Moralising and misguided

For the initial couple of days, the coverage of the death and funeral of Charles Haughey was characterised by extremes – on the one hand, the inevitable regurgitation of historical hatreds and the replaying of Haughey's defects and misdeeds; on the other, the attempted veneration of his legendary status as statesman and cultural icon. Almost anything you could lay your eye on was manifestly written by a friend or a foe.

It isn't so much that there was nothing in between, as that there was little marrying of the two approaches. One lay column-by-column with the other, risking public confusion, scepticism and unease. (I am avoiding the word "schizophrenic" here in deference to the sensitivities of Schizophrenia Ireland.) Not until the weekend papers did we begin to get slightly more measured perspectives, and then only patchily.

Those of us who were there during the Haughey era, who remember and cared enough either way, could find our way through the contradictions. We could remember and recognise the agendas, so that the truth, you might say, shimmered at us between the lines. But I wondered more than once what, for example, the community of Polish immigrants might be making of it all. (Those I meet seemed unaware it was happening.) Bewilderment arising from such coverage, then, more than the clouds hanging over him or the distance in time since he departed office, is the most likely explanation for the low turn-out at Charles Haughey's funeral. To attend would have required clarity of mind, a settled perspective embracing both light and darks sides of Haughey, and that was all but impossible to arrive at from the polarised media coverage that persisted until after the funeral. To stay away was safer, a neutral or at least ambiguous statement.

To suggest, as some reports have, that people deliberately "turned their backs" on Haughey in death does not ring true, and not specifically on account of any redeeming qualities of Haughey. I have been to many funerals throughout the country of people who have been "disgraced" in small and large ways within their communities, but have never been at one in which this resulted in a shortening of the cortege. The opposite is more often the case, as people usually seek to see the better side of someone who has recently died. When a relatively unknown person of ambiguous virtue passes away, there follows an adjustment in the public culture which takes account of the weaknesses and sins of the departed while elevating human considerations above others. It is not so much that people "always speak well of the dead", but that they place the individual in a perspective whereby it is possible to speak of their mix of good and bad qualities in a rounded way. Because Charles Haughey was a politician, this was difficult to begin with, because politics requires people to be passionately for or against. But this was distorted also by the culture of Irish media, which have long been infected with biases which, though valid in the wider culture, have no place in journalism. The truth is that Haughey was despised by most journalists long before anything of substance was discovered about his finacial affairs. The tribunal revelations simply validated prejudices that had been in place virtually from the start. The result was a journalism rich in moralising but poor in human insight.

It was correct for the media to report in full, then, and at the time of his death, the full detail of Charles Haughey's sins. What is troubling, though, is the inability of Irish journalism to go beyond that, to sketch out a context reflecting the intelligence, grace and compassion of the broader culture, in which it is possible to read the life of a recently-deceased public figure in all its intricacy and see overall a human being more or less like me or you.