Tag: Fine Gael

Who are the haters? Shameful Fine Gael, shameful Irish media

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Something of a small storm is raging in the North Atlantic. A group of Irish young people with a commitment to politics attended a conference in Washington of conservative-leaning students and young graduates. Their senior political colleagues or bosses at home got wind of it and all hell broke loose. Ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration – it is the silly season after all. Nevertheless the incident does speak volumes about the worrying lack of freedom in the new modernised Ireland whose praises the world seems to be singing about now. Clearly all is not as it seems.

Ireland is now a dangerous place for any young person who dares even to seem to think that there might be an alternative to liberal ideology. God help them. A friend commented yesterday, “where will any of these kids get a job in Ireland now after this barrage of hostile pc publicity?” Ireland’s graduate job-market is now dominated by corporate American high-tech and big pharma – and we know what they stand for in terms of social ideology. Government is in turn dependent on them for the high income employment which they generate. An independent State? Forget it.

‘MEP Maria Walsh, liked a tweet calling YAF (Young America’s Foundation) “a horrific hate-filled organisation” and demanded a resignation from one of the Irish students in attendance.’

This sounds more like Ireland’s party-in-power, Fine Gael, than any other organisation on the planet.

This incident carries all the traces of the same virus which gave us the Covington High School slander of a few months ago. There is no doubt but that Ireland’s political establishment and its senior partner, Irish mainstream media, have both swallowed Blue America’s ideology hook line and sinker – or is it hook line and stinker?

I’m not putting any money on the Irish Independent accurately reporting this response from the YAF.

Young America’s Foundation (YAF) hosted its 41st annual National Conservative Student Conference (NCSC) July 29 to August 3, 2019, bringing more than 1,300 participants together to learn from leading figures of the Conservative Movement. These students came from 37 states, the District of Columbia, and four countries.

Following the week long conference, several Irish students in attendance were blindsided by attacks from a reporter with the Irish Independent under a headline calling their attendance at NCSC “entirely inappropriate.” The piece goes on to quote attacks against the Irish students and Young America’s Foundation for mainstream conservative stances on today’s issues quoted as “regressive positions,” by the Independent. Even more absurdly, Irish media are now shamefully alleging that YAF’s National Conservative Student Conference has a “commonality” with the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton over the weekend.

Additionally, other journalists piled on with their own ad hominem attacks and calls for the students to lose their jobs. Among those endorsing the intolerant and baseless claims about Young America’s Foundation is MEP Maria Walsh, who liked a tweet calling YAF “a horrific hate-filled organisation” and demanded a resignation from one of the Irish students in attendance.

The fact that anyone in Ireland is so threatened by a handful of students attending YAF’s flagship conference is a testament to these intolerant individuals’ weakness and insecurity in their own ideas. 

The Irish students at NCSC were attending in their personal capacity—anyone would be honored to hear from and interact with America’s leaders, including Vice President Mike Pence, the Honorable John Bolton, Senators Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz plus Mia Love, Lila Rose, Michael Knowles, and Liz Wheeler, among others.

In addition to this year’s distinguished speakers, NCSC has been addressed by the likes of President Ronald Reagan, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman along with a Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader over the past four decades.

“The intolerance of the Left clearly knows no borders. The fact that Members of European Parliament or leaders from Ireland would attack a group of students for striving to broaden their intellectual horizons and learn from some of America’s leading decision makers is pathetic,” remarked YAF Spokesman Spencer Brown. “These students—and all those who took time out of their summer to learn and engage in a true free and open exchange of ideas—ought to be applauded, not demonized or threatened. Furthermore, the attempts by Irish media to sling baseless accusations and politicize a tragedy in the United States is disgusting.”

Young America’s Foundation has a long history of inviting students from around the world to participate in its conferences as YAF advances its mission to reach the rising generation with the principles of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values.

Young America’s Foundation looks forward to inviting even more students from Ireland and other countries to attend the next National Conservative Student Conference.

 

Waiting for the aftershock

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

An electoral earthquake took place in Europe last week, we are told by media across the world. And in Ireland? A severe tremor perhaps, but it will be the aftershock from that tremor in two years from now that will change the Irish political landscape. It is on its way and the dead hand of historical mythologies which has crippled Irish political life –  for half a century at least – will at last lose its grip. Real political choices will then be open to the Irish electorate once again.

