The Trib (10 page)

He continued his crusades well into his eighties. He regularly visited the offices of the
Sunday Tribune
to personally hand in press releases about his most recent campaign to stop the expansion of Dublin Port.

A few years back, I didn't hear from him for a long period before getting a letter from Sligo from him telling me he had taken ill there while on holidays. He told me that, as he was still recuperating, his wife had helped him write the letter. I didn't know anything about his family but I thought it was one of the most romantic things I had ever heard. I wasn't surprised to hear his family speak in such loving terms about him last week.

For the rest of us, Sean Dublin Bay Loftus was a lesson for the hurlers on the ditch who wring their hands and complain about politicians and a lack of leadership. He didn't moan or complain. He walked the walk instead of talking the talk.

In an era where volunteerism is constantly declining, his unstinting work on behalf of his community is a shining example of what one person can achieve and what is really important in life. It's customary when such an esteemed person dies to use the old saying, ní bhéidh a leithéid arís ann (there will never be his like again), ach tá súil agam go mbéidh, because, now more than ever, Ireland needs more men and women like Sean Dublin Bay Loftus.

28 October 2007

K
atie Price, also known as Jordan, is a woman who knows what she is doing. She uses her body and her fame to make money. Jordan is not an ambassador for charities, nor does she claim to represent a liberated feminist viewpoint or indeed recommend her lifestyle to anyone else. She just amasses huge amounts of cash by being a celebrity commodity.

The unfortunate side-effect of what Jordan does is that her persona is elevated to iconic status. The worst brand of celebrity magazine presents her and people like her as a representative of modern woman ... and the vulnerable, and perhaps the young, buy into it.

However, the wider British media do not present what Jordan is as an aspiration or ideal for all women.

She is broadly seen for what she is by most responsible publications and there is a distinct separation between someone who takes their clothes off for money and someone who should have social influence.

Here at home, we have a comparable example in model and celebrity Katy French, but the lines between model and moral authority have become dangerously blurred. Katy is everywhere, most product launches want her as their public face because her picture gets in the paper. She is in high demand as one of the most recognisable faces in Irish media.

That Katy French is sought-after as a model is no harm.

Good for her that she is busy ... take the work as it lands in your lap, Katy, and charge them top-dollar for the privilege.

More worrying is the recent development that has seen Katy's opinion held up almost as the voice of a generation. Her admission that abortion would be a better option than sacrificing her career for a baby and her vulgar honesty in relation to her sex life recently became frontpage, broadsheet news. The credibility this exposure gives to the musings of a model means Katy French now speaks for Irish women as a whole.

It is not necessarily what Katy says that is offensive, but that a responsible society gives her such a loud voice.

Katy French is a model who gets paid for posing in her underwear in the tabloids when the Dublin football team is playing in a big GAA match.

She should not be portrayed as a new feminist whose flagrant flaunting of her sexuality equals sexual maturity.

Most intelligent women are not, as she recently claimed, ‘threatened by her sexuality' but instead cringe when her pronouncements are presented as being a bellwether indicator of what women think or want.

Even the most venerable in our society have fallen into the trap of using Katy as a role model. The aid organisation GOAL recently sent Katy French, the model, to Calcutta, where aid workers strive to alleviate poverty and rescue child prostitutes from the sex industry.

Do you really want to hear a model talking about her sex toys and sexual exploits one week and telling you about the plight of the Third World the next?

The use of Katy French by GOAL to garner some cheap publicity could be seen as compromising and it does devalue the real and valid work of the organisation. But perhaps modern society encourages such stunts because we want to hear how the trip affected the celebrity rather than the real issues behind the ongoing and dire poverty they experience.

Katy French is a free woman in a democratic country and her views are as valid as those of the next person. I'd imagine most of what she says is done with tongue firmly in cheek in order to elicit reaction. But if her crass pronouncements are read as an indicator of wider female opinion, it becomes damaging. Katy French is a female Irish model, not a model Irish female and should be treated by the media and others as such.

