Crucify them! No, society rightly too civilised to slaughter scapegoats

THE MINUTE I got into the taxi I could see by the way the back of his head was dug into his shoulders that he was a disgruntled taxi driver from central casting.

We weren’t off the kerb before he had moved on from the weather to discussing how drunks were always getting into his taxi and how it was all the gov’ment’s fault.

This guy had it in for the gov’ment. The whole stinking lot of them.

I was making non-committal noises in an effort to end the conversation so he dipped into his back-catalogue to get a response from me. If this gov’ment was bad they were no worse than the last gov’ment, he opined: “That fella Brian Lenihan should have died before he issued that bank guarantee.”

I nearly got sick. And it wasn’t because I believe Lenihan stood between us and going out Cyprus-style. It was out of horror that a dearly loved husband, father, brother, son, should be spoken of in that way to a complete stranger...

Ireland being Ireland, I could well have been a relation or close friend of the man. In fact, I did meet Brian Lenihan once and I admired him for his courage and his integrity.

But the taxi driver hadn’t finished. “And his brother, Conor Lenihan... He’s never done anything for our constituency, I wish he was dead too.”

There was only one proper response and that was: “Stop. I’m getting out.” To my shame, I didn’t say it. I wanted to get home. So I sat fuming in the back of the taxi, incredulous that anyone would speak of another human being in that way. A human being who has a child in my son’s class at school, as it happens.

As I got out of the taxi I was thinking: “I’m going to write about you, buster,” but I forgot all about it. Until I was sitting in my seat in the church choir last Sunday and the rector and her curate started to read the Gospel of the Passion from the Book of Matthew, those words which are so well-known but whose meaning I rarely grasp.

There was such a ring of familiarity about the trumped-up court with the baying crowd shouting: “Crucify him!” Pontius Pilate knew he would have a riot on his hands if he didn’t condemn Jesus to death and he did so, washing his own hands of responsibility. Those people were no different to any other baying crowd which has sought scapegoats, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution to our own bloody Civil War.

My husband and I joke about TV programmes which we think have scapegoated politicians, such as certain Frontline programmes on RTÉ and certain Vincent Browne programmes on TV3. We call them “Give us Barabbas!” Listening to the Gospel, with the crowd shouting for the criminal Barabbas to be released and Jesus to be nailed to a cross, “Give us Barabbas!” wasn’t a joke anymore.

Today is Holy Thursday and, from tonight, Christ’s Passion is remembered in Christian churches all over the world. But what I’m looking at here is the historical fact of Christ’s death, along with two others, 2,000 years ago.

It was revulsion that humans could do that to another human that came home to me last Sunday. I hadn’t thought about it since Easter 2000, when the Corcadorca theatre company staged a Passion Play in Cork. I remember walking up Patrick’s Hill and finding myself among a crowd which was thirsty for blood, led on by their morally bankrupt “chief priests and elders”.

The horror of it! The imaginative cruelty of the crown of thorns and the mocking sign saying “King of the Jews”. The agony of those three hours nailed onto the cross until he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?”

No-one is suggesting that there is anything Jesus-like about any of our politicians past or present. But what has stayed the same is what humans are capable of doing to other humans when they want a scapegoat.

We are very civilised here compared with Jesus’s corner of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. And how valuable that civilisation is. We have put no-one to death as a scapegoat for our banking crisis. That’s the way it’s got to stay.

We responded to our banking crisis with a straightforward, democratic general election. While most of us want a banking inquiry, we rejected in a referendum a proposal that would have seen politicians scapegoating other politicians in the Dáil for political gain.

Politicians and their families are, I hope, physically safe in this country. Safe from the bloody fantasies of men like my taxi driver.

But are they emotionally safe? Some of the candidates in yesterday’s by-election in Meath East might contest that. Particularly when the media repeatedly cast themselves as the “chief priests and elders”, leading the crowd to bay for blood.

There have been many times when this has happened, from a casual comment read out on RTÉ, when a cement mixer labelled Nama was driven into the gates of Leinster House, calling for politicians to be in it, to the comment by a journalist on RTÉ at the time of the general election that she wanted to see “a stake through Fianna Fáil’s heart”.

I will never forget the Frontline programme in Nov 2010, on which there was a call for the suspension of democracy to allow a technical group negotiate with the troika. Then-minister Tony Killeen countered that his job as a politician in those terrible times was to keep his head while others were losing theirs and “focus on bridging the gap between income and expenditure”. Brian Cowen was, he said, “an honourable man”.

The audience laughed a horrible laugh. It was the kind of mockery which dehumanises and can end in the baying for blood. I will never forget the hurt in Mr Killeen’s eyes.

MAYBE it was a gut instinct for fairness which made Enda Kenny say of Cowen on the last day of the last Dáil: “I have no doubt about his integrity as a person or as a politician.” Maybe he saw that, once one politician was dehumanised before a crowd, others would follow.

Of course, his party, as well as the rest of the opposition, exploited the ugly instincts of the crowd before they went into Government. It is possible no party would have done any different in our competitive democracy.

But what matters, as cutbacks bite and the euro wobbles, is that we ignore any chief priest or elder who is advocating anger as a policy if they threaten democracy or the rule of law — be they commentators getting angrier than the Four Angry Men or politicians going further than: “Hello I’m George Lee and I am angry.”

Sounds very conservative, I know. Scores low for testosterone. But scores high for making this society too civilised to slaughter its scapegoats.