The tremor which Ireland felt last weekend brought its casualties and there was little mourning for them. The deputy prime minister (Taniste), Eamon Gilmore,  bit the dust and resigned as leader of his left-wing party. The electorate’s preferences swung wildly towards independent politicians and it was clear that they were not to worried about the kind of independents they chose – it was a matter of anyone but the political establishment in power.

Why all this happened and what we may expect in the future was well analysed by Professor Ray Kinsella in one of the country’s daily newspapers yesterday.

“Voters observed, up close and personal, what happens to individual TDs of real ability and principle when they voted with their conscience on the Coalition’s Abortion Act. It sent a message: this Government will not tolerate individuals who think for themselves and dissent from ‘The Party Line’. This message was further reinforced by the Coalition’s effort to consolidate political control by abolishing the quasi-independent Seanad. It is not so easy to push around Independents and threaten grown-up legislators with the Party Whip system.

“Voters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while the Labour Party ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people struggling to make ends meet. Voters could not understand how Labour would enact the procession of cuts and charges on families and the self-employed. What they also saw was how both parties acquiesced in a deeply flawed ‘adjustment process’ that delivered a reduction in the fiscal deficit but at a terrible cost, including an ongoing debt burden that will stifle growth for the next two generations.”

In this hard-hitting article in the Cork-based Irish Examiner, Kinsella, Professor of Banking and Finance in the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD analyses the Irish election results.

Voters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while Labour ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people

The outcome of the local council and EU Parliament elections demonstrated just how far the Coalition partners had become detached from the day-to-day experiences of families and, also, from their own foundational values.

The immediate response to the results equally showed how little they have learned. The Labour Party stated that: “The Irish people have sent the Government and the Labour Party a message…” Really?

Does the Government really need to be sent a message about what has been happening to living standards and to public services across the country: the scale of emigration, the dreadful legacy of long-term unemployment and the impact of cutbacks in healthcare and education?

The old stock alibis won’t work:

‘We’ve taken the hard decisions’. No. They were the wrong decisions.

‘We didn’t communicate our policies’ — well, the six austerity budgets gave the Coalition plenty of scope to ‘communicate’.

‘The country was bankrupt’ — so you put more than $17bn from the National Pension Reserve Fund into a malign ‘bailout’, skewed towards the interests of those who contributed to the crisis in the first place.

The medical card shambles is, as the feature in the Irish Examiner last Friday demonstrated, a potent symbol of the insensitivity of policy and the arbitrary manner in which cards have been removed. What makes this worse is the ‘retrospective spin’ by government — featured in that same article — as the medical card debacle continued to unfold.

The medical card shambles was a flawed and arbitrary process, based on ‘Management by Press Release’, long after the damage had been done. It was a metaphor for the wider health system. It was a pity more attention wasn’t paid to the press release of the heads of four Dublin hospitals, who publicly warned about the threat to patient safety, of what was happening, and continues to happen, in hospitals around the country.

And these pressures have been driven by the troika.

Voters have observed the deference to overseas interests who contributed to the banking crisis, against the background of the escalating number of orders for repossession of Irish homes.

The acquiescence by the Coalition in ‘troikanomics’ — a blinkered and short-sighted strategy criticised many times in this column — is the reason for their rejection by the electorate. It is at the heart of the breakdown in public trust in mainstream party politics. Instead, voters have turned to Sinn Féin and to Independents.

The political system itself is skewed in favour of established parties, making it very difficult for new entrants with fresh ideas.

The result of this is that shifts in the percentage support for these parties do not necessarily reflect anything other than a lesser dislike of one, compared with the other. Hence the relative performance of the two members — Labour compared with Fine Gael — of the Coalition.

It would be a great mistake to dismiss the increased support for Independents as simply a ‘protest vote’. The contribution of Independents, such as the late Tony Gregory, to value-based community politics can hardly be overstated.

Long serving and hard-working MEPs stood for re-election this time around. The growth in support for Independents is not alone a reaction against hegemony of the ‘old politics’ which young adults, in particular, do not understand — because they have no way of knowing what they stand for, other than power.

It is, more importantly, a statement about the loss of trust in mainstream politics.

