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They were sleepwalking at a time when everyone else was wide awake.
On RTÉ radio's Liveline on Monday, Cormac (his surname was not broadcast) told Katie Hannon about his experience of watching the somnambulists of the Oireachtas Golf Society gather, without face masks, in the Station House Hotel in Clifden last week. He sneaked a look at the table plan for that evening's anniversary dinner. When he went up to his own room, he said to his wife: "There'll be trouble with this one."
It is no insult to Cormac’s perspicacity to say that this was not exactly the most insightful prophecy since Cassandra was in her prime. The great mystery of what, inevitably, has been become known as Golfgate, is that the looming scandal could not have been more obvious if the hotel had erected a giant screen over its entrance saying, in flashing red letters, Abandon Public Trust All Ye Who Enter Here.
How could 81 grown men and women – including a senior EU commissioner; a Cabinet Minister who had just been broadcasting warnings to young people to obey the rules on large gatherings; a Supreme Court judge who had until very recently been the State’s chief law officer overseeing the drafting of the regulations; one of the sharpest interrogators of folly and hypocrisy in the history of Irish broadcasting; a doctor (the former Clare TD Michael Harty); the chief executive of a charity for older people (Áine Brady); and a phalanx of serving and former politicians – not have seen it?
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Stupidity would be the merciful answer, but these are not stupid people. The only viable explanation is one that also begins to clarify what is different about this scandal and why it cuts so deep.
They didn’t see the obvious because they didn’t think they had any obligation to be aware of where they were and what they were doing. Harty subsequently said that he had “turned off completely in relation to what was going on in the outside world” for the two days of the outing, and that seems just about forgivable in relation to a GP who has been working under the stress of the pandemic.
No such excuse
The problem is that many of his colleagues have no such excuse and yet seem to have “turned off completely” from the anguish of the society whose standards they help to set.
For almost all of us, a heightened consciousness is one of the main symptoms of living with Covid-19. We have trained ourselves to be hyperalert to ourselves, to others and to the spaces we are occupying.
But some people, it seems, didn’t bother to learn any of this – people who cannot plead youth or foolishness or ignorance. They simply assumed, probably unconsciously, that they didn’t have to internalise the pandemic. They didn’t take Covid-19 personally. And this is where the big trouble lies: millions of citizens have had to take it very personally indeed.
Political scandals are always about the abuse of public trust and in that respect it might be said that this one is no different. But what distinguishes it is that this time it’s also about private feelings – often of the most intimate kind.
A great wave of emotion broke on Liveline the day after the Irish Examiner told the story of the dinner, swept along by feelings that came from the gut. Among the words callers used about their own reactions were “total shock”, “disgusted”, “enraged”, “frustrated”, “incredulous”, “sickened”, “appalled”, “horrified”.
It was clear from the stunned tone of their voices that this was not hyperbole. The raw nerves that Golfgate touched were the ones that have been shredded over seven months of quiet, sometimes deeply lonely, experience.
The funerals that had to be watched remotely on a live stream.
The parents in nursing homes who could only be waved at through a window.
The weddings cancelled and the wedding rings that now have the wrong date engraved on them.
The rites of passage – Communions, Confirmations, birthday parties, special days out, first days at school – that have not taken place.
The grandchildren whose hands have not been held.
At worst, the loved ones lost.
The essence of Golfgate is that it is a State scandal that feels like a church scandal
These are not epic events. Taken as a whole, they are part of a big moment in global history. But, one by one, they are experienced minutely and remembered meticulously. They are seared into our brains and branded on our hearts. They form a part of who we are now and probably of who we will be for the rest of our lives. They go deep.
You mess with this stuff at your peril. How could the sleepwalkers not know that?
If we try to classify this scandal in the biology of modern Irish outrage, we find that it is one that, like the virus that shapes it, has jumped species.
There are two great categories of abuse of public power in Ireland over the last 30 years – those relating to the State and those relating to the Catholic Church. The essence of Golfgate is that it is a State scandal that feels like a church scandal.
Because the common ground shared by most of those who were at the fateful dinner in Clifden is a current or previous connection to the Oireachtas, this episode is undoubtedly an ugly reflection on State power.
It reveals the creepy cosiness of a nexus that brings together forces that are supposed to be separate from each other: TDs, officials, lobbyists, the judiciary, the media. And it manifests among that nexus an attitude – all the more potent for being unconscious – of detachment from the constraints and anxieties of other citizens.
