High and Low
Hysteria surrounding the Northern Bank robbery and Brad and Jen's divorce.
Perhaps there's a simple explanation for the funny five-week delay between the Belfast bank robbery and this week's firestorm of media and political attacks on Sinn Féin: the catalyst was not so much the heist itself, but rather last weekend's Irish Times opinion poll suggesting that it had minimal effect on the party's solid support in the South.
Cue the horrified hysterics. Also, given the virtual veneration of bank-robbery in popular culture, cue the belated discovery of grislier IRA-linked crimes. Meanwhile, thanks to the spat over Bobby Sands, entering from stage left is a certain sense of déjà vu: in the early 1980s, as H-Block candidates surged to electoral success, a chorus of the Republic's Great and Good despaired of working-class voters: "How can they vote for these terrorists?"
Back then, we endured another decade of media abuse and marginalisation of republicans before the peace process was allowed to emerge. And of course it wasn't just present-day republicans, but the whole historic lot.
This week, sure enough, we were back to that stuff: eg, Michael O'Regan of The Irish Times, generally a reliable weather-vane of the winds of conventional wisdom, was on Vincent Browne's radio show and rolled out the old chestnut about the "disturbed" Padraig Pearse and his quare ideas about blood sacrifice.
No one bothered to counter that Pearse finds echoes in such assorted criminals as John Redmond, Thomas Jefferson and most of the leaders of wartime Europe. Seventy years ago, "the red wine of the battlefield" was not so much a poetic image as an everyday reality, and the political argument was about in what "cause" it should be shed, and supped.
In Italy this week, the media was also lining up behind its political class on the vexed question of crime and terror. The twist there was that the papers and politicians were united in opposition to a Milan judge, Clementina Forleo – who now may face disciplinary action from the government.
Her crime was, essentially, to acquit a group of north African men accused of recruiting suicide bombers for the resistance in Iraq. She said the charge of "terrorism" couldn't be applied to guerrilla activities in a war zone.
Italy has troops in Iraq and Italian papers quickly denounced and/or satirised Forleo's classification difficulties, often with references to dead soldiers. A conspicuous exception was Il Manifesto, the Communist paper, which headlined its approval for the "just decision" alongside a photo of an Italian military helicopter being prepared for use in Iraq.
The Italian and Irish news media may be following the leads of their respective governments, but ordinary people in their most private life-decisions are following the leads of celebrities.
Or so Sky News would have us believe. Last weekend one of its headlines shouted: "Divorce! Why more and more of us are following Brad and Jen's lead". Those viewers ignorant of celebrity coupling and decoupling may have got some help from the accompanying image of Pitt and Aniston, a picture that cleverly cracked and split before our very eyes.
That few seconds of television neatly encapsulated a news culture dogged by deeply awful writing and the relentless search for tenuous Hollywood hooks. Not every social and/or cultural explanation for a phenomenon like the rising divorce rate is quite so superficial as "Brad Pitt made us do it", but it's all too typical.