Feckers (16 page)

Robinson said that she wanted to ‘change’ Ireland, but change it into something that, she implied, it wished to become. She sought to reassure people that she was not some left-wing Trojan horse, some fire-eating feminist dragon who, if she won, would seek to claim a famous victory over ‘the forces of conservatism’. One of the senior Labour Party people involved in her campaign afterwards described it as being like a train with lots of different carriages filled with different kinds of people. The trick was not to let people in any one carriage know who was in the others. To have any hope of being elected, she would have to gain votes not just from the left-liberal constituency, but from across the spectrum, all over the country.

More than six months before the campaign would rightly begin, Robinson began her work in Allihies in west Cork, and afterwards travelled the length and breadth of Ireland trying to overcome her disadvantages and persuade ‘ordinary’ Irish people to vote for her. She did not slap any backs, but she clasped the sweaty hand of middle Ireland. She forced a smile and kissed babies. Her rhetoric was inclusive and almost warm. She said that there did not have to be winners or losers, there did not have to be sides. By fighting against the perceived conservative forces in Irish society, she had come to appreciate the nature of those forces: that they were not merely the preserve of a diehard minority, but an essential part of the equilibrium of the society. Conservatism and liberalism, she explained, were not for her exterior forces, but intrinsic parts of herself, of her own experience and outlook, just as they were parts of all Irish people. ‘I’m a Catholic from Mayo,’ she said. ‘So there’s nothing about
that
Ireland that I don’t know. So it’s me. I understand it from within and I want to develop it on, but in a way that one would want to develop oneself, almost. I don’t repudiate as much as want to coax along into a different mould.’

Afterwards, there were assiduous efforts to reinterpret her victory as emblematic of a narrow range of orthodoxies. When the writers came over from
Time
and
Vanity Fair
, they were facilitated by Robinson proponents in writing simplistic analyses of what was going on. The country, which just four years earlier had rejected divorce, the world was told, had had a sudden and dramatic change of heart. The ‘old’ Ireland was in retreat. The Irish were now ready to join the modern world.

What this ignored was that most of the people on the Robinson train espoused a multiplicity of complex and often contradictory views about everything. Some of them, for example, had no problem with divorce but abhorred abortion. Some of them were simply sick of the old tribal politics. Some of them were female chauvinists. Some of them were men who thought that electing a woman President would be a nice exercise in window-dressing. And so on.

The rinsed-down reason we elected Robinson was that we suddenly became drunk on the possibility that we could. In truth, her election was more of a gesture than a symbol. She won at a time when people were beginning to think it might be fun to overturn the party political bandwagons. Robinson succeeded in presenting herself as unthreatening to a sufficiency of people to enable her to sneak past the post on the second count. We had no idea what it might mean, or how on earth it could be deemed to mean anything, but somehow we decided that it was better to do it than not do it. In this sense, her election was emblematic of the modernizing-cum-liberalizing ethic with which she had come to be identified, representing a form of change which was purely reactive, which has no real announcement to make but simply wanted to denounce what already existed.

Having promised to reinvent the presidency, Robinson appeared to use it as a platform for her own advancement and greater glory. The very fact that she had been elected was enough, it seemed. Nearing the end of her term of office, she pulled plant to take up a big job in the UN. So much for her desire to reinvigorate the self-confidence of the Irish people.

In the end, the Irish people were left wondering what, other than the career of Mary Robinson, it had all been about. What had changed other than that the person going around opening gymkhanas was a woman rather than a man. It wasn’t just that the whole thing had been an elaborate con-trick to get Robinson elected, but that it had been an elaborate con-trick that created an impression of ‘change’ and ‘progress’, when really nothing much was changing or progressing at all.

If this was not sufficient to display Mrs Robinson in her true colours, an episode that occurred some three years later would put an end to any remaining doubts. Robinson, now United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was speaking on International Women’s Day. By now she had been replaced as President by another woman, Mary McAleese, an entirely different class of individual by any standard.

‘Apparently,’ Robinson told her receptive audience of like-minded sisters, ‘there are small boys in Ireland who are complaining to their mothers, “Why can’t I grow up to be President?” That seems to me to be an excellent experience for small boys in Ireland.’

Finally, it was all laid bare. The grandiose rhetoric of inclusiveness had fallen away and we were left with the spectacle of one of the pettiest chauvinists the nation had ever nurtured gloating because, as a result of her glorious endeavours, little boys could no longer hope to become the first citizen of the Republic. Sisters, what a triumph!

In Robinson’s defence, it might be said that the remark was an attempt at a joke by someone with no sense of humour. But no – underlying her words was a deeply disquieting hostility – even managing to exceed the standard everyday feminist rancour towards males. By virtue of being specifically directed at young boys, her words attained a new level of unwomanly malevolence.

Of course, deep down, very few of those who voted for her expected Robinson to be otherwise. None of it really meant anything. She had become the incarnation of values that we were instructed we had to adopt but in which most sensible people saw very little value. We liked the idea of having a President who represented ‘liberal’ ideas without having the right to express, still less implement, them. We welcomed her necessary fudges and enforced silences, because they allowed us to have the name of modernity without having to work out what it might actually mean – in concrete Irish terms. She represented our unspoken desire to be perceived as liberal without surrendering the fabric of our existing society to a process of unravelling for which there seemed to be few rules or principles. In short, Mary Robinson did not turn the first sod on a new highway to the future: she cut the tape on a cul-de-sac into which we pulled to have a look at the map. And we’re still there.

