Gavan Reilly

This evening TV3 exclusively revealed that Brian Lenihan, Minister for Finance, had been diagnosed with a malignant tumour in his pancreas.

Sadly TV3 don’t see fit to allowing their videos be embedded elsewhere, but the piece they did – it’s the first 7 minutes out of a 7’30” news bulletin – can be seen here.

It’s difficult to know where to start with a piece like this. TV3 say – and, to be honest, it’s a commendable choice – that although they became aware of the news on Christmas Eve, they chose not to reveal it due to the sensitive timing of the news.

There are, however, a few serious problems with the piece. I’ll start with the meekest one and work upward.

Ursula Halligan, completely aside from the merits of the piece in question, is quite possibly the worst reporter I’ve seen ever. She stumbles, leaves dead air, and struggles to grasp words so badly that sometimes she make Bertie Ahern look like Dickens. Her interviews are inane, bland, and ask so few questions that the subject could admit to serial murder and still come out smelling of roses, such is Halligan’s inability to string up a subject. Bring back Miriam, all is forgiven.

The striking absence from Halligan’s report is not only that Lenihan, the Department, or the Government have declined to comment on the matter, but that Halligan doesn’t see fit to mention this. All in the sake of getting the scoop to beat all scoops. Why would you say “We asked the Department of Finance for a comment, but were told it’d be inappropriate for them to comment on a personal issue” in a piece when it de-sexifies the piece? Lenihan (in a statement) has said he has no plans to speak to the media until the New Year. Clearly that’s a public domain fact. But try telling that to TV3.

It’s tough to imagine how TV3 could have had any less tact in handling this subject. ‘Is it too early to talk about the political impact of this?’, wonders Colette Fitzpatrick live on air, when most viewers are going “Jaysus, I hate him for the pay cuts, but that’s terrible”. Yes, Colette, it is too early to ask who’s getting his job. Frankly it’s too early to talk about the issue at all.

“How do you get pancreatic cancer?” she asks later. Jesus, Colette, it’s not like he got it as a Christmas present. The respondent, Prof John Crown, is hardly any better, essentially implying that because the symptoms of pancreatic cancer tend to strike when it’s too late to do much about it, when it’s diagnosed there’s little that can be done to assist recovery. While TV3 tried their best to demarcate the Lenihan content from the medical analysis, the line was so thinly-drawn as to be blown away the second that Prof Crown drew breath.

Following the interview, the piece featured a retrospective on Lenihan’s 18 months as Minister for Finance. There is very little to justify this. The video reel didn’t need to say anything about the end of Lenihan’s tenure out loud for the implications to ring clear. To do this is galling enough – in essence the reel is an obituary – but given that TV3 had two days to put together the reel, it means that at some point in the last 48 hours, someone – anyone – with editorial authority could have put their heads in and thought, ‘maybe we shouldn’t run an obituary piece’. Again, tactless and horrible.

I don’t think one can be so quick as to condemn the reporters involved – all they can do is get the story and give it to the news editors to use it as they see fit – save for Halligan, who when presented with acres of dead air in which she could have explained that everyone else had declined to comment, rather than choosing to give off the impression that the story was so fresh that they simply didn’t have time to ask.

The kicker is that whatever about his public responsibility or profile, this isn’t really news. Brian Lenihan and his family are the ones to whom this matters most; it’s not as if he’s been incapacitated for some time and that should a bank fail on Monday morning (especially when everyone’s forgetting that Monday’s not a bank holiday) he won’t be around to act. It’s just simply a matter of extreme insensitivity to deny the man with the country’s toughest job a bit of space to come to terms with a debilitating condition, and even if the piece wasn’t as tabloid and grotesque as it ultimately was, there’s simply no forgiving that.

To think they wonder why the mainstream media is falling apart.

Edit: Elsewhere, Suzy Byrne contemplates the impact for ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ between politics and the media.

This post was edited to correct the spelling of Ursula Halligan’s surname.

