34 Charlie Bird

In the months and then, God help us, years after the flight of the Celtic Tiger, the media became the highest court in the land. With politicians determined to take the ‘respectable’ option at all costs, and, ultimately, to require the citizen to carry the can, it soon became clear that there was no real possibility that many of those who had pauperized the country would be brought to anything resembling justice. The important thing, from the politicians’ perspective, was getting everything up and running again. Sure, a couple of retired bankers could be thrown to the pack, but it remained a refrain of governmental rhetoric that the survival of the banking system was essential to a revival of national fortunes. For this to work, the government needed to direct public anger towards a handful of targets that were no longer central to the plans for reconstructing the banking system.

In this climate, the media became the Supreme Court of a kind of national desire to kick the miscreants in the shins. But, instead of pursuing politicians on why they were unprepared to pursue radical options, journalists went for the easy option of chasing scapegoats wearing their jackets on their heads. Those who sought to outline the cultural context to the crisis were sidelined as the frontline reporters pursued incidentals like pension top-ups for retiring banking executives. This fuelled public anger but also reduced its focus to the peripheral symptoms of the problem. In this environment, Charlie Bird became the Chief Prosecutor of Easy Targets.

If there was a retired banker or a failed developer to be pursued, Charlie was your man. There was no hiding place. Charlie, in his resumed capacity as RTE’s Very Important Big Chief Head of No Ordinary Reporting, would tiptoe to the wrongdoer’s door, whisperingly confiding to viewers his intention to ask some serious questions. He would knock and wait. The viewer would be enabled to observe a Mercedes in the driveway, or any sign of Georgian splendour about the residence. Silence would ensue. Charlie would knock again. A voice inside might say, ‘Go away’, or words to that effect, or ‘I have nothing to say’. Charlie would hold his ground. ‘What about such ’n’ such?’, he would demand through the letterbox. ‘What about the missing money, Mr So ’n’ So?’ ‘I have nothing to say’, Mr So ’n’ so would say.

On, perhaps appropriately, 1 April 2010, Charlie Bird, in his capacity as RTE Chief of All Washington Correspondents, sought to doorstep the former Anglo Irish Chief Executive David Drumm at his $4.5 million home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

As our hero made his way up the driveway, Charlie’s voiceover set the scene: ‘As we approached the house, it had all the appearance as if there was no one at home.’

He reached the front door and looked through the glass.

‘Oh, he’s there,’ Charlie exclaimed to no one in particular. ‘They’re there!’

A voice could be heard shouting indistinctly from inside.

‘Mr Drumm. It’s Charlie Bird from RTE.’

The Voice again.

‘Why are you ducking down?’ Charlie continued.

The Voice said something about whether Charlie had seen what it said on the gate.

Charlie became just a little irate. His voice went up an octave, which made him sound peevish. ‘I WANT TO TALK TO YOU,’ he said.

The voice said something about its family being there.

‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘can I talk to you outside?’

The Voice seemed to say no.

‘There are taxpayers at home in Ireland who would like some answers,’ said Charlie, now fully into his stride.

The Voice was having none of it.

Charlie started again and then thought better of it. ‘There’s some taxpayers . . . Okay. Thank you very much.’

This was regarded as the height of journalistic endeavour. Charlie Bird, long a hero of the Irish public, again became the object of widespread gratitude and respect. ‘At least we have Charlie Bird,’ people would reflect, ‘to ask the hard questions.’

It has often been observed that the first response of most Irish people to the mention of Charlie Bird is a broad smile. It is a smile containing elements of condescension and amusement, but also of intense affection. In the massive cultural changes that have swept through Irish life in recent decades, Charlie Bird has become a kind of avenging angel. To emphasize his importance to Irish life, his title has been extended, making it longer and more important-sounding with every passing year. First he was a mere Reporter; then he became a Correspondent; then a Special Correspondent; then a Chief Special Correspondent.

There was a time when tax evasion and white-collar crime were part of the fabric of Irish life, the subject of discreet nods and winks, indulgent smiles and shaking of heads. Nowadays they are regarded, at the level of public conversation at least, much in the way a parish priest might once have regarded the phenomenon of auto-eroticism. Charlie Bird has become the national chronicler of previously unspoken sins. His postbag has for years been by far the largest of any RTE news and current affairs reporter, presumably divided between outraged citizens selling out their neighbours for tax evasion and contrite wrongdoers unburdening themselves of their own sins. His is the voice of the national conscience, the facilitator of the collective confession. When a scandal breaks in the corridors of power or high finance, it is Charlie who guides the wrongdoer towards a tearful blurt of remorse, though always on camera, with Charlie standing by to express the hurt and incomprehension of the man in the street. ‘But do you not think,’ he might probe, ‘that you owe the Irish people an explanation?’ ‘Mr So ’n’ So,’ he would earnestly demand, ‘do you accept that what you’ve done is very, very wrong?’

The Irish people are delighted with all this. Most of them would have been shocked to discover that Charlie Bird was once a militant left-winger, and that he was photographed at the graveside of a dead comrade giving a clenched-fist salute alongside the notorious left-wing agitator Tariq Ali. Nowadays Charlie gives few hints of such a colourful past.

His full name is Charles Brown Bird, although he spent a brief period in the 1960s as Cathal Mac an Ein, and another as Cathal Mac Einigh after someone pointed out that ‘Son of the Bird’ was a daft name for a serious reporter. The ‘Brown’ part derived from the fact that, on emerging from his mother’s womb, Charlie was a deep brown, the consequence of the iodine tablets taken for a thyroid condition Mother Bird had developed during pregnancy. Another brother was named ‘Dickie’.

Perhaps this initial colouring was by way of a prophecy concerning Charlie’s future role as the National Pursuer of Brown Envelopes. For three decades, Bird has been the People’s Witness to disaster. Following Hurricane Charlie in the 1980s, he took to the street in a gondola. In one memorable sequence, he approached a man who was sitting on the roof of his house, with the water lapping at the gutters. Before Charlie could speak, the man declared, ‘You’re too late, Charlie. Go away or I’ll put your head under the water!’

One time, when he was Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, a keen sportsman, sent his Christian-namesake a brace of duck as a gesture of admiration. Bird, however, saw it as a Mafia-style warning. Although personally a gracious and charming individual, in his public demeanour he comes across as humourless and even priggish. Charlie seems to embody some deep, brooding piety in the national imagination that, while buried deep under cute-hoorism and ‘the Crack’, emerges every so often to launch literalized, projected accusations at anyone who happens to get caught.

Charlie Bird undertakes journalism as though every day were a movie. He is, as one journalist memorably put it, ‘a Lois Lane who shaves’. His nightly pantomimes have added greatly to the gaiety of the nation and made him into a national figure. But the question must be asked: does knocking on front doors and demanding that bankers submit themselves to interrogation by Charlie really achieve anything beyond creating diversion and entertainment for the viewers of the nine o’clock news? The Charlie Bird brand of slapstick investigation probably attracts far more viewers than a thorough, and tedious, exposition and analysis of the facts, and in this sense it might be called more influential. But it also results in the consolidation of a national mindset whereby public rage and indignation is channelled into a kind of sadistic glee at the discomfiture of Charlie’s latest ‘subject’, and then allowed to hiss harmlessly into the stratosphere.