Government by Google

By AM Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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I never read Jude Collins. Whatever he is for or against his writing has invariably failed to stir anything remotely resembling interest in me. There is nothing personal in it. Some writers, adore them or abhor them, hit the spot and others fail to.

Formerly a columnist with the Irish News and then with the failed Daily Ireland, Jude Collins would write regularly. Yet for the world of me, apart from one piece in each where he first defended me against a PSNI raid on my home, and then in another attacked me because the McCartney sisters campaign annoyed him, there is virtually nothing of what flowed from his pen that has left an indelible trace in my memory. During the peace process he emerged as a bit of a republican. If he was a republican earlier it was something he successfully concealed.

Last week I was referred to a column he had written in his blog. It was described to me as a hapless attempt to defend Sinn Fein boss Gerry Adams from media scrutiny over his serial weakness on economic matters. Even though I guessed a masochist alone would take on that task, I could still not be persuaded to visit Jude despite the promise of a laugh. His piece was eventually read out to me. In essence the case he sought to make was that Adams had no need to understand economic detail, it could always be found via Google. If my children were to come to me and say they had gave up studying, there being no need to suffer it, as the computer would do it for them, I would immediately throw the contraption in the bin. So if we rebut a slovenly attitude from young children there is no imaginable reason to approve it from people who want to run the country.

Jude Collins’s idea is that Gerry should just be allowed to get on with it and not face questions he has no answer to. Which would mean on the economy he should be asked no questions at all.

Consider a doctor not understanding pathology and having to Google each time he wanted to diagnose a patient’s condition. What confidence would that inspire? If every other political leader in the country was equipped with the same level of economic awareness as the leader of Sinn Fein, the problems besetting society at this point, awesome as they are, would be greatly amplified.

Little marvel that someone commenting on the Collins post under the name ‘Dragnet’ tore strip after strip from his argument to the point where Jude felt it better to cut his losses and run. At least he proved savvy enough not to ignore the time honoured advice to stop digging when in a hole.

The type of debilitating virus that flows from the type of case made by Jude Collins for long ravaged journalistic integrity and efficiency in the North. We now see how subversive of pubic understanding that proved to be. To the extent that such a deferential attitude still exists – and RTE showed it in abundance with its truncating of a Vincent Browne savaging of Taoiseach Brian Cowen - it should be ring fenced into the North, well away from the South where public understanding should be fire walled against its invasiveness. And if that sentiment is born of a partitionist mentality, then lo and behold partition has some good qualities after all.

The media should be about intellect in defence of investigation, not idiocy defending ignorance.