This morning the three major broadsheets carry news of a trial in Tralee concerning Danny Foley, a bouncer who was sentenced to seven years in prison for the sexual assault of a young woman in Listowel. There are two particularly attention-grabbing facts about the case:

1. That the accused’s parish priest, Fr Sean Sheehy of Castlegregory, had provided a character reference saying the defendant “always had the height of respect for women” and that there was “not an abusive bone in his body”, a statement later heavily criticised by the judge, and
2. That, before the judge delivered the sentence, a group of fifty people – anecdotally, mostly male – queued up to shake the defendant’s hand and hug him, in some cases with tears in their eyes.

Now, rightfully, when people began sharing links to the story on Twitter this morning, most people were fairly appalled at the idea of a convicted sexual offender being party to such evident public support. However, it didn’t take long – probably because the victim was accompanied by representatives from the Kerry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre – for people to start immediately referring to the convicted man as a ‘rapist’.

The man has not been convicted of rape. The man was convicted of a sexual assault.

Elsewhere in the same papers today, we have the news that a boy was taking a Supreme Court case to challenge the quick-fix Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 2006, because it deemed him to be a statutory rapist having slept consentually with a 14-year-old girl when he himself was 15, while she was portrayed as a “comely maiden” under the same act. Surely this is a reminder to us all that there are degrees of sexual offence – including, evidently, an offence that isn’t an offence at all.

Now, I can’t claim to have heard the defendant’s girlfriend on 2FM this morning – I believe she tried to portray a questionable picture of the nature of “circumstantial evidence” produced at her boyfriend’s hearing – and there’s a fair chance that she may have dug her partner into an even bigger hole depending on the merit with which she presented her thoughts.

But it seems that people are quick to condemn the man, and the people of Listowel, for such an unprecedented move in the courtroom, blithely assuming that those who queued to embrace him were endorsing the offence, and not the person itself.

One action does not, and cannot, give a complete reflection of a person’s character. Clearly, Danny Foley must have been a reasonably popular man in his hometown; any social outcast who is later found to have perpetrated a sexual assault (which, in case there’s any equivocation about this, I totally condemn) would probably have been assaulted himself a number of times in the fortnight between being found guilty and being summoned for sentencing. Obviously Danny Foley was held in great esteem by his friends, and thus must have been of reasonable standing and of seeming good nature to have won this kind of affection from his peers.

Nor does consoling a man who is about to be locked up for seven years – albeit deservedly, it would seem – a total endorsement of his actions and an expression of association with them. I know very few people who haven’t done something they’ve regretted; even if they had carried out transgressions (sadly a dirty word since Tiger-gate) I’d still like to try and see the bigger picture.

Of course seeing a display like this is a gruesome experience for the innocent victim of Foley’s crime. But it’s an enormous leap of faith to condemn the people of Listowel for standing by a friend, especially when they have the right to feel that his conviction is open to question (as his girlfriend clearly does, given her comments on the radio), and especially so to take the easy leap by pointing the finger at a priest who quite clearly wasn’t going to give a false statement.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.

(Edit: I’ve seen on RTE News tonight that Fr Sheehy was one of the people who queued to shake hands with Foley before his sentencing. That’s reprehensible and Fr Sheehy deserves the bollocking he’s gotten from the Bishop of Kerry as a result. Whatever about the intentions of the other people who shook Foley’s hand, a priest should have been far more conscious of the symbolism to the victim.)

…and I wanted to capitalise on the Sterling/Euro exchange rate, I would ensure that Royal Mail delivery to the Republic of Ireland was cheaper than it was to the rest of Europe.

Isn’t it weird that it’s the same price for someone in Enniskillen to send a package to Drogheda using Royal Mail as it is to Athens? When so much of Ireland’s discretionary spending is done through the means of online shopping, and when so many of the biggest online retailers – Amazon, Play.com, et al – being based in the UK, and when we’re so culturally dependent on the UK to begin with, why not stimulate the British economy that little bit by reflecting the proximity of the Republic and making delivery appropriately cheaper?

Just a thought.

As I typed the original title of this post, ‘2-0 up’, Antonio Valencia scored.

It’s a midweek Tuesday and I’m watching Manchester United beat Wolves on a not-in-any-way-illegal-I-swear online broadcast, having just read Declan Lynch’s excellent book Free Money, a tome I’d highly recommend and one I’d been (he wrote an extended preview for it in the otherwise meritless Sunday Independent in May, definitely worth a read if you’re not the book-buying type).

