My 1 1/2-YEAR-OLD daughter's favourite book is the story, in Irish, of Luidin O Laoi, by Mairead Ni Ghrada. It is a simple but in some ways a strange story. The father of a beautiful young woman who, like my daughter, is called Roisin, is in the habit of singing his daughter's praises, and eventually, the king gets to hear about it and sends for him. He asks if it is true that this young woman can do everything, and her father says that, yes, this is the case. He asks if she can make gold, and the father, not wanting to back down, says that she can.
The king tells him to bring Roisin to see him. When she arrives, the king leads her to a room in which there is a big pile of hay. He tells her to turn the hay into gold. If she fails, he will put her and her father to death. Knowing that she is unable to turn hay into gold, the young woman, left alone in the room, sits down and starts to cry.
Then the door opens and a "fear beag" enters. He asks her what's wrong, and when she explains he says that he will turn the hay into gold if she gives him her necklace. She agrees, and he sets about turning the hay into gold.
The next morning, the king comes back and pronounces himself very pleased with Roisin's work, but then brings her to another room, where there is a big cock of hay, and asks her to repeat the exercise. And so it goes on.
On the second night, she gives the little man her ring, but on the third has nothing left to give him. "Tabhair do cead mhac dom," he says. Thinking to herself than she may never have a son, she agrees, in order to save her father and herself.
When the king arrives next morning and finds that the huge cock of hay has been turned into gold, he declares that he is going to make Roisin his queen. They get married and live happily, eventually having a son.
Some time later, the fear beag returns, demanding that Roisin hand over the child. She pleads with him not to take her child away, and he says that he will give her three days to tell him his name. If she fails to do so, he will take away the child. Roisin sends a servant out to scour the countryside in search of every conceivable male name.
When the fear beag turns up on the first and second days, she lists what she thinks is every single male name in the kingdom. None of the names is correct. On the third day, her envoy returns with only one new name. He tells her that he came across a little man dancing around a fire, singing a song to himself, the final line of which was "Mise Luidin O Laoi".
When the fear beag returns and finds that she has discovered his name, he becomes angry that he made the gold for her but she had failed to give him her son as promised. "I prefer my son to gold," says Roisin. The fear beag leaves and is never seen again.
Although in truth what my daughter likes about the story is the sound of the language and, in particular, the rhyme Luidin recites as he turns the hay into gold, I confess that, from time to time, I have had serious reservations about the morals and messages inherent in Luidin O Laoi. Gold, and the greed for it, is at the heart of the story. The three main male players are, respectively, foolish, greedy and exploitative. The heroine is the flawless victim of their actions and machinations. In the end, when she says that she prefers her son to gold, she delivers what is clearly the ultimate moral of the story, causing us to forget that the father of her son is a man who threatened to have herself and her own father put to death if she did not supply him with gold. Only the beautiful young woman emerges morally intact from the story.
Of course all of us need fables, and children need them most of all. And fables are best when they are simple. But it is strange indeed to see a fable enacted in real life, as we have in these past 10 days, in which the morals and messages are every bit as unsophisticated as those in Luidin O Laoi. It should be deeply worrying for modern society that, for all of its ability to engage in what might be mistaken for communication, it has acquired a proportional inability to discuss or accommodate the complexity of human life and relationships. It might not matter all that much if it were simply a matter of paying tribute to the dead. It is always proper to say good things about the recently departed. But what has been most intriguing about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana has been the public desire to present other members of the British royal family in an unfavourable moral light by comparison. Having a dead heroine was not enough; they also needed live villains. And when a degree of ambiguity entered in as to the extent of the culpability of the paparazzi, the focus of blame shifted to the royals and in particular to Prince Charles.
It is as comprehensive a statement as is imaginable about post-Thatcher Britain that, in order to celebrate a good woman, it needs to destroy a good man. For 10 days now, every second assertion of Diana's goodness has been followed by a denunciation of her former husband. In Ireland, we have had to listen to a succession of vindictive busybodies ringing radio phone-ins to say how much they hated the prince for what he did to Diana.
How does anyone much beyond the intimate confines of their relationship know what happened between Charles and Diana? If I had a pound for every time I heard someone say how well they felt they knew Princess Diana, I would certainly never be in need of the services of Luidin O Laoi. But of course, none of these people knew her at all. What they "knew" was a mixture of gossip, propaganda, fantasy and invention, mostly courtesy of the very people who, themselves driven by greed and the cravings of a voyeuristic public, drove her to her death. Having had some modest experiences of my own at the hands of the tabloid press, I can say with some authority that anything you "know" about someone as a result of the scribblings of the scum of Wapping, or some such nether orifice of the modern media, is likely to be as far from the truth as it is possible to imagine.
Of course, I am not really all that concerned about the effect on my own princess of repeated exposure to Luidin O Laoi. Few things in life afford me such delight as to read it for her for the 10,027th time before she goes to bed. I have no doubt that, in time, she will perceive the many ironies and absurdities which surround its moral statements and start to question it in ways that have not yet occurred to me. That is why children need fables so much.
But what is so extraordinary about the events of the past week is that, with the exception of the occasional dissenting voice, the entire adult world has seemed willing to take at face value a fable which in truth has more ambiguities than there were flowers at Saturday's funeral, and which has in large part been written by its own villains.