Something rotten in Irish media ecosystem
However, it is a humble attempt to redress the image perpetrated by Irish media that we all live in a hovel.
Last week my wife and I took a few days off for a jaunt along the west coast. It was bookended by visits to the Ballycroy National Park in Co Mayo (free entry) and the Mizen Visitor Centre (€6 per person) in deepest West Cork.
Along the way we stopped off in small hotels where bed and breakfast rates were around €35. In between we walked, swam and cycled on roads, beaches and routes that were completely, entirely free.
We met people providing services who were friendly and helpful, many of them young. Is this a vision that confuses you after watching, listening to or reading Irish media reports recently?
Self-loathing is a topic of debate that has done the rounds over recent weeks and it is a subject worth considering further.
An average day spent listening to Irish radio, watching Irish TV and reading Irish newspapers leaves you with a feeling that something dreadful is under way in the Irish Republic.
Waves of corrosive, cynical and deeply negative reports festoon the airwaves and the print media about the state of society. Politics, religion, health and business are four of the favourite themes around which Ireland is presented as a place a thinking human being should avoid.
You could come away with the conclusion that not joining those on the emigration trail makes you either an idiot, locked in to a tractor beam of family commitments or simply incapable of making a rational decision.
It is not hard to conclude that self-loathing is at risk of becoming a national but dirty habit in this context.
Far better, don’t you think, to join in with the crowd that wind up a variety of agendas in to hysterical articles, phone-ins and twitter streams that add one tale of woe on to another?
After applying baseball bats of anecdotal bad experiences we can have the average person quietly retreat in the knowledge that life in Ireland, when all is said and done, is a pathetic journey through life.
I find myself on an increasingly resolute opposite side to this drum beat argument about how awful our country is. I find myself wondering why taxpayer funds are being used to support presenters who peddle bile and cynicism as worthy broadcasting.
I find myself joining the increasing numbers who simply turn off the fourth estate and focus on things that can incrementally brighten instead of darken each day.
In a world where Irish politicians have become something on the end of a national shoe, how can we produce an Interpretative Centre of beauty in the middle of the awesome Ballycroy National Park in Mayo? How is it that young Irish and east European employees in hostels and other visitor centres throughout the State can be so infectiously friendly in such a rotten society as ours? Why is it that the guide in the taxpayer funded Mizen Visitor Centre can show more passion for her country than entire sections of our national media infrastructure?
Maybe its the fact that traditional media business models are in a death spiral. Or perhaps the growing market of uncontrolled Twitter and Facebook activity is doing it.
Whatever is the cause, something rotten has grown within the Irish media ecosystem. It is self-destructive, unworthy of the profession that journalism can offer, and is a poor servant of the society in which it resides.
