Author Archives: Eithne Tynan

Lighthouse ho

by

 

I’VE always wanted to be a tour guide. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve always wanted to be a journalist, but I thought being a tour guide might be a bit of fun if – oh, I don’t know – the newspaper you worked for went into receivership, say, and you had a mortgage to pay.

And so it came to pass, when Loop Head Lighthouse opened to the public in July. My new job necessitated hours of study about Fresnel lenses, daymarks and mercury baths, but all that swotting was not enough to dispel a bowel-loosening nervousness the first day.

The first tour group eyed me sceptically as I led them to the top of the tower, wearing a fetching high-vis jacket and finding it hard to breathe. I told them about Loop Head’s unique flashing sequence, and how every lighthouse is different, and that’s how mariners know where they are. These factoids had been new to me, and I presumed they would be edifying for others. But it turned out that practically everyone on that first tour had spent 80 or 90 years in the merchant navy.

“What’s the candle power of the bulb?,” inquired one elderly, salty-looking man. I looked away toward the west, into that vast blue space that both divides and connects us with the Americas, and mumbled that I didn’t know.

“What’s that, love? What did you say? Speak up,” he said, tapping his wooden leg and adding, “The name’s Ahab, Captain Ahab”.

 “I don’t know,” I whispered, already reconsidering the wisdom of honesty vis a vis the best policy.

Another visitor pointed towards the lumpy coast of Kerry. “Arr, me hearty,” he cried. “Be they the Blaskets yonder?”

“Yes, yes, those are the Blasket Islands,” I declared, having abruptly realised that you don’t have to be certain, you just have to be convincing. Amazing that it took one day as a tour guide, and not 20 years in journalism, to learn that lesson.

In later days, having filled the gaps in my knowledge, I became shrill and emphatic. “You there at the back, you’re not listening!,” I would bellow at startled tourists. I began locking the door of the tower and subjecting visitors to multiple choice exams after their tour. If they got the answers wrong, I took to hitting them about the head with rolled-up copies of ‘Afloat’ magazine. Children grew tearful at the sight of me.

More to the point, I began to take possession of the lighthouse itself. All it took was a series of mornings approaching that lonesome tower – for so long a saviour of lives and now increasingly, tragically, obsolete, thanks to GPS – to engender a sort of emotional ownership, a protectiveness. If anyone climbed to the top of the lighthouse and was not surprised by joy at the experience, I took it personally.

We expected 50 or 60 visitors a day; instead there were hundreds. People sometimes had to wait an hour for a tour. You would look down from the gallery and see an angry mob gathering at the base of the tower. It was positively mediaeval. The danger was that night would fall and the mob would somehow acquire torches and pitchforks. Consequently, you had to hasten people of all nationalities back down the stairs, and as everybody knows, not all nationalities are equally susceptible to being hastened. (You know who you are, Germany.)

With very few exceptions, though, tourists are good-natured, patient, willing to be made laugh and eager to absorb information. But blow me down, they’re a motley crew.

One visitor had dentures so huge and so bright that I worried they might constitute a danger to shipping. Discreetly I positioned myself between the dentures and a large container vessel that was at that moment entering the estuary. A person with her own lighthouse has to think of these things.

One of the more memorable visitors was a blind woman who feared she might not be equal to the spiral staircase. So badly did I want this woman to reach the top of Loop Head Lighthouse – to ‘see’ it – that I would have shut down the entire operation for as long as it took to get her there. She got there. 

One afternoon it was so foggy that the light came on in the lighthouse, beaming out its age-old warning to sailors. I led a succession of visitors to the top, where we could see nothing but  the light – and each other.

“This is quite Zen, really,” I said, in a feeble attempt to assuage their disappointment. Pointing south I told them: “If it weren’t so foggy, you could see the Blaskets there. But at least you can see the light – all one thousand watts of it.”

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 28 August 2011

It’s not the adjective that matters, it’s the gun

by

 

UPWARDS of 91 people are dead in Norway. Needless to say, this has been the cause of countless bust-ups on the internet. Pass the popcorn and watch, as Meathead A tries to provoke Meathead B into an immoderate remark about political correctness/ immigration policy/ the “mainstream media”.

Amid all this noise, this exuberant, juvenile bickering between those who describe their opponents as The Left and those who describe their opponents as The Right, there is just one point on which you would think all sides might agree. If Anders Behring Breivik hadn’t owned a gun, at least 85 people might still be alive today.

The rushes to judgment began when certain newspapers and broadcasters (in particular those owned by the pantomime villain du jour, Rupert Murdoch) jumped to the conclusion that al-Qaeda was responsible for the atrocity, without waiting for confirmation.

‘Look it’s those damn towelheads again, getting away with murder because the Left is too lily-livered to stand up to them,’ screamed the Right.

