ONE OF the few negative legacies of the Ahern era is that, at a public level, we nowadays elevate consensus over virtually every other value. This condition has roots in the recent four decades of history, when discussion of certain aspects of Irish life became radically ingrown by virtue of a wholly sensible imperative not to make things worse, writes John Waters
The outcomes have been in many ways positive, but this development has also resulted in the suppression of full-blooded discussion, driving underground perspectives and viewpoints that are essential to truth, to justice, to good order and to the resolution of both visible and invisible pathologies in the national psyche.
For example, a vital discussion about Irish history stretching from the enormous wound that is the Great Famine was largely suppressed for fear of giving succour to one side.
During the 150th anniversary commemorations in the mid-1990s, there was a smattering of discussion about the more immediate aspects. I was vocal in this discussion and imagined it exhausted by the time the commemorations were completed. Only recently, in working on a couple of television documentaries about the Famine, have I come to recognise that this discussion - conducted apologetically and with excessive fear of giving offence - may have blocked rather than enabled our access to the truth. As a consequence, the wound still festers, with all the visible results you see staggering around our streets on a Saturday night. Even to make this connection is to say the nigh unsayable. Bertie's natural instinct for compromise and consensus served us well. It is as though, unburdened by ideology or conviction, he nurtured a profound antipathy to absolutism and extremism. This was not unique, but what distinguished him was that his scepticism about entrenched positions only occasionally showed itself as irritation. He was therefore better able to draw in the extremes, to disarm them, literally and otherwise, to defuse long-standing impediments based on polarisation. These have been terrific achievements. But it would be dangerous if we assumed, on the basis of Ahern's successes, that consensus is always a good thing.
We have this self-congratulatory idea that we have intensedebates about everything, when really we have dramas in which one side, representing the orthodox view, seeks to consolidate its hold on the public mind.
Across a broad spectrum of vital matters - economics, European affairs, national questions, social issues - we have surreptitiously replaced the concept of free, open debate with a kind of ritual in which the prevailing consensus pits itself against unapproved ideas and invites would-be dissenters to have a go. Underlying this process is an ideological subtext that elevates the idea of "progress" over all others. Adherents of the approved orthodoxies regard it as self-evident that what they say is the total truth about everything.
Towering overhead is a moral totem pole, casting a long shadow. The dominant ideology creates discussions in an ostensibly democratic fashion in order to dramatise its own goodness, so to dissent from orthodoxy is not merely to be wrong, stupid and perverse - it is to be, in a precise cultural sense, bad. Because the dissenter is fundamentally questioning the very essence of progress and its capability to deliver to humankind all that is possible, it is necessary for such a troublemaker to be ritually shamed as a lesson to others.
To volunteer as a dissident across a range of issues - social affairs, family questions, immigration, children, etc - is therefore to court not merely disapproval but a withdrawal of affection in the public realm.
On the day of Brian Cowen's elevation, while discussing the concept of consensus with a friend, she spontaneously coined the phrase "consensus affection" to describe this, the most worrying of Bertie's legacies. "Consensus affection" is the approval of the mob, the goal implied by an overwhelming desire to be seen to agree with conventional wisdom on all things. As the phrase implies, it is not simply a matter of factual agreement with the prevailing ideas, nor even of adhering to some unspoken moral code.
More interesting and important is that underlying this process is an emotional need. Our elevation of consensus has given rise to the tendency to use public expression not as an instrument of discourse but as a kind of advertising for approval. The result is to be observed in recurring episodes in which judges and politicians seek to perform their functions in a manner calculated to guarantee the affection of the consensus.
It is said that Brian Cowen is not much given to philosophical discussion. But all leaders must speak at this level or they become tagged by default with a philosophy that writes itself around them.
Cowen is a shrewd politician with a sharp brain, but he needs more if he is to create a new mood and put his own stamp on the nation. For such a mood to be truthful to his personality in the way that love of consensus is truthful to Bertie's, we shall look back at the end of his tenure and say that he restored common sense and freedom to the culture of public life.