Soft Irish Rain

Exactly how powerful IS the media?

Some recent, seemingly unrelated incidents have got me thinking.
For several days last week and the week before, the Liveline airwaves jolted with some truly shocking tales of random violence on the streets of Tipperary Town. While most incidents appear to have occurred on St Patrick’s Day, and some it appears within sight of patrolling gardai, it seems it has been an ongoing problem for months or maybe even longer.
In one incident on our national holiday, a garda approached a man who had just assaulted someone and told him he couldn’t be hitting people like that. But it didn’t end there.
One young American visitor had to cut his holiday short after he was attacked on the street in sight of his girlfriend and sister.
Caller after caller recounted assaults that for the most part went unreported or un-investigated by gardai. One woman even claimed that she and her daughter were advised by a garda not to press charges for fear of negative repercussions.
By last tuesday it seemed clear that the attacks were emanating from one unnamed family group who, if the callers are to be believed have been terrorising the townspeople unhindered.
Then comes the extraordinary news live on air of a major garda operation involving armed and unarmed patrols, special response units- hitherto deployed in the gangland strongholds of Limerick- and wait for it, a garda helicopter, as gardai closed in on suspects.
Coincidence or what?
Good news no doubt for the good people of Tipp Town who want their streets back but, really? Is that what it takes to get action and is that level of force actually required?
The second incident was a little more benign but nonetheless troubling. It began last Sunday with a report in the Sunday Tribune of a so-called guerrilla artist hanging unflattering paintings of Taoiseach Brian Cowen in two Dublin galleries. By Monday, the story was picked up by several tabloid newspapers but when it was reported on the flagship 9pm news bulletin by the national broadcaster, RTE it provoked the ire of the Fianna Fail press officer who complained to RTE. One outraged Dublin TD even called for the RTE Director General to stand down. The artist had made email contact with independent radio station Today FM which was then visited by gardai demanding access to the emails in their bid to track him down. You have to wonder who ordered this. As it turned out the artist voluntarily showed up to make a statement to gardai- before the helicopter and the emergency response unit were deployed…..
And then there is the ongoing high profile asylum case of Nigerian mother Pamela Izevbekhai who claims that her daughters are under threat of female genital mutilation if they are forced to return to Nigeria. They have lived in Ireland for four years and have received a large amount of media attention because Pamela’s oldest daughter Elizabeth bled to death as a result of the brutal procedure when she was a baby.
But this is now being disputed after it emerged that two gardai had travelled to Nigeria to verify Pamela’s story and had interviewed the doctor who had previously verified her story. He is now saying there never was such a baby or such an incident. And he is demanding money from any media outlet that wants to interview him.
Is every asylum case investigated so meticulously by the Garda Siochana?
Pamela is already fighting a deportation order and her case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights. It would be highly embarrassing for Ireland to be shown to have got it wrong.

Three separate stories with a common thread.
They are all about saving face in the court of public opinion, whatever the financial or in some cases, human cost.

Since when did St Patrick’s Day get abbreviated to Patty’s Day? I keep seeing these references and doing a double take. I mean Paddy’s Day has become common parlance but honestly, Patty’s Day?
I’m thinking back to St Patrick’s Days of yore deep in the rural midlands.
It was the day when my family had two opportunities to shine.
First, my father was dispatched in early morning to forage for the perfect shamrock. Not fake stuff, not clover but freshly plucked three leaved shamrock in abundance and somehow he never returned empty-handed to the delight of my mother.
Then we marched off the short walk to the chapel, proudly wearing huge sprigs of dew dripping shamrock alongside our St Patrick’s Day badges.
Every year on that one day the parish priest conducted the Mass in Irish, so armed with Irish prayer books and thanks to weeks of painstaking rehearsals with our committed parents, we were poised to ring out the responses in triumphant Gaelic unison.
Ours were the only voices in an otherwise mute congregation. Occasionally our mother, a fluent speaker, was even called on to do a reading, another family triumph.
Much of the remainder of the day was spent discussing the poor excuses for shamrock worn by most of our neighbours and their embarrassing lack of Irish as the prayer books were carefully attached together with elastic bands and stored away with the badges until the following year.