DESSIE O'Malley allegedly remarked when he heard that Michael D. Higgins was being made Minister of the Arts and Gaeltacht, "I hope he doesn't go med." Sorry, Dessie. He has. He has foisted the unwatched, multi million pound white elephant Teilifis de Lorean on us, and his parting shot as he comes up to a general election is to create a body of broadcasting law which encompasses pannism at its worst and most intrusive.
Yet this MDH medness is so politically correct no one dare oppose it. The Irish language is the source of the greatest State driven hypocrisy in political life in this country. Virtually nobody speaks the language, nobody does business in it, and when Proinsias de Rossa wanted nobody to understand him, he resorted to the Curragh dialect when addressing Dail, Eireann. Yet few people will publicly admit these obvious truths to be truths.
Everybody nodded in grave approval when MDH came up with his proposals for TdeL, because the Irish language is the golden calf of the political culture. To question its role, its, future, its vitality, or Government investment in it is deeply unpatriotic yet privately almost everyone - apart from the tiny minority of language enthusiasts - admits that Teilifis na Gaeilge will do as much for the Irish language as John de Lorean did for the motor industry of Belfast, and that throwing yet more money at the Irish language will be every bit as unsuccessful as the old policy of coercion.
Majestic Squandering
Lesson one, not learned for now we hear that in addition to the majestic squandering of resources on TdeL, the Minister is again to resort to the policy of State coercion. And what will the political response be? Silence, as always; for there is method in the man's medness. He knows that most of the parties of the State subscribe to the Public Piety that The Language Must Be Saved, and that anything that purports to save The Language is Therefore Good.
This blinkered and unquestioning idiocy powered policy towards The Language since independence. For more than 50 years a ruthless policy of coercion was employed in support of The Language, wrecking - countless lives; for students who failed their Irish failed their entire Leaving Certificate. University places were confined to speakers of The Language, as was State employment.
Vast amounts of money over three generations, amounting to thousands of millions of pounds, were confiscated from the taxpayers or Ireland invested in The Language. RTE was mandated by law not merely to be a broadcaster but also to promote The Language Signposts, telephone directories, destination boards on buses maintained the fiction that this is an Irish speaking nation, while, to prove it actually wasn't, Gaeltacht areas were given grants merely for speaking The Language and a State agency was formed to provide jobs in those tiny areas where the inhabitants speak The Language, though economically and geographically they have absolutely nothing in common.
Monumental Effort
One of the worst aspects of this monumental effort was the cultural and political intimidation which accompanied it. To question this policy was to be un Irish. The Language Freedom Movement of the 1960s, which campaigned to end coercion, was pilloried both by the political right and the political left for being imperialist, pro British, anti national.
What has been the result? The virtual death of The Language. The greatest single project in Irish history has also been the greatest single failure. Which does not mean that we have to learn any lesson from this failure. What do nannies do when coercion fails? They coerce again, even as the hour for - their leaving the nursery approaches. For coercion is the only word which describes the power MDH intends to give the new Broadcasting Commission which can oblige independent radio stations to spend 10 per cent of their programming costs on Irish programmes.
Will a single speaker of Irish be gained by this? No. But MDH, having spent millions of the taxpayers's money on building a huge television station in his own constituency, now intends to spend the private sector's money obliging them to make radio programmes which nobody will listen to. It is at best witless tokenism; at its worst, it is bloated and swaggering arrogance.
MDH is not alone here. Ray Burke's Broadcasting Act of 1988 was a pioneer of nannyish, witless tokenism, requiring 20 per cent of broadcasting output, to be news and current affairs; government employed monitors - poor hoors - listen to sample tapes to ensure that independent stations are obeying this law.
And they are during listener troughs, when nobody's listening, and with padded news bulletins on the hour. Everyone associated with this farce knows the audience is not made wiser or cleverer or more conversant, in world events by the application of a bad and silly and intrusive law. But that is not the point. The important thing is, Nanny is happy.
Aural Garbage
Why can Nanny not leave the citizens of Ireland alone? Nobody detests pop music radio more than I do; but if that is what the plain people or Ireland want, then they should have it. If they want 24 hours of aural garbage, who am I - or any medman - to say they should not have it? We know, we know beyond all doubt and beyond all peradventure, that the new obligation on radio stations will do nothing to save The Language. But it will make Nanny happy. And making Nanny happy is the purpose off so much of our law.
I can at this point utter the normal face saving pieties about the loss of Irish being a national calamity, and how wonderful it would be, etc etc etc. Meaningless bilge. The people of Ireland do not speak Irish because they simply don't want to, and that's that. The Irish are not the only people to have abandoned their language. In France, the Flemish of Pieardy, the Bretons of Brittany, the Germans of Alsace, the Languedocians of Languedoc, the Basques of Colliours, the Italians of Nice, have largely lost their native tongues. The original (and non Germanic) Prussian has vanished without trace.
This is not a good thing, to be sure but it is not unique. What is unique is the unquestioning and unquestioned squandering of resources on Irish. Young people from Killinarden in Tallaght, where the drugs problem is almost out of control, were complaining on radio the other day that their school has not even got a sports hall for lack of money; at which point, the issue is not simply whether Nanny is med or not. The issue is whether the frittering of public resources on vain quests is, not actually wicked.