Sometimes fleeting, relatively inconsequential images are more eloquent than long, detailed analysis. So how is this for a perfect snapshot of Ireland at the end of the boom and the beginning of a new year: the sealing off of public space at public expense so that two pop stars can sell exclusive pictures of their wedding to a celebrity magazine?
The marriage last Saturday of Westlife's Bryan McFadden to Kerry Katona, formerly of Atomic Kitten, matters about as much to me as my views matter to them. The use of Garda powers and resources to protect Hello! magazine's exclusive access to the village of Rathfeigh in Co Meath where the wedding was celebrated does matter, however, both in itself and as an emblem of the state of the public realm in Ireland now.
In his Begrudger's Guide to Irish Politics, Breandán Ó hEithir told the story of a Cork priest talking to a Cork small farmer about the imminent blessings of Home Rule. We would, the priest assured the sceptical farmer, have our own parliament, our own police, our own church, our own flag and our own gentry. After a moment's silence, the farmer growled (quote) "We will in our arse have our own gentry" and moved on.
That deep resistance to having our own gentry is one of the great saving graces of Irish culture (especially in its Catholic and Presbyterian strains) both at home and abroad. It has contributed greatly to the demotic spirit of Australia, the hatred of pretence in blue-collar America and the democratic scepticism that undercuts the pomposity of power in Ireland.
Thus, for example, Padraig Flynn whingeing about the cost of keeping up three houses or Cardinal Connell complaining about not getting an honorary degree from Trinity have been far more damaging to Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church respectively than what ought, objectively, to seem like far bigger issues.
Bad as it is, though, to be lorded over by princes of the church or pin-striped EU commissioners, it takes an extraordinary taste for self-abasement to agree to be lorded over by the new gentry of boy bands and girl bands.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against the winsome creatures that Louis Walsh concocts in his garden shed and unleashes on the pop charts with such unerring regularity. They give a great deal of harmless pleasure to millions of people.
The contract is clear - they get money and fame, their fans get a relatively risk-free obsession in which to ride out the hormonal storms of adolescence. This, however, is precisely what makes the events surrounding the Westlife wedding last Saturday even more reprehensible. For the State to underwrite displays of private grandeur by anyone is galling. For it to underwrite a display of private grandeur by people who have chosen to make themselves public property is simply stupefying.
What, after all, is Westlife? A carefully constructed mechanism for attracting crowds of delirious fans. Not even Louis Walsh would claim that screaming young girls are an unwanted byproduct of the band's success. They are the whole point of the operation. The entire function of Westlife is to generate a longing that can only find expression in the purchase of consumer goods: CDs, videos, concert tickets, official and unofficial biographies, Westlife On Tour books, the official Westlife annual, the official Westlife dolls, the official Westlife duvet cover with matching curtains, the official Westlife Easter egg ("nasty cheap chocolate" according to one fan website I consulted), and even the official Westlife bubblegum, "cool and minty" of course).
The wedding itself was quite openly a part of this huge revenue-generating exercise. The official and exclusive wedding pictures were sold in advance to Hello! for a sum variously reported as €400,000, €300,000 and €250,000. The point of the Garda operation, therefore was not to protect the couple's privacy but to protect the value of their deal with Hello! And in the process to keep at bay the fans which Westlife's whole purpose is to attract. Or, to put it another way, to aid and abet a cynical breach of the band's implicit contract with its fans.
THE cost of providing what the Garda say was a "sizeable" police presence to block a public road and provide a motorcycle escort for the royal couple to and from Slane Castle must be considerable. The official excuse for it was to "keep the peace and make sure children are safe".
But this simply doesn't wash. If crowd control was the aim, the barrier that kept the few hundred fans away from the village could just as easily have been placed around the church itself.
And how does a motorcycle escort keep children safe? If we're going to have our own gentry, it might as well be Bryan and Kerry, or Georgina and Nicky, as Lord and Lady Muck. But when did we decide to revert to this kind of feudalism? When was it decreed that the public roads belong in a special way to people who can get sufficient numbers of young girls to scream at them?
When did it become OK for local people in a village like Rathfeigh to be denied access to their own streets? Who decided that this kind of arrogance, which is not permissible for Orange bands, is OK for boy bands?
Or is it simply that we have drifted so far from any sense of having a public realm that all of this now seems so natural that it doesn't even need to be discussed?