Michael Clifford: Outrage is all the rage these days

It washes through their bodies, delivering an old familiar comfort. I’m mad as hell and I ain’t going to stand for it.

Maybe it’s down to the pandemic but I suspect this addiction to outrage predates the onset of the virus. 

Maybe the media plays a role in ramping it up, but any such argument reverts to whether the media is leading or following societal trends.

One way or the other, outrage is all the rage. This week there was plenty of fodder to feed the beast of anger and what was really interesting was which stories hit the sweet spot.

It started with the scuts in RTÉ. There they were, all those familiar faces, posing for photos with a colleague who was leaving after decades at the station. 

Who did they think they were? For the few seconds that it takes to get a good photo these days, none of them were practicing social distancing. 

They obviously think the rules don’t apply at their elevated perch in society.

The shock generated by the carry on was mixed with indignation, brimming with resentment and topped with a sprinkling of undiluted rage. 

Who in the name of white knuckle rides do those RTÉ bigshots think they are?

The bigshots reacted appropriately for the times we live in with abject apologies. But too late, the cops were on their case. 

A garda investigation was launched and interviews conducted with the kind of speed that would be alien to some victims of real crime.

Parallel investigations are also underway to ensure the wave of outrage is surfed for all it is worth. An Oireachtas committee will subject the RTÉ bods to forensic questioning – what were you thinking? 

What do you expect “ordinary people” to make of this? How much do you earn a year? There’s oodles of anger to be wrung from it yet.

Later in the week, two choice current subjects of outrage, toxic masculinity (is there any other kind?) and body shaming, were in the stocks. 

Female students in Carlow Presentation College had apparently witnessed a diktat from on high that girls in the co-ed establishment should not wear tight clothing because it might make the male teachers “uncomfortable”. 

Or, to translate, toxic masculinity was being used as a weapon to subjugate teenage girls and body shame them, objectifying their gender and whatever else gets on your wick.

The narrative took flight as truth slept. 

A petition saying “down with this sort of thing” attracted over 6,000 signatures. 

And then all the media jumped on board, with the story featuring on the Nine O’Clock News and on the main RTÉ current affairs programme, Prime Time.

The Labour party’s Aodhán Ó Ríordáin was, well, there’s no other word for it, outraged.

“No student should be shamed because their outfit might ‘distract a teacher’,” he boomed in a statement. 

“There must also be an acknowledgement of how completely undermining for male teachers the message given to students was…girls are being objectified younger and younger and the last place we expect it from is schools.” 

Good man, Aodhan. Except it wasn’t true. On Wednesday, the school principal, Ray Murray, explained what had happened. 

There had been drift from the uniform policy during Covid and the girls were showing up in clothes that suggested “a fashion show”. 

They were reminded of the specifics of the uniform policy.

Somebody on social media took this up as the girls being told to get rid of the tight clothes to effectively protect male teachers from themselves.

But who cares? The main thing is that while the rogue narrative was dancing through all forms of media, plenty of people got to locate their inner rage.

Curiously, there was another story during the week that didn’t elicit outrage but in a civilised society most definitely would have.

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky believed that one way in which you could gauge a society’s capacity for empathy was to look towards the bottom of the pile.

“The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons”, he wrote. According to that benchmark, we have a long way to go in this country.

On Tuesday, the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture published its latest inspection report on places of detention in this country.

The most disturbing detail concerned a prisoner in Cloverhill who was severely mentally ill and found lying naked on the floor of his cell with faeces and urine on the walls and floor.

The man had been there for two weeks without even getting a shower. The only human contact he had was when the cell door was opened to pass him in food, which was done by prison officers standing behind a shield.

There were also reports inmates in a similar condition wandering aimlessly around units or prison yards, neglected, some living in squalor.

As pointed out by Cormac O’Keeffe in an analysis of the report in the Irish Examiner on Wednesday, the issue of mentally ill people being locked up in prisons is one “facing not just Irish prisons, but Irish society – an issue that has worsened in many ways in recent years and one that key players have repeatedly warned about.” 

This state is depositing in prisons hundreds of people who in a civilised society would be detained in a psychiatric facility. 

These people, allegedly in the care of the state, are subjected to this because there is a chronic shortage of investment in secure psychiatric services. Prisoners wait up to two years before being transferred to the Central Mental Hospital.

There is no outrage about any of this. There is no seething anger that it has taken a body outside of the state to shine a light in and show how uncivilised this society is. 

There is no acknowledgement that what is occurring on a daily basis is straight out of a bygone era when human rights and basic standards of living were confined to the upper echelons of society.

There is no outrage because the kind of anger currently in vogue is dependant on a target. That can be the government, the so-called elite, some figure or institution that is deemed not to be compliant with prevailing moods or mores.

The problem with a genuine subject of high indignation - the subhuman treatment of vulnerable human beings – is that the target is society itself.

There is no satisfaction in being outraged if the target is staring back at you in the mirror.