WHEN Guy Debord wrote in 1988 about the way the empty debate on The Spectacle - which he defined as "the activities of the world's owners"
would be organised by The Spectacle itself, I am certain he had just experienced a vision of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the Beef Processing Industry.
In his description of The Spectacle, those who give the orders "are also those who tell us what they think of them". This just had to be a vision of an oppositionless society, such as we have in Ireland today.
Debord fell short, however, of predicting that both "sides" would be paid in equal measure from the same purse.
There has been a fair deal of outrage about the announcement of the Taxing Master's ruling on the beef tribunal. We are supposed to be horrified that Mr Larry Goodman and his legal team appear to have done very nicely, thank you very much. I hope you will forgive me for my lack of outrage. I never expected any other outcome. I am, therefore, not surprised to learn that Mr Goodman will collect £3,536 for bed-and-breakfast expenses for the four days on which he gave evidence before the tribunal.
At the time of the announcement of the setting up of the tribunal, I wrote that the tribunal was good news for lawyers, politicians and newspapers - and bad news for everyone else. I forgot completely about public relations consultants and would like to apologise for this omission.
There was a fair deal of outrage at the time, as I remember, about my "cynicism" regarding the tribunal which, we were assured, was vital to protecting our democracy. I reckon my assessment stands, five years on, as a fair summation of the overall situation from a public interest point of view.
The only concrete outcome, apart from the doling out of large amounts of taxpayers' money, was a few prosecutions of shelf-stackers and the near incarceration of journalist, Susan O'Keefe.
Oh yes, and there was the matter of the £70 million in fines which are due to the EU as a result of the tribunal's fearless work on behalf of the Irish taxpayer. The taxpayer, of course, will pick up the bill for this as well.
LEST I again be dismissed as "cynical" (do real cynics worry in case they be thought cynical?), I should add that I wrote also at that time that, if an analysis into the beef industry was what we wanted, we already had the 1977 McKinsey report, which warned inter ala of the dangers of over-reliance on intervention, and urged a major role for government in marketing and regulating the industry.
I observed then that if what was required was a blueprint for avoiding the kind of concentration of ownership which was the real problem with the beef industry, then this was already to hand. If wrongdoing in the industry was what was at issue, was this not the kind of thing for which we retained the services of a most expensive police force?
The point I was making, and now repeat, is that this tribunal was never about the beef industry. It is true that the beef industry was the ostensible subject of the tribunal but that is a different matter.
The tribunal was actually a show trial, a kind of political circus, a sham enactment of the drama between government and pseudo-opposition, which is essential from time to time if we are to continue concealing the fact that we do not have a proper democracy. The issue at stake was the "culture" of Fianna Fail versus the moral purity of the rest.
Since you cannot have a true democracy without an opposition, we have not had one for some time. This is true in the narrow, parliamentary sense, and in the wider, societal sense as well. Looking back, I reckon that the last time you could say we had a viable opposition in either sense was about 10 years ago. Then, we had a variety of political viewpoints represented in the Dail, and an even wider range in the broader political arena of alternative media and issue-based politics.
Today, the radicals are either dead or in government and sometimes it is difficult to say which category particular individuals should be filed under. For almost a decade, the entire body politic has been united on the principal issues confronting this society. The economy is to be run according to the rules of the EU, most recently expressed as the Maastricht criteria.
All political parties are agreed upon this. Social issues are to be decided in accordance with a form of post-traditionalism, which is interpreted uniformly across the supposed political spectrum. And so on.
Government and opposition are a matter of musical chairs. The music stops and whatever random assortment ends up on the government benches becomes known as The Government. The rest sit disconsolately on the other side, reluctantly accepting the title of Opposition.
Clearly, in such circumstances, it is necessary from time to time to throw up issues which are contentious without being in any way disruptive, on which the various parties can make a show of differing with one another.
OTHER than on the North, the past three governments have pursued the same policies in virtually every area. The government has been changed twice since the beef tribunal was established. Other than by virtue of the controversy provided by the tribunal, there would have been no pretext since 1991 on which to change the government once, never mind twice.
The present Government comprises all of the parties which were in opposition at that time, and who screamed and screamed until the tribunal was set up. This Government is all but indistinguishable from the one it replaced, and from the one before that.
The Opposition benches are currently occupied by the two parties which were in government in 1991. These now repeat the same rituals formerly carried out by the parties now in government.
In fact, the tribunal was on the margin of the controversies which brought down both the Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats Coalition in late 1992, and the subsequent Fianna Fail/Labour Coalition two years later. In both instances, of course, what was at stake was not the beef industry but the self-importance of the leaderships of the junior partners in both coalitions.
In the absence of real differences between them and the senior partner, the tribunal served to provide a steady flow of moral dilemmas which allowed the junior partners to function simultaneously as both government and pseudo-opposition.
Quite often these days, it occurs to me that I am not nearly cynical enough about politics and politicians.