Voters observed, up close and personal, what happens to individual TDs of real ability and principle when they voted with their conscience on the Coalition’s Abortion Act. It sent a message: this Government will not tolerate individuals who think for themselves and dissent from ‘The Party Line’. This message was further reinforced by the Coalition’s effort to consolidate political control by abolishing the quasi-independent Seanad. It is not so easy to push around Independents and threaten grown-up legislators with the Party Whip system.

oters observed that Fine Gael abandoned its foundational values, based on supporting families and fairness, while the Labour Party ditched the ethos of solidarity with working people struggling to make ends meet. Voters could not understand how Labour would enact the procession of cuts and charges on families and the self-employed. What they also saw was how both parties acquiesced in a deeply flawed ‘adjustment process’ that delivered a reduction in the fiscal deficit but at a terrible cost, including an ongoing debt burden that will stifle growth for the next two generations.

It is two years until the next scheduled General Election.

This is too long for people numbed by austerity and a ‘recovery’ about which they read but have not experienced. It is hardly long enough for a Coalition that is in office but has lost any claim to legitimacy to truly re-engage with their foundational values.

There are three priorities for whatever new political consensus emerges from the radically different political landscape.

Firstly, demand from the eurozone establishment a €60bn debt write-off. There is broad consensus among international economists that such a write off is justified and appropriate. Peter Mathews TD, perhaps Fine Gael’s most qualified and professionally experienced banking expert, has continually made this point. But, of course, he was expelled from his party (and from the Banking Inquiry) for having a mind of his own.

The Coalition simply hasn’t got the debt-write off message. It is now too divided and jaded — too cosy with ‘our friends and partners’ in the eurozone — to deliver the demand for a write-off with any conviction. Independents and Sinn Féin are unlikely to be similarly inhibited.

The second is this: both Fine Gael and Labour have been willing, in the interest of power, to ditch their traditional values. At a time when the focus of Government should have been on the economy, they engaged in a damaging, divisive and wholly unnecessary campaign to legislate for abortion on the X case. For anyone who actually took the trouble to read the ECJ judgement on the ABC cases — or who listened to the informed views of the medical and psychiatric evidence — this was an exercise in ideological ‘power broking’ and one that the country could ill-afford.

Their proper responsibility was to support families, struggling with the consequences of six regressive austerity budgets and cutbacks in services and supports that hit primarily those on the outside — including single parents and the homeless.

Later in this year the Coalition will be at the same crack; pushing the same ideology and pressing for changes in the Constitutional status of marriage and the natural rights of children to a mother and a father. This would be bizarre to traditional Fine Gael.

In fact, the fundamental freedoms that every citizen have are not the gift of governments; they are the result of the courage of individuals from outside of the establishment, people like Raymond Crotty, Patricia McKenna, Mark McCrystal, and Kathy Synott; individuals who were brave enough to go to the Supreme Court to vindicate these freedoms and to hold government to account, over and over again.

This should encourage ‘new democrats’ because the research shows that the integrity of public institutions is fundamental to growth and development.

The third challenge for the emerging political forces is to get their head around how best to adapt the Irish economy to an external environment that is heavy with risk.

The EU, and particularly the eurozone, is mired in financial repression. Forecasts for growth continually fall short of outcomes.

Any momentum rests on the assertion two years ago by Mario Draghi that the ECB would ‘do what it takes’ — when, in fact, Mr Draghi had no mandate to make such a pledge.

In the markets, sovereign spreads have declined — but it will take something more than an adventurous pledge to sustain economies mired in sovereign debt There are also significant risks, including political risks and a ‘liquidity trap’ stymieing monetary policy.

The Coalition’s post-bailout strategy, published earlier this year, is simply not robust to these challenges. That is why securing debt write-off is absolutely central in the new political consensus.

In the run-up to 2016 (if the Coalition lasts that long) an emerging values-based ‘new coalition’, to counter the old failed orthodoxy, may have to be built.

Such a grouping is now likely to comprise of Sinn Féin, a ‘new’ Fianna Fáil — and a much stronger and more assertive group of Independent TDs.

They should begin their dialogue with the eurozone establishment by declaring that they would like our country back.

