Ten years ago, when I was editor of Magill, I was approached by a businessman who offered me what he described as the scoop of a lifetime. This story, he assured me, would rock the State to its foundations.
He explained how, caught between recession and a remorseless taxman, he had managed to squirrel away a few shekels for a rainy day. He had lodged the money in a "special" account in a local bank, where he had been assured that the word would be mum. Now, having had a demand from the Collector General for details of where he came by the said monies, he had concluded that the bank had sold him out.
I thought of him in recent days, first after revelations about AIB and the Revenue Commissioners broke in Magill, and again when I heard that Vincent Browne had sold the magazine to Mike Hogan. The connection has to do with meaning, more specifically with the meaning of the word "scandal".
For some people, the existence of "special" accounts is a scandal. For my businessman friend, the scandal resided in the fact that his bank was unwilling to keep his secrets under wraps. How is one to write about a country of which such discordances are part of the everyday reality? Indeed, how do we decide what is scandalous and what is not? In a society in which most of us complain about (a) having to pay tax at all and (b) the uses to which our money is put, what is the true nature of our indignation on discovering that others have been getting off more lightly?
Are we troubled about the breach of the law, or just outraged that we must pay while others do not? In a society in which there is so much pseudo-moral posturing and so few established principles, should we be surprised when people look out for No 1? And in an economy in which amnesty culture has prevailed for more than a decade, is there any sense in being surprised at the exposure of another sweetheart deal?
In truth, if we believed absolute notions of morality were at stake in the present controversy about bogus offshore accounts, it would not be possible to interest us in a discussion about who said what to whom and when. The moral universe is not a football pitch, in which things can be decided in terms of whether the entire ball was over the line before the whistle blew.
The purpose of the present exercise, however, is not the elimination of corruption but the perpetuation of a culture of finger-pointing. In the media context, facts about these breaches of the agreed rules are commodities to be sold to a public which is primed to be outraged by certain events, but which could just as easily be primed to believe the precise "moral" opposite.
Most Irish journalism now accepts as given the rulebook as laid down by the official culture and proceeds to "reveal" various details of breaches as though these were absolute and unambiguous. But life is not that simple.
It is, in fact, quite easy to imagine a society in which people would be outraged by the "scoop" my tax-avoiding friend was offering. Most hard-working Irish people would see more sense in his complaint than in the flimsy moral fabric of a set of rules which deems it righteous to suck the yolk out of a hard-earned nest-egg on which ample taxation has already been levied.
To put it another way, if large numbers of Irish citizens desire to avoid tax, should not the "story" be about the breakdown in the relationship between the State and its citizens rather than some legalistic notions of the rights and wrongs of tax law? How do the same politicians who have campaigned against the taxation system now manage to work up a head of moral steam about those who succeed in evading some taxes?
I merely ask, while hastily stressing that I do not myself possess any "special" accounts. Should not the "story" about tax avoidance in Irish society embrace the cultural ambivalence which surrounds such matters and the reasons for this?
Although he would hardly see things like this, I suspect this is why Vincent Browne has sold Magill. He says that he cannot find enough journalists able and willing to work with him in exposing corruption in the manner we have come to associate with Magill. But this is just another way of saying that it is impossible now to produce a magazine which presents facts about this society in an unambiguous way.
Magill worked best at a time when it was not as difficult to describe what Irish society was and how it needed to change. You could talk or write uncontroversially about the need for redistribution of wealth, the importance of civil liberties and the imperative to improve the situation of women in society.
But how is it possible to report the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, to celebrate its growth figures and conspicuous consumption, and move on to describe the dispossessed and abused, whose situation is so at odds with the requirements of a belief system which has been arrived at to enable such an economy to prosper?
Facts, figures, statistics, give us a particular picture, but this depends on the belief apparatus with which we receive such information. Magill reported Irish society quite straightforwardly until the end of the 1980s, and contributed much to changing it. But some of these changes related to the beliefs we hold in common - or don't - and have made things much more complicated. The result is that journalism has been reduced to the role of referee in a game where rules seem to exist for their own sake.
The notion of "investigative journalism" has become a cliche. Mostly what we so describe is more correctly seen as Brown Envelope Journalism, the phenomenon whereby information in the hands of disgruntled operatives in various institutions ends up in journalists' in-trays. Rather than a studied laying-bare of the society in its complexity and truth, this journalism proffers information relevant only to those who have a full stake in the society. Reports of secret deals and bank accounts is shocking only if you can afford to live by the rules.
The true distinction in journalism is not between investigative and something else, but between journalism that assumes meanings to be absolute and journalism that channels the "story" through the complex machinery of the human experience. The best journalism is not so much about discovering new "facts" as about challenging existing beliefs.
But Irish journalism - perhaps under the influence of fundamentalist politics - has lost the capacity to perceive the world in a complex, human-centred way. The meaning of what you write or say nowadays depends much more on whom you're addressing. It is not a coincidence that the creative energies which previously went into journalism are now finding an outlet in fiction and in the theatre, where moral confusion is not necessarily an ignoble condition.