Agenda: the Latin plural gerundive, meaning "things to be done". Agendas govern our lives, even when we are unaware of them. Take, for example, the seizure of three golliwogs from a shop window by police in Herefordshire in England last week. They were apprehended on suspicion that their presence in the shop window might cause "alarm, harassment or distress" under Section 5 of the Public Order Act. After an "investigation" of some kind, the offending dolls were returned to their owner, with the advice that they should not be displayed "insensitively".
You are Irish Times readers. You do not need the obvious pointed out to you. The golliwog might - or might not - have its origins in some outmoded racial caricature. But that is irrelevant. Is it the business of the police to seize children's toys which convey messages their chief constable might possibly disapprove of? And if they do, are the police not following some agenda which no chief constable's mission statement would ever consciously allude to? Consensual unspoken agendas are particularly powerful among journalists.
Take three adjoining stories which appeared in this newspaper last week. The first was headlined, "Woman who took €100 after act of kindness convicted." The affair concerned a Claudia Dragusin who used her baby to con her way into a young mother's house in Blackrock, where she stole a handbag and ran away. Throughout the story this convicted criminal was referred to as "Ms Dragusin". In the final paragraph we were told that she was a Romanian national, was the mother of three children, and that she, her husband and her three children receive €344 a week in State benefits.
Next to that report was one about a similar crime, involving an Inga Janacuaskiene, who attempted to steal an elderly woman's handbag on a bus. Her nationality was not mentioned, and the one reference to her name contained no title. I would take it from her name that she is not Irish, but of course, that is mere surmise. Samantha Mumba and Olwen Fouéré are not Irish names, but their owners are of course Irish.
However, a neighbouring story was altogether more forthcoming about the national origins of an offender. "Briton dealt drugs in Temple Bar," ran the headline. The opening sentence was equally informative. "An English electrical engineer will be sentenced by Dublin Criminal Court after being caught in Temple Bar selling drugs," it declared. After naming him as Dean Matthews, all further references to this convicted drubs dealer referred to him by his surname alone.
So what is going on here? A woman who unscrupulously plays upon the charitable instincts of a young mother and then robs her in her home is referred to by the title "Ms" throughout a news story. This, of course, implies respect, and her place of origin is given in the final paragraph.
In another, a similar robber appears to be foreign, but if she is, we are not told. And in the third story, not merely are we told the national identity of the criminal, but it is the main feature of both the headline and the opening paragraph.
Let's switch the terms around. If Dean Matthews had been Nigerian, would that have been in the headline? Would the fact that he was an Ibo have been the opening to the news story that followed? If Claudia Dragusin had been Claude Dragusin, and he had been found guilty of cruelly duping a woman and robbing her, would he have been referred to as "Mr Dragusin" in the story reporting his conviction? We know the answer to all these questions. Moreover, we know that the terms "Nigerian" and "Romanian" are now allowed into headlines only if there is an implicit victimhood in the stories which follow. If there is any question of culpability, then their national identities would not be a main feature of the story. And if this were an all-embracing norm, it would be fine. But it is clearly not, as the example of Dean Matthews suggests.
There is an agenda here, but because it exists in the unconscious, and is unquestionably assumed to be culturally normative, its existence is largely unsuspected. I use the examples presented by this newspaper out of convenience, but much the same culture informs most newspapers and RTÉ.
The most fascinating aspect of this faith without a church is how its guiding dogmas, its terminology and its rules are generally understood without ever being discussed or defined. In terms of journalistic respect, at the bottom of the heap are white, middle-class, heterosexual British males. It is possible to say almost anything about them in an Irish headline (though any British newspaper which made such a feature of the national origins of an Irish drugs dealer would be denounced by our quiveringly sensitive tribal guardians on the airwaves for "racism"). Next in the inverse hierarchy of legitimate targets are their Irish equivalents.
At the far end of a subtle and complex spectrum involving gender, orientation, race, class and ethnicity (i.e., Traveller/Romany/ gypsy) would be an asylum-seeking, circumcision-fleeing, Nigerian lesbian Traveller, with children in Laois and Lagos. And whereas the Briton's nationality would implicitly be part of an accusation, the Nigerian's would be invoked in exoneration. But the really beautiful thing is that the people who so religiously follow this quasi-liberal, politically correct agenda would at the same time hotly deny that it even exists.