Declan is a sportswriter for the aforementioned Sindo, and is – by his own admission, though he makes a compelling case for not using the term itself – an alcoholic. Free Money is about a nine-month project of turning €100 into… well, whatever his instinct and sporting acumen will allow him. As someone with a more-than-everyday familiarity of the worlds of journalism and addiction – worlds that one fears might be a little bit less distant than one would first suspect – and writes with particular eloquence about the addiction industry and its craft with words.

A therapist would reply that in taking the positives I’m ‘rationalising’ it, that I am using mere words to give myself a false impression, and to keep betting.

Words, words, words, the therapist would say disdainfully. Words are nothing, it is all about feelings.

[…]

I take it personally when I hear these people denigrating about words, words, words because I know something about words. I make my living out of words, and I can assure these people that words are not mere objects that the mind produces in the absence of feelings, they are not ‘mere’ in any way.

I set up this blog – or, at least, this edition of my blogging life – in the second-last week of December 2008. My intention was to post one blog per day, trying to work myself into the habit of writing at reasonable length on topics that I may not necessarily be particularly interested in, or motivated by. It was to fall between every stool going; one day it’d be about Stephen Jones missing a last-minute penalty to seal a Grand Slam for Ireland, the next it’d be about staying motivated to work in journalism, on a student newspaper that offers infinite reward but horrific wages.

To an extent – and I guess I’ve done okay in this regard – it has been that; Thinking Out Loud is a blog about nothing in particular. The only problem is that between the day where it’s been about Ireland winning at rugby and the Sunday Tribune being abject failures at covering gaelic games, there’s been ballooning voids of silence where Thinking Out Loud wasn’t a blog about ‘nothing in particular’ but rather ‘nothing at all’.

I might surmise that a lot of the problem with trying to write a blog about ‘nothing in particular’ is that the writer is so easily distracted and captivated by such a broad spectrum of topics that inevitably the devotion to any one subject – including the very act of blogging itself – is lost amongst everything else. But alas.

Which is why a book like Free Money works so very well. It’s a real journalistic endeavour, trying to gain genuine insight into the act of gambling, figuring out what its real function is, offering commentary on how the gambling industry tries to package and present itself as being the modern equivalent of sitting around with a board game… and yet, it flirts with the darkest nether regions of the habit and of the soul itself, contemplating the horrors of addiction from the part of someone who has genuinely been there.

I’d be lying if I said I was watching this United and Wolves game (still 3-0, into injury time) and not wondering what it might be like to have a punt on it, pitting my wits against the probability of the universe and earing financial gain for it. It’s a strange impulse and thankfully, for me personally, it’s one that comes and goes. I started into the habit of putting small-stakes accumulators on weekend cycles of Premiership games last April – as a part-time amusement to get me through the tedium of my finals – and by the end of the season I was impatient that I’d lose three months before I had the chance to place any more. And yet, I don’t think I’ve placed any more than three this season, maybe because given the day job I don’t get the chance.

It’s a strange impulse though. There’s always that fleeting moment where, drunk on the lethal cocktail of arrogant self-belief and the acute desire to make financial gain, one could casually log onto a sports exchange website or an online casino and risk it all on the flip of a coin, the width of a goalpost, or the fall of a ball on a 21st century roulette table where every number is a 1 or a 0.

Such are the small margins between immense wealth and chronic destitution – the flip of a switch between a 0 and a 1.

Tomorrow, as a result of a string of 1s involving my getting a placement in the first place, and subsequently the nature of the workplace and the circumstances of the breaking ball, I’ll be seeing a printed copy of my first front-page story for a reasonably major regional newspaper. Later this week I’ll be getting a headshot done. This weekend I’ll be going to a birthday party, and having good food with friends, and spending time with my nearest and dearest.

ABE:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss,
…you’ll be a man, my son.

HOMER:
You’ll be a bonehead.

2009 might have been, on my scorecard, largely comprised of 1s, but I refuse to concede that the laws of probability have 0s in store. Better golfers get luckier more often, they say. I prefer to think of it as people making their own luck. If I don’t blog again before 2010, I’ll regret it, but I’ll be doing my best to make sure that it’s because I’ve been coming up tails and rolling sixes.

