Dublin Opinion

Yesterday I came across an interesting presentation put together in 2006 by the head of Factual Programming in RTE, Kevin Dawson. It seemed to be geared towards executives in RTE, but it provides an insight into what Montrose thinks are the qualities of its more critically acclaimed programs, such as Hidden History.

Because the slides are often just made up of simple bullet points, however, the full meaning of what is being suggested is left to the imagination.

For example, yesterday I showed the slide which referred to Hidden History’s ‘Superquinn factor’. Having watched last night’s edition, William Martin Murphy, A Figure of Hate, I still don’t know what that means.

But what I didn’t point out was that there are two presentations available on the Web, which although quite similar, are not the same. In one, the qualities of Hidden History were outlined in the slide I put up here. In other presentation, however, the slide listed the following qualities:

So did the Hidden History program on William Martin Murphy meet these high standards?

Certainly in terms of strong core narrative the documentary worked very well. William Martin Murphy was a significant, perhaps one of the most significant, players in Irish politics, business and the media from the 1880s up until his death in 1919. So we had his election to Parliament, his role in the split of the Irish Parliamentary Party as part of the conservative Catholic faction who acted against Parnell, his fall from political grace when he lost his seat as a result of that. His amassing a fortune from the electrification of Dublin trams and his ploughing of some of that money to create the Irish Independent to challenge the dominance of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s hold over the Freeman’s Journal, the leading opinion former for the Catholic middle class at the time. His influence over the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and his challenge of the plans to replace the Ha’penny Bridge with an Art gallery that would span the Liffey and which would house Douglas Hyde’s collection and how this infuriated Yeats - leading him to write September 1913, ‘fumbling in the greasy till/adding the half pence to the pence’ - and so on. (Actually I’m with Murphy on stopping the ha’penny bridge gallery project – the proposed building looked dire.)

No biography of Murphy could be complete, however, without detailing his part in the 1913 Lockout and his determination to break the ITGWU. He used the Irish Independent from the beginning, characterising Larkin as a mendacious irreligious secret agent determined to undermine Irish commerce in the interests of dread socialism. The program also described how he forced Larkin’s hand by making everyone one of his workers sign a declaration that they were not part of the ITGWU. When they refused they were sacked and eventually the tram workers had to go to Larkin to call the strike before there was no workers who were part of the Union left.

His determination, or ‘pure will’, to act unequivocally towards the strikers, which ensured the incredible suffering of the Irish working poor were all thoroughly detailed. As was his attitude, as represented in the pages of the Irish Independent, toward the rebels of 1916, and, when calls of clemency were being made immediately after the uprising, how instead of echoing them, the editorials of the Independent called for decisive action against the rebels, which meant only one thing - execution.

No wonder temperatures rise when William Martin Murphy is being discussed. He was a proper bastard.

So strong core narratives, 10 out of 10.

Next, ‘Resonance and meaning for modern Ireland’. Actually, maybe I’ll leave that to the end – I will not kowtow to some arbitrary RTE convention for ordering bullet points. If I want to rearrange the order of these things I will, it’s my bloody blog post you know (humf) – so the next order of business is “High production values: Interview, actuality, archive, recons”.

There is no doubt that high production values were to the fore. You don’t have to be a TV executive to appreciate the cost of doing fancy location shots in London and Dublin. There was a particularly evocative shot of a night journey down the Liffey with the Ha’penny Bridge ringed with a halo of ethereal fog pierced by the aquatic-like glow of green spot lights. A fantastic shot, but while watching it I couldn’t but worry about the poor production crew catching their death of cold on whichever cool evening it was when it was shot.

The contributions from the talking heads were excellent and wide ranging – Mary Daly saying, in her only bit in the program, that ‘Larkin was very much the radical, let us not forget’. I tried to figure out which of the archived photographs Conor may have sourced. Looking at the credits at the end (which started with the researchers – Conor you were number three or four in the list, which I think was alphabetical) the amount of sources was enormous, so it was hard to tell.
Thankfully there were no reconstructions – this often comes across as low-budget costume drama and the wealth of grainy film footage meant it wasn’t required.

High production values then? Check, all present and correct.

We’ll have to leave aside ‘Presenter with knowledge and motivation’ because the documentary was narrated as a voice over by an actor. This wasn’t the Generation Game – there was no slick economist-turned-media-chap spinning snappy pop-economic categories at a M50 trauma-induced audience of couch-trapped worker-drones. This is history – the authoritative voice-over works every time.

Lastly ‘Resonance and meaning for modern Ireland’. This was the trick. The subtitle of the program was ‘Figure of Hate’, and as the program eased towards its conclusion the point was made that ‘history has not been kind to William Martin Murphy’. Fintan Lane, I think, made the point that there is no statue to Murphy, but there is for Larkin.
And there endeth the history lesson. If we look at the history of Murphy’s life it is no surprise that although an indomitable figure in Irish life at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, that history in its objectivity has decided that he was an obstructer rather than enabler. He acted against the forces of progress for the majority of the Irish people. He tried to control the worker for his greater profit. He tried to manipulate middle class opinion in order to prevent the ceding of greater freedom to the Irish people.

However, the program was not over. The final scene showed a clip from the Entrepreneur of the Year award, at the point when a winner is announced and the lucky businessman (its always a man isn’t it?) rises from his chair, buttoning the jacket of his Armani suit, his face pattern of outright glee mixed with genuine modesty. Then the program makers made they’re final point. If Murphy was alive in the Ireland of today he would be treated as a glorious entrepreneur, a hero. I’m paraphrasing as I didn’t note it down, but that was the bones of it.

Why this finishing gloss? Why this emphasis on entrepreneurship as the finest virtue of modern Ireland? Is it trying to suggest that without individuals in the mold of William Martin Murphy that we wouldn’t have this wonderful Celtic Tiger economy of ours?

Of course, this jarred with me and I was reminded of the facts laid out in Michael Taft’s post about how entrepreneurs are somehow gilded individuals, wealth creators who should have money thrown at them rather than taxed.

“One of the reasons put forward as to why we shouldn’t introduce a tax on the highest income earners is that it would be a disincentive to work and enterprise, would penalise those making a profound contribution to our economic development; would punish the risk-takers, the job creators, the wealth generators.”

But as Michael shows, entrepreneurs - those risk-takers - are, in general, not in the group of top earners in this country, as this graphic illustrates:

However, Murphy’s legacy does live on in another way. Perhaps there is no statue to him on the street of Dublin. But his method of dealing with workers continues in the minds of corporate managers who have only one attitude to industrial relations when it’s imperative that the profitability of the company trumps all other considerations – alienate the worker from the Union.

From today’s Irish Times:

“Aer Lingus has said that it will suspend ground operation and cabin crew staff who are members of Siptu from the payroll from next Tuesday unless they provide a written undertaking not to participate in industrial action planned by the union for next week.

In a letter sent last night to 1,800 Siptu members, Aer Lingus chief executive Dermot Mannion said that any employee who participated in the industrial action next week “may be guilty of very serious misconduct in the discharge of their duties”.

[Note to Conor, please correct any historical inaccuracies ]