Meanwhile, Cora Sherlock of the Irish Pro Life Campaign writes on LifeNews.com that Fine Gael’s losses a direct result of betraying pro-lifers on abortion.

As the dust settles from Ireland’s European and Local elections, it’s a good opportunity to examine what the results mean from the pro-life perspective.  While there is always the temptation to overstate the political implications for a single issue, the results of recent days have far-reaching consequences for the life issue.

Read what she says here.

Conscience-free politics – truly bizarre

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment
Two faces of Irish politics – Creighton and Kenny

Irish TAOISEACH (prime minister) Enda Kenny thinks politics is all about fixing things. He is a mechanic without a clue when it comes to principles – either philosophical or anthropological, not to talk of his bizarre theology. He is now is facing an unprecedented party rebellion for the very reason that he has failed on all these counts. Those who rebelled against him in the Irish parliament – and those who will do so over the next two weeks – know that there is more to life and the pursuit of the common good than “arranging things” so that those who want to can do what they like – regardless of its consequences.

This abortion Bill which the Irish parliament is about to pass into law will be the undoing of Kenny’s reputation as any kind of statesman. It may also be the undoing of his party and many are hoping that it may be the catalyst which will bring about a realignment of Irish political forces into a meaningful one where the illiberal ideologues of the left, and their populist followers, will be confronted with a politics guided by a true perception of humankind and its common good.

Kenny – and the governments of whatever party mixes which have been in power for the last 20 years – inherited a constitutional mess created by a rogue Supreme Court decision, the notorious “X” case decision, based on faulty evidence. This decision compromised the Irish Constitution’s guarantee of the right to life of children in their first nine months of life. Kenny and his acolytes’ ham-fisted effort to “fix” this mess is even more flawed than what it tried to fix.

Mr Kenny has adopted a hardline stance against those who voted against the Government’s legislation last night. He expelled all four members from the parliamentary party immediately, promising to end their political careers. But Irish people looking on at this debacle can now see a handful of principled politicians who are prepared to think about what they are being asked to sign their names to. On the other side they see a crowd of sheep following a leader who ordered them to vote with him, regardless of their conscience.

Both Ireland’s main political parties – whose origins go back to Ireland’s Civil War over 90 years ago – now look like unravelling. The Fianna Fail party leader, Michéal Martin, supports the legislation and if principled voices within the party had not prevailed he would also have denied its members freedom of conscience on this matter. Potentially the Irish parliament has now been divided into two camps, those from who conscience counts for something and those for who it clearly counts for nothing – for it it doesn’t pertain to matters of life and death what does to what does it pertain?

This unravelling will be no bad thing. There is every hope now that the women and men of principle – of any and no party – inside and outside the parliament might now come together to give an effective voice to a disenfranchised electorate disillusioned for at least a decade by a political culture devoid of anything other than a “fix-it-up-at-any-cost” mentality.

Lucinda Creighton, a Minister in Kenny’s government, whom all observers expect will take her stand against him on the issue next week, made a powerful defence of the dissidents’ case in the parliament yesterday and would be the natural leader if a new political force were it to emerge. If it does this will be no single issue movement but a movement based on a vision of human society and the true nature of humankind within it – just, free and enterprising. There are many currently outside the formal politics of the country who would have been ashamed to stand beside those currently in power but who would be very happy to cooperate and support those who are now revealing themselves as politician with principles.

Ms. Creighton put her cards on the table in the parliament in a long, articulate and detailed speech on Monday. At one point she told us that I’ve had people contact me in recent months condemning me for having a ‘moral’ or ethical concern about abortion. Some demanded that I leave my morals or conscience aside in order to support abortion. Now I must say that I find this bizarre.

There is an emerging consensus in Ireland which suggests that having a sense of morality has something to do with the Catholic Church. It is automatically assumed that if you consult your conscience, you are essentially consulting with Rome. This is deeply worrying. It is a lazy way of attempting to undermine the worth of an argument, without actually dealing with the substance. This is not just a Catholic issue, any more than it is a Protestant or Muslim issue. This is not a religious issue. It is a human rights issue.

This was nothing less than a veiled criticism of her leader who has been proclaiming his peculiar brand of religion and politics around the country over the past few months – a very bizarre political philosophy indeed.

