsomer Murders, which was as riveting as watching an elderly tortoise trying to lay an egg and failing.
How did UTV Ireland expect to survive in the republic’s television marketplace? The only explanation is the human equivalent of the animal kingdom’s species imitation. Hoverflies pretend to be wasps, cuckoos pretend to be sparrow-hawks, and stingless plants pretend to be nettles. UTV Ireland saw so many indigenous institutions in the republic promising to do their job and failing — RTE, CIE, HSE — that it presumably thought all it had to do was to behave similarly, and all would be well.
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The key difference is that those organisations are state-subsidised. They don’t have to succeed. They also know that undertakings can be given which are no more than imitation undertakings. They’re not meant to be real — they’re rather like a moth pretending to be a bee, which only a fool would expect to make honey.
UTV Ireland thought it could get viewers by promising the wholly undeliverable or the entirely imaginary, and is now left with its nursing home audience, their jaws hanging open and dust-covered cobwebs between their snagged and yellowing teeth.
“Sometimes, nothing is quite as sweet as a failed promise
The pretend promise is almost a defining feature of Irish life. The coalition government made an apparently irrevocable and binding undertaking to the troika that it would introduce water charges as a quid pro quo for the bailout. This merely brings us into line with the rest of Europe: the polluter must pay, and building dams, water pipes and sewerage outlets is pollution on a grand scale. Now it seems that these promises are no longer irrevocable but in fact optional. This is not just a delusion of that grisly confection that is the mountebank, Montessori-left of Irish life, but now also of Fianna Fail. What was part of a binding agreement, and in accordance with European law, is no more.
Similarly, the government also promised to reform the protectionist squalor in the Bar, but didn’t. That government is now finished, as is the one politician who was determined to reform the legal profession, Alan Shatter. And so, as outgoing ministers head off into the sunset, tottering under the weight of the colossal pensions which the rest of us will pay for, our beloved barristers must wipe the gobbets of grease from their many chins and the tears of relief from their eyes. Sometimes, nothing is quite as sweet as a failed promise.
How much in Ireland is authentic? Is almost everything, everyone, at every level, like UTV Ireland? Is such inauthenticity merely a reflection of popular morality?
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In Louth, where the IRA buried the dead body of the widowed mother of 10 Jean McConville, hid the living body of the child rapist Liam Adams, and beat the living body of Tom Oliver until it was a dead one, its political wing got nearly 20,000 votes and two TDs.
In Kerry, weapons smuggler Martin Ferris is also home and dry, as now are his feet, while his daughter Toiréasa Ferris, a former mayor, has threatened to erect a monument at the place where the Da brought the weapons ashore. This is in retribution for a monument being erected to the Irishmen who died with the Royal Munster Fusiliers in the First World War.
In all, we have elected 23 TDs belonging to the political wing of the still extant Provisional IRA, which promised just one thing, a united Ireland, and after causing the deaths of thousands of people, forgot quite why. And so, by God, do I.
Moreover, in addition to the Ferris clan, Kerry has also produced a brace of Healy-Raes, Tipperary has again given us Michael Lowry, whose capers might cost us millions in damages, and sunny Wexford has returned the tax fraud Mick Wallace. This means there are more than two dozen TDs in a party with paramilitary associations, or with records that would make them politically unelectable in such numbers in even large European countries such as Italy, Germany or France. Here they constitute more than 17% of our elected representatives.
One reason why I deeply dislike US presidential election years is that they give the know-all Irish liberal-left a chance to sneer at Republicans — and, of course, Donald Trump is quite perfect. He’s a thoroughly unpleasant character, a preening narcissist and an abusive bully. However, he does not, to my knowledge, belong to an organisation that has buried any dead widows at midnight, or protected any rapists, or beaten men to death. He wouldn’t get the support of one in seven American voters if he did.