Thursday, July 5, 2012

The beginnings of real debate in Ireland




Ireland - or rather the Irish state - has almost magically created an elite so financially and existentially comfortable that the rest of us might as well be living in another country, even if we share the physical island. It would behove this elite simply to keep its mouth shut; we don't want the peasants revolting! Instead, they continue hectoring about “monetizing the culture”, 'innovation' and so on while not allowing the rest of us any access to the resources in media and indeed state-supported universities that they so jealously guard.

“Monetizing the culture” is precisely what artists do; given the theft of their property through mechanisms like IMRO, they do so at risks that re far greater than anything in other comparable European cultures. What “monetizing the culture” in fact meant was a request for the state to provide infrastructure, both physical and moral, so that already extremely wealthy individuals could accelerate their stealing from the rest of us, this time through the arts.

There is no “we” of equals in Ireland any more; yet there is a diabolical tendency for the elite to demand further unpaid effort from the serfs. A quintessential example is O'Toole's recent jeremiad against theater from his well-paid sinecure at the mysteriously-owned Irish times/Pravda;


At a guess, this was a “kick the dog' response to his being outed as clueless at the meeting he himself refers to toward the start of the article. In any case, one of the targets of O'Toole's critique replied furiously;



As it happens, we are about to debate the issue at UC Berkeley;


However, that is not the point of this post. Since O'Toole has opened the door by attacking some producers in society in the name of “we”, effectively accusing them of wasting taxpayers' money, is it not time to ask whether we need O'Toole himself? Or the universities, and their spin-offs like SFI, given their reluctance to open themselves to accountability in any sense? Since the web afford the opportunity to dispense with perhaps 15k public “servants” in tertiary education and at least ten times that overall, why don't “we” just do it?