I wonder what one should consult when voting on a fundamental human rights issue such as this, Ms. Creighton continued, if not one’s own conscience? My personal view is that all I can do, when making a decision on life and death, and that is what we are considering here, is consult my conscience, which is based on my sense of what is right and what is wrong. What else can I consult? The latest opinion poll? The party hierarchy? The editor of the most popular newspaper?

I mentioned groupthink, which is a corrosive affliction in this country. We saw it in the Haughey era, we saw it during the Celtic Tiger era, and we see it on this question of abortion. It is easy to understand why people in positions of responsibility want thorny issues to simply disappear. It is far easier than risking conflict, unpopularity or worse; paying the price for speaking up…

Some were very offended by her groupthink remark. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? ‘Groupthinkers’ never see themselves as such.

This is a voice we have not heard in Irish politics for many years. This represents a political philosophy of depth and substance worthy of Ireland’s greatest political thinker, Edmund Burke. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a new era in Irish politics in which cant, posturing and “fixing” will be a thing of the grim past.

A further six Fine Gael may follow Ms. Creighton next week. With two thirds of Michéal Martin’s party voting contrary to his line and without any substantial policy differences between them and the Fine Gael rebels on other issues, there is every hope that the old outdated party structure might finally crumble.

The Distance Between Wonder and Curiosity: Whither Modern Journalism?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Ireland’s former Minister for Justice and former Attorney General, Michael McDowell, supposedly “retired” from politics, asked some big questions of the Irish political and media establishment at a private dinner in Dublin last week. It may have been a private dinner but what he said ended up on the front page of The Irish Times nevertheless. For some people McDowell’s remarks put a question-mark over his retirement – he bowed out after his defeat in the last General election. Was he making a pitch for the formation of a new political grouping to confront the cosy and anodyne choices which the present set-up seems to offer the Irish electorate?

This is what the Irish Times reported: “There is a ‘gap in the market’ in Irish politics which will need to be filled if the next general election is to be more than just a contest between Fianna Fáil (the main party in the present government) and Fine Gael (currently the main opposition party)  to see who will govern with the Labour Party…If people wanted to stop the general election being like that, they had to do something about it rather than just complaining, Mr McDowell said.”

That is intriguing enough but we will have to wait and see if anything more comes of it. What was more intriguing but only alluded to in the reports was the fact that in his address Mr. McDowell devoted the lion’s share of his attention to the media itself, criticising it for its “holier-than-thou” posturing since our financial world began to unravel three years ago.

The Irish Times reported: “A large portion of his address was devoted to criticising the media, including The Irish Times and RTÉ. He agreed with Taoiseach Brian Cowen that media commentary about the economy was excessively negative. He objected to the media criticising the Government for not seeing the property crash coming, when they too had not predicted the financial downturn. He mentioned The Irish Times Ltd’s purchase of the property website myhome.ie for €50 million in 2006”.

Stanley Baldwin, a British prime minister in the early part of the last century once jibed that journalists enjoy “the privilege of the harlot down the ages – power without responsibility”. Kenneth Minogue, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, quoted this in a powerful critique of journalism which was published in New Criterion back in 2005.

Professor Minogue accepted that we cannot live without journalism. We need information and the way we get the vast bulk of the information which we need for life in the polis comes to us from journalists. But some kind of decadence has taken hold. He connects this with Baldwin’s jibe insofar as it seems to “point to the profound idea that there is something essentially pathological about the whole activity that daily satisfies our often pointless curiosity about what is going on in the world.” He accepts that at its core journalism is a perfectly respectable and certainly a necessary trade, informing us about the world. However, he maintains that it has lost its integrity and has become, in some degree, a parody of truth. I suppose that Baldwin’s analogy went something like this: Just as the harlot panders to the indulgence of human sexuality, regardless of any sense of its true purposes and outcome, so the journalist can pander to the indulgence of that pathological curiosity that Minogue refers to and that all of us can be tempted to.

Is this not the problem at the root of McDowell’s complaint about the negativity of the media’s treatment of our financial predicaments? Is negativity endemic in the provision information at a popular level? No news may be good news but every journalist also knows that good news has to be very good to get itself into print or on the airwaves. The journalist has an inbuilt instinct to entertain first and inform second. The journalist has to first of all attract attention; then the information can follow. If bad news attracts more attention than good news then the bad news angle becomes the default option.