 Then it turned out that the culprit was not a Muslim who hates Christians but a Christian who hates Muslims. The face of evil in Norway this week is a corn-fed, clear-skinned, blue-eyed, 32-year-old blond. The man looks every inch the Aryan pin-up.

 ‘Look, it’s those damn right-wing neocons, scare-mongering again about Islam,’ screamed the Left.

 For a while there it was like being stuck between two taxi drivers. And meanwhile, as the argument raged on, and both sides became more and more ridiculously entrenched, the death toll in Norway went on rising at a sickening pace.

On Twitter, everyone went and had a look at Breivik’s lone tweet: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests,” he had written on 17 July, misquoting John Stuart Mill, whose actual quote was the rather punchier “One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests”. (Mill also gave us the line: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” But never mind that. I digress.)

At length, it seems most parties settled on the “lone nutter” interpretation of events, so the massacre is seen as Norway’s Oklahoma City, not Norway’s World Trade Centre.

This is if anything even more repugnant than the mistaken conclusion that there are jihadists lurking in every alleyway in Europe. Not only does it further stigmatise mental illness but it – perhaps deliberately – downplays the social significance of Breivik’s actions, and underestimates the dangerous and growing prevalence of the ideology he believed in. This, remember, was the very same week in which the grave of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had to be demolished – and his body exhumed – because it had become a shrine for neo-Nazis.

And so we have learned – or we should have learned, and not for the first time either – that one murderous fundamentalist is much the same as another. Christian fundamentalist killers have more in common with Muslim fundamentalist killers than they have with peace-loving Christians or peace-loving Muslims. Put another way, a Christian fundamentalist with a gun is the same as a Muslim fundamentalist with a gun. It’s not the adjective that matters, it’s the gun.

Anders Behring Breivik had three legally-held firearms – a Glock pistol, a rifle and a shotgun – and is a member of the Oslo Pistol Club, according to the Norwegian newspaper VG. Under Norwegian gun control laws, rifle and shotgun ownership permission can be given to “sober and responsible” people aged 18 and older. So much for that.

Applicants for a licence must also document a use for the gun. Typically, people claim to want them for hunting and sports shooting. In both cases, applicants for a licence are obliged to undergo training and examinations. There are also strict rules about the storage and transportation of firearms. The country has until now had a low rate of gun crime and, before last Friday, gun ownership in Norway would have been regarded as a relatively uncontroversial matter. That will all change now, or at least it should.

In the United States proponents of the constitutional right to bear arms say: “Guns don’t kill people, people do”. (In the US, it seems, being an opponent of gun control is practically a synonym for thinking in bumper stickers.)

Certainly, if Anders Behring Breivik had not owned a gun, he would probably still have harboured political ideas that were some considerable distance to the right of Norway’s conservative Progress Party, of which he had been a youth member. He would probably still have cultivated, along with his melons, roots and tubers, a pathological dislike of multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness”. He would still have been able to order six tonnes of fertiliser last May, in keeping with his trade as an agricultural producer. He would still have been able to use that fertiliser to make a bomb, and would probably still have been able to plant that bomb in central Oslo, killing seven people.

If he had not owned a gun, he might still have made his way to the Labour Youth camp on Utoya island. He would absolutely not have been able, while police were otherwise occupied in attending to the aftermath of the bomb attack in the capital, to open fire at random, killing 85 people. Seven people would be dead today, instead of 92 dead and counting.

Here in Ireland, a district court hearing last year was told that there are 230,000 licensed firearms in the state – that represents one gun for every 16 people. The hearing was in one of dozens of cases taken by Ireland’s nascent gun lobby against the refusal of firearms licences by gardaí.

Legislation banning handguns was introduced by then justice minister Dermot Ahern in 2009. In 2003, there was just one legally registered handgun in the country; by 2008, when Ahern pledged to introduce the ban, there were 1,551 pistols and 284 revolvers. No wonder he was a bit alarmed.

“My bottom line is this: while I recognise that the vast majority of handgun owners are responsible people, as minister my concern is the safety of the public, particularly at a time of concern about gun crime,” said Ahern at the time.

Ahern, along with various garda spokespeople, was worried about gangland criminals – rogues with idiotic nicknames – getting their hands on firearms. He wasn’t thinking about vegetable farmers like Anders Behring Breivik. Until now, no one has ever seemed especially worried about preppy-looking native fascists going postal and shooting their perceived enemies dead. In light of what has happened in Norway this week, the supposition that “the vast majority of handgun owners are responsible people” begins to look dangerously naïve.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 24 July 2011

Skirt lengths and head counts

by

 

Once again there are more women than men, the latest census reveals. So things are back to normal then. For the past 30 years, there have always been more women than men, except for just that one time, in the last census five years ago, when there were more men than women. But that, like so many things that we thought of as permanent back in 2006 – job prospects, crass materialism, upward mobility, the affordable mortgage – turns out to have been an aberration.

