SARAH CAREY: TESCO POINTS AND KNUCKLE JOINTS
May 20th, 2009 by Conor McCabe
“They keep talking about offering an alternative to “working people”. But we’re all working people. Well, except for the unemployed, and I presume they want to offer them an alternative too. What we are is a deeply conservative people with broad agreement on where we want to go, if slightly different views on how to get there.” (Irish Times, 20 May 2008)
Ahhh, the conservative Irish.
Funnily enough, there’s a report on Irish conservatism, especially Irish Catholic conservatism, and what it did when it had complete and utter sway in this country, due to be released today.
Irish conservatism. Embrace it, before it embraces you.
She also muses:
“The vast bulk of people are happily middle-class with an isolated underclass and a privileged oligarchy existing untouched at the edges”
I think Ms Carey may be making that classic grammatical mistake so common in her publication. Its like wanker tourette syndrome. She says “the vast bulk of people” but infact means “everyone i talk to”.
The term “happily middle-class” made my day though. As if the last hundred years of culture never happened
Ms Carey knows about as much about class as my arse knows about snipe shooting.
[…] And, by the way, Conor also deals on this issue here… […]
Funnily enough, there’s a report on Irish conservatism, especially Irish Catholic conservatism, and what it did when it had complete and utter sway in this country, due to be released today.
On the report on institutional child abuse……..
As well as everything else, it was open class war: the criminalisation of 2 year olds for not being in possession of a fit guardian? belongs with the vagrancy laws. The industrial school system was, explicitly, the enslavement of working class kids as free farm labour for the enrichment of religious orders. Right now, I’m ready to hang the last Christian brother with the guts of the last complicit politician.
I watched Christine Buckley on Vincent Browne last night and I was absolutely horrified. The main theme of the discussion for me was the structure of the abuse. The criminalisation of children, the money received from the government to ’support’ them which was used for the members of the order and not the children. The use of child labour because the children sent to the institutions were considered to be ‘third class citizens’. The complicity of the medical and legal professions and the blind eye of the Dept of Education inspectors. The report also describes the memos in the Dept of Education when a teacher complained about a serial abuser and how they wondered how they would deal with the ‘troublemaker’.
And is not even dealing with the systematic nature of the physical and emotional abuse. It was so widespread that it was clearly institutionalised. Up to now the focus as been mainly on a number of individuals, specific abusers - with conservative commentators saying that it shouldn’t be a witchhunt - but now we can see that it was a system one which involved the state and several other organisations of the state.
Class war, pure and simple.
The vast bulk of people are happily middle-class with an isolated underclass and a privileged oligarchy existing untouched at the edges
And, at the risk of trivialisation, an attitude such as the above , ‘retro-fitted’ is entirely visible in the attitudes which allowed this to happen*; it might be rephrased as ‘the vast bulk of people are respectable, with an isolated class of the immoral/ criminal/ idle and a privileged clergy existing untouched at the edges’ - each view abolished the working class and replaces it with something determined as culpably deficient with respect to the imagined majority.
* actually that’s too passive; ’caused this to happen and profited from it’ is better.
What we are is a deeply conservative people with broad agreement on where we want to go, if slightly different views on how to get there.
If ‘we’ are a ‘deeply conservative people’ then ‘we’ are also a pack of child rapists and torturers.
I’d thought initially that this ‘Diamond Shaped’ idea used by Carey was just a bit of fluff, a ’snazzy’ way of ‘visualising’ her nonsense idea of how Irish society is structured - a facile misrepresentation. But hearing all the reports on the Clerical abuse case, and in particular the panel discussion on Vincent Browne last night, it struck me that her representation of Irish society was endemic of what caused this in the first place. That is, always suggesting that the vast majority of the population espouse and emulate the values of a group that is in reality a significantly smaller yet still more powerful within society as a whole. The sort of people with the same Tescos bill as Sarah’s.
Does anyone have a problem with her use of the word underclass? I think it’s a disgusting term.