We’re all too happy to tune out in our time of troubles

THE Kennedys of Castlerosse. That’s how we used to know the summer holidays were over. Of course the leaves turned gold too. The weather turned cold. And wasps, threatened with retirement, turned nasty, not that wasps are ever the charmers of the insect kingdom.

Nonetheless, the death knell of summer happiness was the Kennedy's signature tune. Term time meant listening at the lunchtable to that interminably reasonable old trout, Mrs Kennedy, prissing comfortingly on about how to resolve the latest townland tiff.

The summer had been full of excitement and dreams, stories and new possibilities, and now that was all over, narrowed down to the chill pre-shaped sameness of bloody Castlerosse, the radio equivalent of gumboots.

It was well-acted, the radio soap. But it was always there. Unchanged. Unchanging. A relentless cycle of sameness that made you want to slamdunk Mrs Kennedy face down into the nearest slurry pit.

Then came the promise of change. Television arrived. Then came more and bigger newspapers. More magazines. More radio stations. More TV stations. They bred like hamsters, the media outlets, and their proliferation carried the promise of variety and choice.

Last week provided the definitive breaking of that promise. No matter where you turned, your choices were two-fold. You could get Noel Dempsey on the front pages and in the feature pages and in the editorials. You could have Noel Dempsey blamed, defended, sliced, diced and soundbited. You could have Noel Dempsey out of doors, on the telephone or in studio. No doubt the toddlers in playschool even had their version: Noely Poely, pudding and pie, dissed Laffoy and

Or you could have Pat Kenny versus Eamon Dunphy. Broken down by age, sex, drinking pattern, location and track record. Analysed by anybody who had ever met either of them, appeared with either of them or had a bad thought about either of them.

We are right smack in the middle of what Toynbee called a "Time of Troubles"; one of those periods of prolonged spiritual and political disintegration within civilizations. And half the brains in Ireland are devoted to comparing comperes. We've got more space for delivering information and debating its significance and we are filling that space with a quality of public discourse that makes Mr Ed look good. The pattern of that discourse is as relentlessly limited as the Kennedys of Castlerosse ever was.

It goes like this. Pick a problem. Any problem. But for argument's sake, pick Laffoy. First of all, find a victim. If you can, get that victim to cry on camera. Next step, find the guilty party. Noel Dempsey will do. If the issue gets more complex, shift the argument to tone and timing: never mind what he did or why he did it, Dempsey's manner of doing whatever he did was wrong. He still won't roll over and confess? To hell with him: he wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if he was lucky. Good politicians are lucky. QED.

One media outlet after another went through this process over the last few days. Changing channels just gave a different set of people dancing the same steps. In fact, in some cases, changing channels didn't EVEN give a different set of people. It gave the same set of people recorded earlier. The public's right to know was vindicated, with bells on. Unless you hold the naïve view that the public has a right to know more than the same thing all the time. Unless you hold the even more naïve view that a solution to the problem is what is needed by victims and by society because, in solution terms, what we had was an incredible amount of sound and fury signifying nothing.

That's part of the problem. Blame and punishment seem to be enough. Except that not only do blame and punishment take up the space that should go to debate about the solutions, but the excitement they generate can both conceal and contribute to a significant underlying trend: compassion fatigue.

Colm O'Gorman, a dab hand at blame and punishment when they're needed, was a still small voice pointing to this grim possibility. He was right. Anyone listening to what non-media people were talking about last week would have been struck by how few of them were talking about the controversy at all, and would have been struck even more forcefully by the fact that those who mentioned it, mentioned it purely as a Government failure. But they did not move on to discuss alternative models for solving the real problems left unsolved.

ONE of the reasons for the shallow punitive melodrama characterising much current coverage is ratings.

Ratings require familiar faces, simple outrage, emotionality, blame and humiliation. Ratings require excitement, conflict and evil-doers unmasked. Real-time research establishes how many people are looking or reading at any given moment, and if reality, with its boring complexities, does not deliver those bodies, to hell with reality. Reality must be re-invented using a cast of celebs who can be set an unreal task and filmed making a cat's entrails of the task. Never mind the content, see the surge in the number of bodies on seats, watching this segment or reading this publication. Never mind the fact that the totality of the audience is shrinking. And whatever you do, do not face up to the possibility that cranking public attention by currently popular means is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The boy who cried "wolf" got fantastic ratings, the first couple of times he tried it.

Another reason for the poverty of public discourse, with its current almost exclusive emphasis on blame and punishment, rather than ideas, is the plethora of tribunals and commissions. They have become an imperative. Hence the current call for a public enquiry about the Neary scandal.

Curious, that call. The surgeon has been struck off by the Medical Council. His defence including its egregious suggestion that his mutilation of the bodies and lives of young women was in some way caused by nuns not letting him sterilize them in other ways is in the public arena. In the public arena, too, is a chilling corpus of data indicating that other senior medics, present when he removed wombs without cause, stayed silent about it. The Medical Council's Professor Bury has bluntly stated that legislation to prevent such situations was asked for nearly a decade ago.

The material is already on the table to provide for serious public and political discourse about patient safety, about consultant autonomy, about whistle-blowing, about publicly comparable figures related to the kind of surgeries and the success of those surgeries in different hospitals. The opportunity is there for any politician to take up Prof Bury's challenge and draft the legislation he says is overdue. We're up to our collective armpits in media outlets which could explore and expose the thinking and behaviours that led to so many continuing family tragedies. Yet the women at the centre of the controversy assume that only another tribunal, commission or public inquiry will serve.