Surrealing in the Years Between subs, Tubs and consultative forums, who knows where to look?

AT THE GLOBAL level, this week will be remembered for only one story. The tourist submersible that disappeared en route to the wreckage of the Titanic. 

What is there to actually say about the submersible? Maybe: If a strange man offers you a ride to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible piloted by a Logitech video game controller, don’t take it. Don’t sign any waiver that features the word ‘death’. There are better ways to spend roughly a quarter of a million (more on that later).

Discrepancies were noted in both the media coverage and public attitudes towards the vanished submersible in contrast to the sinking of a boat carrying more than 700 refugees off the coast of Greece last week.

Side by side the tragedies tell the story of human inequality – one the result of a desperate journey to survive, the other a tale of hubris rivalling Icarus not only in theme, but also pure mechanical recklessness. 

Both events are unspeakably sad, but only one became a days-long news event – the one that involved CEOs, vast sums of money and significantly less loss of life – complete with ghoulish countdown clocks estimating the amount of oxygen left on board.

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Closer to home, the news has been similarly frantic in pace, though objectively less nightmarish.

Let’s just say when it comes to producing a certain segment of Reeling in the Years 2023, RTÉ might have to forego the usual archival footage in favour of a Ken Burns shot of their own ledger, panning slowly over the name ‘Ryan Tubridy’ and across the credit column. 

RTÉ has suspended its director general Dee Forbes in the wake of revelations that €345,000 was paid in secret to former Late Late Show host Ryan Tubridy over six years. These additional payments went unreported in RTÉ’s annual high-earners list — a list that tends to upset people at the best of times.

TD Michael McNamara has since called for the abolition of the licence fee following the corporate governance screw-up, without which RTÉ won’t live to see Reeling in the Years 2023. Such an outcome would of course only make this column an all-the-more important document of this week in Irish history.

The scandal is very much ongoing, and Ryan Tubridy did not host his daily radio show on Friday, nor will he for the entirety of next week. Tubridy confirmed as much in a second statement issued on Friday afternoon, in which he apologised for his “failure” to “answers as to the circumstances which resulted in incorrect figures being published.”

RTÉ’s secret payments to Tubridy have wrenched public attention away from what had been already a perfectly serviceable furore around Michael D Higgins and the consultative forum on security. 

Higgins came under much criticism for overstepping the bounds of his role when he said he would “describe our present position as one of drift” away from neutrality. 

Lots of  columnists were unhappy. But it seems that the displeasure of my columnist brethren was unshared by the public at large, especially now that we’ve got to worry about what Taylor Swift’s visit will do to inflation and we can’t even save money by shopping at Iceland.

After all, it seems unintuitive that when it comes to selecting a president after weeks of campaigning, including televised debates, regular people numbering their ballots are doing so in order of who will be the best at keeping their mouth shut about things that matter.

While the electorate is aware of the limited role of the president in contributing to the direction of policy, it’s unlikely they are voting for a vision of the country only for their chosen President to never speak about that vision under any circumstances. If that were the case, we could have been using a cardboard cutout of Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh this whole time and saved a fortune.

A President piping up about once a year is pretty good going in the age of the attention economy. If anything, given his well-known political leanings, it would be fair to say that Higgins has shown restraint across his 12 years as president.

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For him to warn against a drift towards military alignment with NATO is not especially controversial. In fact, it’s in line with the overwhelming majority of the Irish public, and current government policy. 

Higgins could probably be credited with directing public attention towards the consultative forum, attention that probably was not expected by the government. After all, if you want the public to ignore something, calling it a “consultative forum” is a great start.

The forums themselves have been hit with protests, the first of which led Micheál Martin to express fear for open debate on campuses. There is an irony to this of course, given that much of the criticism of consultative forums centres around who has been chosen to lead and participate in the debate. And besides, it’s not those debaters who were hauled away by the guards.

After a week of who can say what, who should pay attention to what, and all manner of quandaries, a voice that can cut through the chaos seems one of the presidency’s most valuable functions.