29
Louis Walsh

A
s the 1980s progressed and the emerging Irish rock’n’roll constituency began to come to terms with the fact that U2 were, really and truly, the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world, the disbelief and wonder provoked by this began to give way to a sense of national entitlement. Very quickly the conversation shifted to oscillating between backbiting about the fact that U2 were regarded as perhaps the least worthy of their generation of post-punk contenders and desultory debates about who would become ‘the next U2’.

A couple of top-flight acts did manifest themselves, notably Sinéad O’Connor. But, generally speaking, the growing conventional wisdom that Dublin could come to be to the 1990s rock’n’roll imagination what Merseyside had been in the 1960s was a little thin on content. Various contenders came and went, but only U2 and O’Connor seemed to have staying power.

But then the future of Irish music declared itself. One night on
The Late Late Show
, following a discussion about the future of rural Ireland between a journalist, a priest and, for some reason, a female disc jockey, a bunch of daft-looking young fellas shambled on to the set. Rumour had it that it was some new wheeze of Louis Walsh, a showbiz impresario who had become prominent in the showband era. The word was that the new act would be a kind of Irish Take That. The obvious question was: why?

The bunch of young fellas called themselves Boyzone. They didn’t sing that night, but instead mimed to a dance track. Everyone laughed uproariously at this evidence of Louis Walsh’s hard neck. Nobody thought it remotely serious. But within months, Boyzone were one of the most successful music acts in the UK. In no time at all, the success of Boyzone was dwarfed by another Walsh-inspired sensation, Westlife, who seemed to turn everything they touched into gold.

Where once we were known as the Island of Saints and Scholars, Ireland is nowadays famous as the Nation of Boybands. Never was this truth so visible as during the celebrations to mark the onset of the third millennium, when it seemed that boybands had supplanted the entirety of Irish culture in the previous 1,000 years. The nation of Carolan and Ó Riada, the nation whose bardic culture had once been called ‘the earliest voice from the dawn of West European civilization’, the nation that had once given the world missionaries dedicated to painstaking calligraphy and Christian gratuitousness was now known globally as the producer of ambiguous-looking young men who could cavort to a beat created by a machine operated by a man from Mayo who had spent a lifetime studying the odds and watching for the main chance.

If ever there was a necessity for evidence of how the Irish nation had lost touch with itself, a video of the proceedings on the premier national television channel in the last hours of the second millennium would be enough to convey to an indefinitely extending posterity our inability to explain anything about ourselves. Anyone who watched could hardly be surprised about anything that followed: the excess, the loss of the country’s run of itself, the economic and psychic breakdown that followed hard on the indulgences of the Celtic Tiger.

Here we had a succinct proof of Jean Baudrillard’s theory that time has started to go backwards, as the coverage cut from the boyband mediocrity on Merrion Square, where a New Year’s concert was taking place, to the sad spectacle of the one-time king of the ballroom circuit, Joe Dolan, playing in Killarney, the whole thing suggesting not so much a celebration of the future as an attempt to drag posterity down to our level. Weirdly, the ‘past’ being focused upon was not the great sweep of time through the annals and battlefields and mass graves of Irish history, but Ireland’s alleged strides in the world of popular entertainment in the previous forty years. More than that, what emerged from it was a strong sense of how post-Independence popular culture in Ireland had continued to slide backwards into its congenital rootlessness.

Even if he cannot be held completely responsible for this miasma of selective forgetfulness and remembered inferiority, Louis Walsh was so constantly at the scene of the crime(s) that he qualifies for special blame. Walsh had been one of the main players in the showband industry, which, for all its flaws, had at least the redeeming quality of innocence. The boyband craze of the Tiger years was indistinguishable from showband culture except that we at least had the decency to keep showbands to ourselves.

In their time and proper place, actually, showbands weren’t anything like as bad as they’re sometimes ‘remembered’. Far more than Gay Byrne or Mary Robinson, people like Joe Dolan and the Drifters, Derek Dean and Billy Brown of The Freshmen, and Brendan Bowyer with the Royal Showband, revolutionized Irish attitudes to sexuality and freedom. It is, in a certain light, arguable that Big Tom was more central to the modernization of Irish society than the cumulative effects of the
Irish Times
, the Labour Party and the First Programme for Economic Expansion.

Louis Walsh was for a time manager of The Freshmen, one of the genuinely great bands of the showband era. He was therefore at the scene of the Big Bang of Irish popular culture, a spontaneous explosion of activity from a void of nothingness. When you factor in the deeply derivative nature of much of what passed for originality in early Irish rock’n’roll, it occurs that, in their own way, showbands were as creative as anyone. Certainly they were creative of excitement and abandon on a previously undreamt-of scale, and some showband records, like The Royal’s version of ‘The Hucklebuck’, and The Freshmen’s version of ‘Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow’, can stand with anything in the past fifty years of Irish pop music.

But no argument of this kind can be mounted in defence of boybands, which came after a time when Ireland had shown itself capable of producing the finest and most creative musical artists in the world.

One of Westlife’s hit singles, released at Christmas 1999, was a ditty called ‘Seasons in the Sun’, an English-language adaptation of the song ‘Le Moribond’ by the stunning Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel. It had been a mega-hit back in the mid-1970s when recorded by one Terry Jacks, a truly awful recording, a mawkish, revolting excess of self-pity and frothy pathos, utterly devoid of Brelesque irony or self-parody. ‘Goodbye Michelle’, went the lyric, ‘it’s hard to die/When all the birds are singing in the sky.’ To be fair, Terry Jacks knew that a capacity to tap into these darker feelings was the song’s only ‘redeeming’ feature, and hammed it up for all it was worth. Westlife, on the other hand, didn’t even appear to have noted this aspect of the song, which they sing as though it were ‘Baa-baa Black Sheep’.