There are now 981 males for every thousand females, the widest margin of difference recorded between the sexes here since 1946. So it’s official: we are  back in post-Emergency Ireland, in case you hadn’t noticed. Keep an eye on skirt lengths from now on.

Between that and our unfashionably high (by European standards) birth rate, Ireland is now quite the deviant from international norms, which will probably have come as no surprise to anyone either.

Globally, the sex ratio (often mistakenly referred to as the gender ratio by people who are perhaps too embarrassed to use the word ‘sex’ – hello again, 1946) is a rather sad 101 males to 100 females, an unusually poignant statistic that suggests one man in every hundred-and-one will not be able to find the woman of his dreams.

Only in the Midlands are there more males than females – or at least there were, until this latest report from the Central Statistics Office reached the Midlands this week. By late Thursday afternoon, almost as one, unattached men from Lough Gowna to the Slieve Blooms will have been packing their knapsacks and leaving in search of more favourable demography.

Interestingly, it is possible that there are even fewer males than the census would have us believe. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, all over Ireland on that night in April, you-fill-up-my-census mothers claimed on the form that their sons were still living at home, sometimes even as many as 10 or 20 years after those sons had moved away to the city and set up home with unsuitable, gold-digging women who don’t even cook not to mind iron a shirt.

At any rate, this distortion of the male-female ratio over the past 30 years has presented us with a problem. When there are more women than men, the birth rate is consequently higher. You don’t need a middling undergraduate degree in sociology from the 1980s to tell you that (though your correspondent does happen to see things from that towering intellectual vantage point; thank you for noticing).

All those girls born 30 years ago are now at the peak of their fertility and, we’re informed, are less likely to emigrate, and so are energetically producing babies here for the greater good (70,000 of them a year), so that our population is at its highest in 150 years. There are now almost 4.6 million of us – including some 100,000 people that the population forecasters in the Central Statistics Office, funnily enough, were not expecting. (How nice it would be to be one of those people, if only for the simple pleasure that might be had from catching a statistician unawares and shouting ‘Surprise!’)

Because of this, the government has had to go back on its promised cull of TDs. Fine Gael had proposed to get rid of 20 of them (‘I suppose it’s a start,’ said everyone at the time) but not any more. ‘We can’t get rid of 20 after all,’ said environment minister Phil Hogan on Thursday. ‘We might be able to get rid of 13. Actually we might only be able to get rid of six. But hey! Maybe you’ll get to pick which six!’

Thanks to Article 16.2.2 of the Constitution (why there you are, Mr De Valera, thought we might be seeing you around here before long), we require one TD for every 30,000 people. This means the number of TDs we require is now actually in the region of 153.333 (recurring, if you like).

The principle appears to be that, if you have 153 TDs, you concomitantly have 153 robust, heterogeneous and independent political ideologies doing the rounds in Leinster House at any given time. You there in the back, what are you laughing at?

So thank you, fecund Irish females, for keeping the population so high that we have to pay so many parliamentarians a multiple of what we earn ourselves, in order to have the same few paltry ideas ventilated over and over again in the Lower House, and then ultimately reneged on.

It’s not a U-turn, said Phil Hogan; our hands our tied by the Constitution. But the list of government disappointments is now about the only thing we’ve lost count of.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 3 July 2011

Off the Hook

by

 

UNEMPLOYMENT is a sad old business for everyone, but the unemployed critic cuts a tragicomic figure – trudging about, mumbling opinions no one wants to hear, shaking their fist at the sky.

That’s how it is for me. Two months after my last radio review was published in the Sunday Tribune, I’m still shouting uselessly at the radio while subsiding back into obscurity – or at least I was until George Hook supplied me with 15 minutes of fame.

For some five-and-a-half years, until the Tribune was placed in receivership in February, my weekly radio review was enjoyed by perhaps as many as a dozen readers, including my mother.

In all that time, I never did learn to predict who would be thin-skinned and who wouldn’t, who could take a joke and who couldn’t. It still comes as something of a surprise to realise that the most ostentatious characters can be the ones with the tenderest little feelings.

A critic has to be ornery. Even in conversation, the person who is unfailingly pleasant and reasonable is the person most likely to exasperate the whole room. It’s the same in print only moreso. If you wrote nothing but kind reviews, people would say of you: “She made many friends during her week-long career as a radio critic”.

The only friends I made were from among a small number of independent documentary-makers. These are people who are waging a probably hopeless war against the prevailing belief that, unless it’s got a bombastic, self-absorbed, overpaid ‘personality’ on it, it’s not good radio, and so they deserve all the support they can get.

