It’s far better to try to understand each other than resort to jeering

POWER is at its most potent when it is implied. Revealed it loses its mystique. What inspires awe at a distance, provokes resentment not understanding in the actual encounter. So it proved in Seanad Éireann. Largely ignored for decades, some senators forgot that the cameras and microphones fixed to the furnishings in the Duke of Leinster’s former ballroom allow others to look in as well as them shout out.

When tragedy began as an art form the ancient Greeks consigned terrible events off stage. Murder was never committed in plain sight. Some events were too terrible to be seen. Horrible details repel people; they rivet attention but raise anger rather than encourage sympathy and anger is an unintelligent emotion.

Greeks knew that in tragedy, the human experience of being trapped between competing passions, awful deeds should not distract from emotional purification. It is this purification which is the purpose of tragedy. This is the good that can come from apparent chaos. It is the crisis that leads to catharsis. Emotions are a more terrifying drama than any actions Their tragedies were distinguished from their comedies by the use of higher language. In comedy base language, scatological references and lewd jokes might be employed. Today that would include words like “shite” and “fanny”. But tragedy scanned the higher emotions and used a higher language. It was intended to sear the soul not appal the senses. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of terror because he relied on the imagination of his audience to conjure horrors more intense than any gore he could create.