So of course it is political. A small detail revealed by Cormac on Liveline is that the tables for the golfers’ dinner in Clifden were set with napkins in the green, white and orange colours of the national flag. This tricoloured effrontery produced its own beyond-satiric image of the mockery of what the State and its institutions are supposed to mean.
Political scandal
If the definition of a political scandal is that the behaviour in question traduces the dignity of the State, this is certainly one of those.
But not in the familiar way. The scandals that have intermittently washed over Irish politics have two fixed features – money and concealment. Somebody is abusing public office for private gain. And the shape of the story is a three-part drama of accusation, cover-up and revelation.
Golfgate lacks both these features. The usual question – cui bono? (who gains?) – does not have an answer. Nobody gained anything.
And while Phil Hogan was initially less than fully frank in his account of his movements, the event itself was not concealed. This was not a secret cabal flying off to a private island for nefarious purposes. It was all conducted in plain sight of hotel staff and guests.
Most importantly, the emotions triggered by this scandal are different. For citizens to discover – as we have done twice in recent decades – that a taoiseach was on the take, or that the planning system in local government had been systematically corrupted, is infuriating and depressing. But it’s the news. It’s out there, on TV, in the papers, online. It is part of the texture of public events. It matters to a lot of people, but in an external way.
The church scandals were, for very many citizens, much more inward. Obviously, they had deeply private consequences for those directly scarred by sexual and physical abuse in parishes and industrial schools or by enslavement in Magdalene laundries.
But they were also internal for believing Catholics. If you believed, as millions of Irish people did, in the holiness and spiritual integrity of bishops and priests and nuns and brothers, this faith was part of you. It helped to give meaning to your inner life.
The cruelty and, even more, the cynical covering-up of abuse, hit believers deep down, in that hidden core of their selves. It did so because it mocked their own goodness. In particular, an older generation of the faithful had made huge sacrifices in their own intimate, private lives in order to obey the rules of the church, to do the right thing as those they trusted defined it for them.
Did none of them ever hear of Dominic Cummings?
Golfgate feels much more like this than like a familiar political scandal. The transgressions involved may be of a much lesser different order – no one would compare a reckless dinner to systemic child abuse. It may even be (no thanks to those who organised and participated in the event) that no actual harm was done to anybody at all as a result of the Clifden jamboree.
But what it shares with the church scandals is the way this hypocrisy of those who make rules yet flout them makes a mockery of other people’s sacrifices, other people’s desire to do the right thing. It suggests that being good makes you a sucker.
That is not just a public business. It gets under the skin. It reaches down into the parts of people’s experiences that they have been trying to hold down or even suppress, the accumulated stress and fear and loss and loneliness of this strange spring and summer.
It brings them all up to the surface. It channels feelings most people have been careful to contain beneath the shell of decent conformity to the rules, the consoling carapace of knowing that all of this pain is shared.
Most of us have been living under that shell. Coronavirus has forced us to carry it on our backs every time we go out. We have been made hyperaware of the spaces we occupy, the way we move through them. We have invented novel geometries of distance and closeness. We improvise new choreographies as we dance around each other. Danger has made us more awake to the world around us than we have needed to be for generations.
Inevitably, because of the way perception works, we are much more aware of the exceptions, the defiers of the common code, than of the compliant majority. In a way, we can understand the brats, the ignoramuses, the yobs, for they are always with us. But we can’t understand the sleepwalkers. We know what the yobs are thinking: F- you! But we can tell that the sleepwalkers didn’t bother to think at all.
What is truly beyond comprehension is that they did not even think politically. These are people who, ex officio, have a higher awareness of politics than most other citizens.
Did none of them ever hear of Dominic Cummings? Did they not watch the ignominious saga of his peregrinations during lockdown, unfolding on the neighbouring isle?
Profoundly insulting
Did they not grasp how profoundly insulting so many people there found the idea that someone who set the rules could make an exception for himself? Did that not lodge somewhere in the well-developed part of their brains that deals with self-preservation – I’d better not do that anyhow? If not for reasons of morality or decency or solidarity than at least because, as Cormac told his wife, “there’ll be trouble with this one”?
Sensing trouble and trying to avoid it is what the rest of us are doing right now – and what we depend on each other to do. In this grim period, not thinking is like not washing yourself. It is offensive to others on the same visceral level.
When people who have power and authority and who have some claim to represent the community do this, it pollutes the atmosphere of mutual attention that we all have to breathe if we are to get through this thing.
Absent mindedness does not excuse the offence – it is the offence. And not one that can be forgiven easily.