Splintered Sunrise

It’s a curious thing about the death of Katy French, that the media seem determined to find a greater significance in it than just a personal tragedy. Some of this has just been silly – I’m thinking especially of Paul Williams in the Sunday World managing to blame Katy’s death on the Provos, via an alleged Provo-Farc conspiracy to flood the Emerald Isle with cocaine. Even for Williams and the Sunday Roast, that’s stretching credibility. More generally we’ve had the sentimental view that Katy represents some kind of death of innocence for the Celtic Tiger.

I suppose though that it does illustrate some aspects of our modern Irish society. WorldbyStorm has already reflected on this, but there are one or two things I think might be worth flagging up. The first is that up until quite recently I’d never heard of Katy and was very hazy as to what she actually did. In fact, just over a year ago hardly anybody had heard of her, but all of a sudden she was everywhere. This had an awful lot to do with her close collaboration with Dublin’s new breed of celebrity gossip columnists, who manufactured her profile in a quite conscious way. Ireland being short of real celebrities – just look at Charity You’re A Star! – it’s very easy to get a media profile very quickly.

The other thing I would ponder on is, yes, how the drugs question relates to the Celtic Tiger. It’s funny, but in recent years I’ve become much more attracted to the old Workers Party bugbear of the lazy Irish bourgeoisie, something that seems to me to have a lot of truth in it. If you think about it, what has Irish capital contributed to the long boom? A sober economic answer might be, frig all. The Tiger has been almost entirely based on inward investment – to be sure, there have been spin-off benefits for Irish capital, not least the construction industry in a wildly overdeveloped Dublin, but the Irish bourgeoisie, as such, has been very much parasitic on the boom.

So booming Ireland hasn’t really developed a culture of enterprise, but it has certainly developed a culture of conspicuous consumption. Look in the Turbine most Sundays, and you’ll see photos of ludicrously lavish society parties, not to mention weddings that even Premiership footballers might think a bit OTT. And this has drastically changed the drugs culture in Ireland. Twenty years ago, the word “drugs” summoned up images of shivering junkies shooting up in inner-city sink estates. What you now have is a very affluent section of Irish society where cocaine use is well-nigh endemic.

To a large extent we’re talking about the younger end of D4, which is why Justine Delaney Wilson’s The High Society reads at times like she’s interviewing Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. But this goes way beyond the Ross types. We’re not really talking about the Irish establishment, but yeah, the sons and daughters of the establishment are as likely as not to be sniffers. And not even just in Dublin – in provincial towns you’ll hear quite open talk about such-and-such from this rich family who’s a notorious cokehead.

And this was the layer of society that Katy moved in. That particular slice of Irish society where socialites, journos, luvvies and the like mix, in clubs where the term “powder room” carries a very definite double entendre. A lot of these people seem to have gone to ground over the last week or so, no doubt due to the fear that a whole lot of drug scandals could be unearthed by the guards or enterprising hacks. Perhaps the death of Katy French will in the end make some contribution in helping to lift the lid on moneyed Ireland’s dysfunctional relationship with drugs.

This blog quite frequently takes a pop at the Belfast Telegraph’s inimitable Gail Walker, but it’s only fair to point out that Norn Iron is far from having a monopoly on daft female columnists. One of these, who annoys my brain on a regular basis, is Carole Malone of the Sunday Mirror.

Carole has a couple of strings to her bow. One is the time-honoured resort of female columnists, which is that chest-beating about crime and immigration is all very well, but there’s no substitute for slagging off female celebrities – Carole’s normal justification is that “this little madam needs taken down a peg”. A particularly frequent tack, and I blame the late Lynda Lee Potter for this, is to give off about their weight. Carole isn’t herself what you would call svelte, but that doesn’t hold her back. The most egregious example in recent years was Carole’s rather creepy stalking of Abi Titmuss, which went on for months on end. Although Abi is a perfectly normal size, Carole would still write on an almost weekly basis about her allegedly fat arse. This is the sort of thing that gives teenage girls eating disorders.

The other profoundly irritating tic of Carole’s is her addiction to the construction “the hell”. As in, “what the hell is going on” or “who the hell does this little madam think she is” or “why the hell don’t these uppity Muslims get the hell back to their own country”. Carole seems to think that sprinkling her column liberally with “the hell”, or sometimes “damn” for variation, cements her status as outspoken and forthright. Personally, it always reminds me of the Myles na gCopaleen Catechism of Cliché.

Anyway, this week Carole writes about the widely publicised tarring and feathering incident in Taughmonagh. Now, I’m not squeamish about the odd bit of mild vigilantism, but Carole is positively enthusiastic:

Not that I’m an advocate of vigilantism, but when I saw the picture of a drug dealer who’d been tarred and feathered on the streets of Belfast, tied to a lamp post and then made to wear a sign that said “I’m a drug dealing scumbag”, it occurred to me that while the whole thing looked a bit primitive, I’m fairly sure the man in question won’t be dealing drugs in the near future.

Moreover, this type of punishment - inflicted by locals because police refused to act - is a damn sight more effective than an Asbo and a few hours’ community service.

This drug dealer now knows that if he continues to put people’s lives at risk with drugs, there ARE consequences.

When was the last time any criminal here in England had that to fear?

