In recent years, my work as a journalist has come more and more to resemble an iceberg, in this respect at least: most of it happens out of sight. The things I write in this column or elsewhere are but the tip of a process of engagement.
For nearly 20 years, since I first began writing about family law and associated topics, I have been aware of a gruesome and distressed underbelly of Irish life, a concealed reality in which appalling injustices happen as a matter of routine, in which no redress or relief is available to the wronged.
Recently – unaccountably as far as I have been concerned – the situation has grown exponentially worse, and reports from this undocumented front now approach flood proportions. But, whereas those who contacted me in the beginning were mainly men, or women acting on behalf of men, my correspondents today represent a broad and mixed bag of Irish citizenry.
On a given day, I might have emails or letters from: an Irish couple who, having lived for years in England, have come back here to seek refuge from UK social workers seeking to forcibly adopt their children; an unmarried mother whose child has already been taken by social workers here; a woman jailed for breaching a barring order (ie returning to her home); the mother of an Irishman whose children have been abducted to a foreign jurisdiction and who is getting the runaround from the Irish authorities. And so on – each day a new story or three, each vying to be worse than anything I have heard before.
The frustrating – heartbreaking – thing is that I can do nothing for such people except enter into a conversation. Usually, I make it clear that I cannot write about their cases, and often advise them that this would be counter-productive. I outline the workings of the in-camera rule, which prevents any ventilation of such matters in public, regardless of facts, injustice or human cost.
Of course, simply by contacting me, such people have already broken this rule, but, since it supposedly exists for their protection, I take the view that they have a perfect right to tell me their stories. To suggest otherwise would be to imply the rule exists for the protection of someone else.
Irish society and its conversations has turned its back on these people, muttering about smoke and fire, so most just want to be heard by another human being, who already knows enough to believe them.
Of late, all these assorted cases have begun to converge in my consciousness into a new shape. Usually, the people involved are not members of some uneducated, mendicant or delinquent underclass, but hard-working citizens who come from upright families, have good jobs and often positions of influence.
They are, under another heading, the “coping classes” – those who pay through the nose for everything because they are sitting ducks and have some modest resources for the State to plunder. They have in common, too, that, precisely because of their sense of being “decent people”, they have encountered in themselves a kind of existential meltdown on account of bumping into a side of the Irish State they had not in their wildest nightmares imagined.
They are the new Little People – the new categories of the wronged who, precisely because they do not belong to an officially sanctioned victim group, have few formal avenues of redress or relief. Had they been asylum seekers, or lesbians, or even Protestants, there might exist some agency to which they could appeal on the basis of “equality” legislation or some such mechanism. But they are simply citizens, good people, who cannot believe what is happening to them. And it falls to me to tell them that, quite apart from the in-camera rule, Irish journalism is not interested in their stories.
A generation ago, when I came into journalism, the Irish media was overwhelmingly staid and what was called “conservative”. But the new energy then whipping up around its fringes was of a different character. A man on a galloping horse might have called it “left-wing”, but now, in retrospect, it seems like the dying sting of an ancient Christian culture.
It honoured the ethics of freedom and justice and truth, and sought to right wrongs by reporting what had happened, without fear, favour or ideological agenda. In those days, what moved journalism was the beating heart of another, rather than the PC tick-boxes of colour, gender or sexual preference.
Now, the only wrongs recognised in this society are those identified as arising from the programme of change and reform promoted through a revolutionised media. Now, only those injustices which fall within a particular schema of ideological understandings are deemed worthy of pursuit. Facts alone are no longer enough. The “story” must also demonstrate its usefulness in a particular agenda for “change”.
The new Little People can go to hell.