Patrick O’Donovan is no Viktor Orbán. The Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport took umbrage at the comparison with the outgoing Hungarian leader made by Labour leader Ivana Bacik last week.
O’Donovan went on to suggest it would not have happened if he were a woman. It was a puzzling non sequitur but, to be fair, it had been a torrid few days for the Minister following his comments questioning whether coverage of the fuel protests had been balanced and stating his intention – subsequently reversed – to ask Coimisiún na Meán (CnM) to investigate the matter.
His intervention was ham-fisted and wrong. It suggested the Minister was willing to ignore a pretty basic principle of State media governance. But anyone familiar with the lexicon of Irish parish-pump politics will be familiar with the urge that office-holders feel to claim direct responsibility for everything.
If you are unfortunate enough to be on departmental mailing lists you will be familiar with this list of “achievements”, where every cheque written to every organisation is presented as another example of the minister’s munificence.
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This stuff is harmless enough, until it isn’t. One place where it does not belong is in the relationship between a minister for media and the media itself. Particularly when the two are now more closely entwined than ever.
RTÉ, for example, used to have the buffer of the licence fee system. However insufficient RTÉ believed that to be, it was a fixed revenue stream more or less insulated from the whims of the Government of the day.
Now RTÉ relies on the Government to provide the substantial top-up that allows it to continue in business. The current commitment runs until next year. It is not unreasonable to assume that much of RTÉ management’s current thinking is focused on how to secure the next financial commitment. The arm’s length principle is a lot shorter than it used to be.
[ Patrick O’Donovan’s attack on RTÉ was wrong, but he had a point about the media ]
Meanwhile, the establishment of CnM has introduced direct State funding of journalists working for news media organisations, about which this column has already expressed reservations. The cumulative effect is that a Minister who seems intent on conveying the impression that he is lord and master of all he surveys is not well equipped to navigate the increasingly large terrain where State funding and editorial independence intersect.
What made last week’s overreach even worse is it played into a narrative in which all Irish journalists are paid lackeys of the current Government. This equal opportunities conspiracy theory is promoted by self-professed populists of both left and right. For them, O’Donovan’s mask slipped last week to reveal how the system really works.
As Eileen Culloty noted in The Irish Times at the weekend, the O’Donovan misstep, while serious, should not be allowed to obscure some more profound questions about balance and representation prompted by the fuel blockades.
As the ripples from the protests subside, two writers coming from different perspectives have pointed to one aspect worth dwelling on. Both identify a widening cultural and social divide between the protest and the tenor of the media reaction, suggesting that this illustrates something important about where Irish public discourse may be heading.
Housing analyst Michael Byrne writes in his Substack post that the reaction of some newspaper columnists reveals a class blind spot. He argues that the protests were treated as a problem of masculinity and coarse language rather than an expression of genuine economic grievance by workers in sectors brutally exposed to fuel costs.
Liberal commentators, overwhelmingly university-educated professionals, have become culturally isolated, Byrne argues. They can no longer distinguish between a meaningful critique of a protest and reflexive disdain for the people taking part in it.
In the Sunday Times, economist Cormac Lucey goes further, proposing that the protests and the reaction to them are emblematic of what is now the real divide in Irish society. Graduate insiders, sheltered in the public sector and large corporations, enjoy stable incomes and limited exposure to market volatility. Non-graduate outsiders, concentrated in transport, agriculture and construction, absorb economic shocks immediately and personally. Lucey argues that the asymmetry of risk is the seedbed from which last week’s protests grew.
Explicitly or implicitly, both writers are saying that changes we have already seen elsewhere are now reshaping Irish society. These include the replacement of old party loyalties by new alignments defined by culture, status and economic precarity, along with the collapse of faith in institutions and the emergence of divergent media ecosystems in which different groups inhabit drastically different realities.
For Byrne, the last two weeks are a warning to the liberal left that it risks going down the same road as its equivalents in other western democracies, oblivious to or contemptuous of the belief systems and experiences of working-class Ireland. For Lucey, that process is already well under way, and the fragmentation of media is just one of several parallel tracks leading toward a more polarised and ungovernable society.
These are ideas worthy of further exploration, not just by academics, economists and newspaper columnists, all of whom are comfortably nestled within the same information bubble. What is needed is someone with the political standing and the institutional reach to initiate a genuine conversation about how media can better reflect and serve a society that is changing faster than those who report on it seem to realise.
Who could such a person be? Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Over to you, Minister.