Now let’s leave aside the actual argument about whether this is the correct way to go about tackling the drugs problem. What interests me is the difference between a journalist who has to investigate stories, and a columnist who can get money for old rope by slagging off Abi Titmuss every week. It seems Carole’s journalistic instincts are atrophied to the point where she actually takes seriously Frankie Gallagher’s version of events.

Now here’s a pop quiz:

1. The UDA controls the Taughmonagh estate, and has done for decades. Which is more likely: that fine, upstanding citizens would carry out a tarring and feathering in defiance of the UDA, or that the UDA would carry it out and prefer not to admit to doing so in case it loses its £1.2m conflict transformation grant?

2. The UDA is up to its oxters in drug dealing. Which is more likely: that it suddenly develops a conscience about what drugs are doing to the people of Taughmonagh, or that it doesn’t want any competition cutting into its profit margins?

Answers on a postcard to Carole Malone.

Skidoo is one of those pictures that a lot of people don’t believe exist. Having seen it, I can testify that it does, and it must be the oddest thing Otto Preminger ever made. It’s hard to credit that a crowd-pleasing director like Preminger could have made Skidoo, but then a lot of strange things happened in 1968.

We open with car-wash owner Tony (Jackie Gleason) and his wife Flo (Carol Channing), who argue over the remote, burn the dinner and worry about their daughter hanging out with hippies. So far, so Honeymooners. Then two figures from Tony’s past come to the door, gangsters in rather arresting orange shirts (Cesar Romero as the father, Frankie Avalon the son). It turns out that Tony is a retired mob hitman, and mob boss “God” (Groucho Marx) wants him to come back for one last job. This involves infiltrating a maximum-security prison and knocking off a dangerous informer (Mickey Rooney – yes, everybody is in this).

All right, you may think. This is an old-fashioned Hollywood gangster movie, albeit one with a cast more suited to It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. But don’t forget that this is the late sixties. Tony having got himself locked up, his cellmate (Austin Pendleton) introduces him to the joys of LSD. Yes, you get to see Jackie Gleason having an acid freakout. “Tough Tony,” intones Pendleton, “your time has come wherein all things are as the void and cloudless sky.” You’ll never watch Smokey and the Bandit the same way again.

Things go downhill from there. Carol Channing does a striptease – trust me, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Groucho wanders about God’s floating fortress (skippered by George Raft) looking about like he belongs in an old folks’ home. The entire prison gets dosed with acid. Gleason and Pendleton take to the air in a balloon. The hippies take to the sea. The whole movie descends into an orgy of silliness.

But none of these features is the strangest thing about Skidoo. That comes at the end, when the entire credits are sung by Harry Nilsson, right down to the set decorator and the MCMLXVIII. (Although the film is nearly impossible to obtain now, the CD soundtrack was reissued a few years back, along with Nilsson’s The Point!) As critic Leonard Maltin observed, about one person in a thousand has the temperament to enjoy this picture; everybody else would just sit with their mouths hanging open.

Preminger himself, of course, famously partook of mind-altering substances while making Skidoo. This led to the exchange:

Channing: “Someone should shoot Otto shooting this picture.”

Groucho: “Someone should just shoot Otto.”

It’s all a long way from Exodus.

This week, Gail eschews the obvious target of the BBC and turns her attention to dope-smoking Labour cabinet ministers. There is little to say about this, except to draw attention to Gail’s hilarious stoner dialogue. Do us a favour, love, next time you want to cover drugs, either watch Up in Smoke first or don’t do the stoner thing at all.

Gail also covers Harry Potter. I have no interest in Harry Potter, being an adult, so I don’t know if the books are the “garbage” Gail claims, but I tend to think that anything that gets kids reading can’t be all bad. Gail responds to this by pouring scorn on the idea that kids will automatically move from Harry Potter to classic literature. Well, duh. There isn’t anything automatic about it. I don’t for a second imagine that young men reading Andy McNab novels will spontaneously exclaim, “Ooh, I enjoyed that. Now I think I’ll try some Kazuo Ishiguro.” What depresses me a little is that Gail’s idea of classic literature is The Great Gatsby and fucking Catcher in the Rye, which I assume is what Gail read for A-Level English. I think that if kids are going to study the American novel, we should give them Philip Roth. God knows, Portnoy’s Complaint should have some appeal to teenagers.

Finally, Gail addresses self-publicising loyalist Willie Frazer’s plan for another Love Ulster march in Dublin, and urges the punters to stay away, although she does this in her usual aren’tchasickofit onelot’sasbadastheother style. I note also that Gail repeats the canard that the last Love Ulster march was ambushed by “dissident republicans”. Well, I know that RSF called for a mobilisation, but I’ve seen RSF in action and I don’t recall zimmers being used as offensive weapons at Love Ulster. Nor does looting the Nike store sound like republican behaviour. Besides, I distinctly remember the gardaí arresting two Lithuanians and a Georgian – were they recruited to dissidence at a Wolfe Tones gig in Minsk? Actually, the debacle of Love Ulster in Dublin proves very little about the strength of dissident republicans, but it does prove two points. One is that loyalism isn’t very popular in Dublin, as Harney (of all people) was savvy enough to pick up on. The other is that Dublin is full of young people who would jump at the opportunity to have a pop at the cops. But then, if you accept that you can’t very well take the even-handed “mad loyalists versus mad republicans” line. Hence the Libertyvalancisation of Love Ulster.