On Tuesday 1 February, I heard, ironically on RTE radio, that I was effectively out of a job: a receiver had been appointed to the Sunday Tribune. The following day, not knowing whether the paper would be published that Sunday, Olivia Doyle, arts editor and world’s best boss, asked me to file my radio review as usual. That one never saw the light of day, which was probably just as well considering the state of it.

The grief over the Tribune’s demise was extremely intense. The paper was the Jack Russell terrier of the fourth estate: A big newspaper in a small newspaper’s body, it was clever, fearless, funny, tenacious, idiosyncratic, and – though one hates to speak ill of the dead – not above disgracing itself on your shoe from time to time.

It also inspired in its staff the lunatic loyalty of the Jack Russell. The pay was like cheap dog food – just enough to keep your ribs from showing – and you never knew when you were going to get kicked by Independent News & Media (INM). But all its staff were fiercely protective of it, and of each other. We were a pack. In the end, of course, after some 20 years of shrill warnings about the Tribune’s imminent ruin, we were all thrown out of a car in the middle of a bog.

There were weeks of union meetings, all of which necessitated costly trips to Dublin, because you need a secure line of credit to buy a train ticket in this country. There was a deafening, dispiriting silence from the board of INM. There was the news that, as a contractor, I would have to fight to get even statutory redundancy. There were the heartbreaking farewell hugs from colleagues. There was the dogged campaign against despair, despair being the serpent in the desert for the unemployed.

On Friday 4 March, a week after the Tribune was officially declared dead, the editor Noirin Hegarty threw a farewell party for staff. At around half past midday that day, before leaving for the party in Dublin, I received an email from George Hook’s lawyers. Suddenly I was the party of the first part, and not at all in a party mood.

The letter was shocking in several respects. Firstly, the lawyers asked me to publish an apology by way of an advertisement in “an equivalent Sunday newspaper” on 13 March. An “equivalent” Sunday newspaper, I repeated, mystified. I forwarded the letter to some of my colleagues. “An equivalent Sunday newspaper?,” they shrieked, disbelieving. “*Equivalent?*” There is no such thing.

Secondly, the letter requested an offer of compensation. What would someone with two jobs and an address in Foxrock consider to be reasonable compensation, I asked myself? Would it exceed the sum I might get if I succeeded in claiming statutory redundancy from the Department of Social Protection?

Thirdly, the lawyers made reference to “bone fides” [sic]. Can there really, I wondered, be such a thing as a solicitor who doesn’t know how to spell bona fides? It seems there can. I pictured a bevy of 20-something lawyers, all qualified five minutes ago, all tottering around in vertiginous heels waiting for their Ally McBeal moment to start.

I sought Noirin’s advice; she consulted the managing director, the lawyer, the receiver. Everyone advised me to do nothing. That is my favourite advice even at the best of times, so I did nothing. Then there was a piece about the letter in the Phoenix on 10th March, obviously leaked by one of my Tribune friends. Then it appeared on Ireland’s funniest website, Broadsheet.ie. Then it took off on Twitter.

Hook was bombarded by invective. Things were said to him that were infinitely more critical than anything I ever wrote about him. He was insulted in a manner that was even more damning – honestly – than anything I said privately about him after receiving his lawyers’ letter, and believe me I left no expletive unturned.

Hook’s lawyers appeared on his behalf in the County Registrar’s Court on 28th March, making the story a straight court report suitable for the national press. Newspapers began phoning, though not, infuriatingly enough, with the intention of offering me a job. The word “devastated” – a word I would never use – was harmlessly put in my mouth.

By midweek, my sense of my own importance had been spectacularly inflated. With a head this big, would I even fit through the door of the local welfare office?

Neighbours in the village finally found out what I’d been doing for a living all these years. “What’s she building in there?,” they used to mutter as they strolled past the house. Now they knew: I had been antagonising broadcasting bigwigs from a considerable distance. (There was actually relief all round. You can never be sure with these blow-ins – drugs and the like.)

One elderly neighbour, apple-cheeked and twinkly, approached to offer his commiserations, and to question me kindly about what might happen next. “Out of my way, old man,” I said. “I’m too important to talk to you now.” If I kept going like that, I would soon have been eligible for my own radio show.

Happily, this story is over now, and not a minute too soon. As it has turned out, Hook has taken a far worse beating than I have; that, at least, is not my fault.

I would like to apologise, though, now that I have the chance. I’d like to apologise to Derek Mooney, who haunts my conscience because I was systematically, routinely horrible to him in my radio review. Not that there was ever so much as a murmur of complaint from Mooney about it. Either he was bigger than the criticism I heaped on him or – and this is every bit as likely – he never read it. It’s good advice for any over-sensitive broadcasters out there.

 

Published in the Irish Daily Mail, 5 April 2011