9 December 2007

O
n Thursday night I sat looking at a newspaper photo of Katy French taken exactly a week earlier. That image was now tainted with another – that of her desperately sad death in a Co. Meath hospital surrounded by her family. This outspoken, but perhaps naïve, young woman whose antics had so irked me just weeks before was gone.

French's promotion by the media as a spokesperson for a generation prompted me to write in this paper about what she stood for. In a fairly hard-hitting piece, mostly directed at the organisations who exploited her for their own gain, I explained how I believed her deliberately provocative opinions were designed to buy her column inches and how the press fell for it every time. While I said I didn't object to her making a good living out of it, I objected to the media holding her up as representative of Irish women and giving her views such a loud voice.

Katy French's honesty led her to a place where the very organisations she used to get her on the front page of every tabloid newspaper here were starting to turn on her. Her birthday party, held just over a week ago, was mocked and described as being more akin to a meeting of the National Union of Journalists than a birthday celebration. The list of high-profile people who weren't there was published before the list of the attendees. It's fair to say she began to be ridiculed; her policy of giving herself completely to the media was beginning to backfire.

Until last week, media organisations continued to publish ever more daring photographs of Katy French and demanded ever more salacious soundbites. These were often accompanied by catty tales of gossip about her private life and her alleged cat-fights with her rivals.

Indeed, in the wake of the personal comments she made about me in a Sunday newspaper, three tabloid journalists made contact asking for my response to the ‘outrageous' and ‘disgusting' attack.

For the record, I didn't regard the riposte as either outrageous or disgusting; it was amusing, and proved my substantive point. Since her death I have heard that she believed I wrote about her to garner publicity for myself. I wrote about her because I passionately believed young and vulnerable people were at risk of buying into the idea that it's okay to recklessly say and do what you like, regardless of the consequences, and expect to be feted as a result.

However, the news of her illness and subsequent death turned these journalistic foes into friends. The very journalists who took potshots at Ireland's only glamour model now told us they considered themselves amongst her closest friends.

In the sugar-coated tabloid world of celebrity reporting, friendship is a cheap commodity. Some of these new ‘friends' explained that one of the main reasons they loved Katy French was because she made their jobs so easy.

We were told last week that most people on the Irish social scene are almost impossible to prise a story from. French provided a refreshing alternative to the gossip writers by giving them what they wanted. It was a mutually beneficial relationship and one which was abused on both sides. Now, however, we are expected to believe all of these people were genuine friends to the woman.

I don't doubt some of the people Katy French met through the media became close to her. Paul Martin, the
Irish Daily Mirror's
Showbiz editor, told the
Breakfast Show
on Newstalk on Friday that he and Katy concocted stories together, engineering photo shoots they knew would make the front page. They even went so far as to stage a reunion with her ex-fiancé.

One paper took the decision to publish comments from a website message board which were critical of Katy French. The comments were slated by the journalist who described the piece as ‘disgusting'.

The decision to close down the thread was praised. This piece of journalism characterised the week's hypocrisy, coming from the same writers who laid in wait for Katy French to put her foot in her mouth. They who reserved column inches for the newspaper version of pointing and laughing at a personality they owned.

One can only but wonder if these people who claimed they knew Katy French really believed she would value their fairweather friendship?

The reaction of the red-top press to her tragic death has confirmed the stereotype. The only purpose Katy French served in most of their lives was to fill papers and make their jobs easier by being endlessly accessible. Professions of deep friendship and close bonds serve only to embarrass those who lay claim to them and insult the memory of Katy French. If French was even half as straight-up as she claimed to be, I am sure she would have appreciated honesty far more than faux friendship driven by guilt.

As it became apparent last week that she was not going to recover, a friend asked me if I felt guilty about what I had written about Katy French a number of weeks previously. My responsibility to honesty will not allow me to deny I found what French represented unsavoury and unpleasant.

I didn't know her personally and did not bear her any malice. Am I deeply shocked and saddened by her death? Absolutely, and I pray for her and those who genuinely loved her.