McDowell’s point might be illustrated by two contrasting reports on an Irish Central Bank quarterly bulletin in two Irish newspapers on the day following that dinner. The Irish Independent went into moan mode, emphasising the negative elements in the bank’s report:

“The euro-region recovery may ‘moderate somewhat’  in the second half of the year as governments withdraw stimulus measures and cut spending to reduce budget deficits, Ireland’s central bank said. ‘The euro-area recovery is expected to continue, but is now likely to occur at a more gradual pace than was anticipated’ in April, the Central Bank led by Patrick Honohan said in its quarterly report published today. ‘This primarily reflects the negative short-term impact of fiscal consolidation.’

“European governments from Ireland to Spain have been forced to step up budget cuts after the Greek fiscal crisis eroded investor confidence and pushed up borrowing costs. The euro- region economy may only show a ‘somewhat uneven’ recovery, the Irish central bank said, echoing remarks by European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet earlier this month. While a recovery in exports is expected to continue, domestic activity ‘appears likely to remain subdued,’ according to the report. Governments’ deficit-reduction plans could curb demand, hurting a recovery, it said.”

Dan O’Brien, the new Economics correspondent of The Irish Times, a trained economist and until recently working with the Economist Intelligence Unit, gave a more positive slant to the Bank’s report.

“Central Bank says economy to grow by over 2% in 2011”, said the headline. “The Central Bank”, he wrote,  “has predicted that the economy will grow by between 2 and 3 per cent next year, well above most expectations for the euro zone as a whole. The crisis in the euro zone, which peaked in May, does not appear to have damaged Ireland’s growth prospects, according to the bank’s Quarterly Bulletin .

“In its first economic forecast since the bailing out of Greece and the putting in place of a rescue fund for other weak euro zone countries, the bank argues that Ireland’s recovery remains on track”. He didn’t ignore the negative caveats in the report but he didn’t labour them either.

I suppose we will have to wait to see which made the better call but certainly if you wanted encouragement you would read The Irish Times on this occasion.

All this is of course at the higher end of the reporting spectrum and may not be so self-evidently rooted in some kind of pathology as Minogue argues in relation to trends in journalism generally. But the worry is that it is a symptom of the same infection – and clearly Mr. McDowell and Mr. Cowen feel the downward pressure which it is bringing to bear on our morale generally. What is the infection? Minogue’s answer is that journalism satisfies curiosity, but a curiosity which is only “a distant relative of the ‘wonder’ thought to be the source of philosophy and science.” How, he asks, can curiosity be a vice? “The answer”, he says, “is that we are often curious about things that are none of our business. The malicious village gossip is the most curious creature on earth, and finds a successor in the ‘door-stopping’ journalist and the paparazzo infesting the lives of famous people.”

If journalism tends to the negative rather than the positive, the pessimistic rather than the optimistic, is this simply because of a certain morbidity in the kind of curiosity it tends to pander to? “The most evidently vicious kind of curiosity is morbid,” Minogue maintains. Plato recognised this, he tells us, quoting from The Republic which tells of a character noticing the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground with the executioner standing beside them. “He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes he ran up to the bodies and cried, ‘There you are, curse you; feast yourselves on this lovely sight!’” Minogue comments: “Some modern press photography is remarkable, almost an art (that of sport, for example), but much that we see in tabloid journalism would disgust us had our sensibilities not been corrupted by learning to enjoy the satisfaction of this particular version of lust – the lust to see and know things of no concern to us.”

I suppose there are many who will say about all this – “So what?” For some it will be because the challenge of dealing with it suggests something that is even more distasteful – censorship. I heard an interview with Bret Easton Ellis on Irish (daytime) radio some time ago. I was amazed to hear Easton Ellis hold back on some descriptive references to his very explicit fiction. But I was more amazed to hear his Irish host mutter his disapproval at the suggestion that they would indulge in any self-censorship on behalf of their listening audience.

Ultimately all this is a question of the ways in which we chose to exercise our freedom, responsibly or irresponsibly, and that in the end boils down to the exercise of integrity in whatever field of human action we find ourselves engaged. If we chose to work outside that framework then we will deserve the jibe Stanley Baldwin made about the journalism of his day.