Colin Sheridan: DJ Carey’s wrongdoing not the only unsettling part of 'The Dodger' documentary

The RTÉ documentary raises questions about who benefits from such coverage, writes Colin Sheridan

DJ Carey: The Dodger. The two-part documentary that reveals but also indulges; that asks for empathy, yet banks on outrage. It is neither villainous nor virtuous.

There is a moment, watching The Dodger, when you sense the camera isn’t illuminating anything so much as circling it, like a moth at a bulb. It wants the light, of course. It wants the heat. But it is drawn most of all to the spectacle of something burning. 

And DJ Carey, once the untouchable deity of the ancient game of hurling, is now the thing aflame. A man who could once make a sliotar hover in air like he had bartered with gravity itself is reduced to wreckage. And we, dutiful audience that we are, tune in to watch the smouldering.

The documentary arrives with a kind of grim inevitability, as if the moment his debts and deceptions became public record, a runaway production timeline clicked into motion. It was never in doubt that Carey — the myth, the miracle-maker — would be remade by the same machine that once polished him to a shine. 

Here lies the question the documentary never seems to fully grasp or even ask: Who is this for? More pointedly, who does it serve? 

Carey’s victims deserve their voices, that must never be in dispute. The people he manipulated, whether through charm or desperation or the terrible alchemy of both, have earned the right to be heard loudly, clearly, and without editorial varnish. Their anguish is real, and it pre-dates the documentary by years. 

But the packaging of their pain by a media ecosystem that spent decades elevating Carey to cult-like heroism — and is now attempting to wring pathos, outrage, and ratings from his downfall — invites a different kind of scrutiny. 

Because if Carey is irredeemable, or close to it, then what are we to make of the institutions that created his myth and now profit from its implosion? The same commentators who once spoke of him in reverential tones now appear with knitted brows and sombre timbres, walking us through the anatomy of his deceit. 

We get the sense of a reckoning, yet no one involved seems interested in reckoning with their own role in building the edifice that Carey fell from. It’s as though the story simply changed direction, and the cameras obligingly followed.

In 'The Dodger', DJ Carey emerges as a kind of modern parable: a prodigious talent detached from the ordinary gravitational pull of accountability; a man propelled to such mythic heights that the eventual fall was not only predictable but perhaps preordained. File picture: Collins Courts

There is a discomfort in watching a man’s disintegration presented as cultural content, even when that man authored much of the hurt. It becomes hard, at times, to distinguish between justice and voyeurism. The film attempts, intermittently, to moralise about the dangers of hero worship, the distortions of celebrity, the isolating bubble of sporting greatness. 

But these reflections feel strangely hollow when delivered by the very medium that has streamlined the conversion of private collapse into public entertainment. Our collective appetite for ruin is nothing new. We have always been archaeologists of catastrophe, digging through the rubble of other people’s lives to confirm the worst suspicions about human frailty. 

But the speed at which we now travel from revelation to documentary to commentary to podcast mini-series is telling. It suggests less an interest in understanding the mechanics of wrongdoing, and more an urge to feast — quickly, efficiently, and with minimal emotional indigestion.

In The Dodger, Carey emerges as a kind of modern parable: a prodigious talent detached from the ordinary gravitational pull of accountability; a man propelled to such mythic heights that the eventual fall was not only predictable but perhaps preordained. 

Yet the documentary seems strangely incurious about what happens to men raised into godhood by public worship and sporting institutions that deal in exceptionalism like currency. Talent in Ireland still buys leniency; fame buys insulation. We remain a country that loves its heroes large and its questions small.

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If the film achieved anything — and it does achieve some things — it is in allowing the victims’ experiences to enter the public sphere with a measure of dignity. But even then, one wonders whether they were invited into a process that ultimately prioritises narrative arc over human closure. 

The question of who benefits lingers.  Carey is exposed, but the broadcaster gains plaudits for a piece of programming that capitalises on a story they once helped shape from the other side. There is also the troubling sensation that we are, collectively, sweeping through these scandals as though skimming chapters in a book we don’t intend to finish. 

The cultural pattern is becoming unmistakable: build the hero, ignore the cracks, gasp at the fall, extract the documentary rights, commission the panel discussion, move on when the next story breaks. The pace isn’t merely fast; it is frantic, almost compulsive. 

And it says less about the subjects of these scandals than it does about us, the viewers, and what we hunger for.

Because if Carey’s crimes tell us something about the capacity for deception in the individual, the rush to monetise those crimes tells us something about the collective. It exposes the uneasy truth that our media institutions are not neutral chroniclers but deeply invested participants in the rise-and-ruin cycle of public figures. 

Eimear Ní Bhraonáin finely lays out the narrative of DJ Carey’s fall from grace in 'The Dodger: DJ Carey and the Great Betrayal'.

They are, in many respects, the chorus narrating a tragedy they helped orchestrate. So, we are left with The Dodger: a documentary that reveals but also indulges; that asks for empathy, yet banks on outrage. It is neither villainous nor virtuous.

It is simply the product of a media landscape hungry for stories with dramatic arcs and tidy conclusions — regardless of whether tidy conclusions actually exist.

In the end, perhaps the most unsettling revelation is not Carey’s wrongdoing, but how swiftly the rest of us gather around the carcass, ready to pick it clean.