By the end of Free Money‘s nine-month narrative, Declan Lynch had turned his €100 into… almost precisely €100. 2009 has been pretty good to me thus far (touch wood), and with any luck 2010 will treat me the same way: 3-0 up.

With any luck.

So. Six weeks away from the office, as semester gives way to exams and to the Christmas break. It’s been a mental semester, but one I’ve really enjoyed.

Anyway. I happened to make it to the LecturesIreland Jimmy Wales talk last Friday night in Trinity College, where I watched the founder of Wikipedia discuss his vision of the availability of human knowledge, and got to ask him whether a print version of the world’s biggest encyclopedia is a grim inevitability given the site’s goal of sharing all the world’s knowledge with all the world’s people, and the relatively sparse level of internet penetration in the wider world. (The answer to that long-winded sentence, which I managed to deliver in person with the same breathlessness as I typed it, was ‘yes’.)

Simultaneously, being a man of leisure before I start some work experience next week, I’ve been on an XKCD binge for the last few days, putting the ‘Random’ link on my bookmarks toolbar and clicking it ad nauseum for hours, disturbing the housemates with sporadic giggling.

I should mention, at this point, that since I set up this WordPress installation nearly a year ago and did a word dump of some potential posts into the Drafts folder, this piece has been sitting near the top, awaiting its turn to be fleshed out to the requisite few hundred words, but held back by (i) my sheer ineptitude at blogging with any regularity and (ii) a treadmill of college-study-college-finals-two-jobs eating almost all of my time.

So – I’m stumbling through XKCD and this one shows up:

It’s called Getting Out of Hand – and to a large extent, ‘out of hand’ is how I think our use of Wikipedia is slowly becoming.

I’ll begin with this: I adore education, purely for education’s own sake, and Wikipedia is, in my eyes, the best resource on the planet. Of any sort. It’s astounding. It’s the perfect companion to the modern ubiquity of tabbed browsing; open any page, and if there’s another piece you want to look at, you don’t have to cut short your initial reading – you merely queue it up in the background. I’ve misspent countless hours accidentally tumbling through election results and the minutae of international soccer tournaments. Spending a few hours on Wikipedia is like going on a druggy bender, where curiosity is the drug and the hangover is a cocktail of ‘Aaaah!’ and ‘Is that the time?’.

Another great thing about the Firefox and Wikipedia marriage is the ability to add search keywords. My browsers are customised so that if I go to the address bar and type ‘wp Adolf Hitler’ (where ‘wp’ stands for Wikipedia), the Adolf Hitler entry loads in seconds. It’s a fantastic ability, but one that leads to an easily developed over-reliance.

Put very simple, Wikipedia has slowly become far too easy to rely upon. When broadband first standard gaining prominence in the early part of this decade, the ability to access an untapped well of knowledge. As we go mobile, and slowly mesh ourselves into an interconnected web of data, the sum of all human knowledge is available pretty much everywhere (note Patrick Collison’s Encyclopedia app for the iPhone, which allows users to download the entirety of Wikipedia for seven quid). If you’re struggling to remember even something as insignificant as Roy Keane’s middle name on the move, it’s not difficult to get hold of the data – especially now as people slowly become more au fait with their phones’ abilities to access mobile websites.

I once asked an old German teacher, quite lazily, what the translation of some inane noun was, and was given an educating response. She told me that if I were just to listen to her translate it and write it down, I was unlikely to retain any of that information; but if I were to take a few minutes and check it in the dictionary myself, I was far more likely to retain the fact. (It was ‘potatoes’, and the translation – which, indeed, has never left my mind since, is ‘Kartoffeln’). But what is it to lose the wonder of not knowing things? Wikipedia might give the ideal process of a quest to check information, but when it becomes as instant as a teacher’s responses, it loses that special edge that genuine, laboured curiosity brings.

We’re coming dangerously close to a time where necessity – being the mother of invention – is a non-entity. If every enquiry can be answered in nanoseconds, what will become of human imagination? Ignorance is the fuel that drives humans to be more creative and do exceptional things. If all answers can be gotten at a moment’s notice, we forever lose grasp of that drive to create better things.

Roy Keane’s middle name, by the way, is Maurice. No Wikipedia needed.