GAVAN REILLY: An unexpected reminder of the power of a runaway State
If you watched Harry and Meghan’s lengthy sit-down with Oprah Winfrey - or, God forbid, you stayed up on Sunday night to find a dodgy internet stream to watch it live - then what you’ll have seen two hours of intriguing telly … which, still, might have been summarised in a single sentence.
There’s the family - the Royals themselves; the people Harry still seems to love despite it all because they’re his flesh and blood - and then there’s The Firm, the institution which strives to remain completely detached from the population while also being utterly dependant on their loyalty and support of those same people. Never was the distinction made more starkly than when Meghan spoke of her struggles with suicidal thoughts and her urgent need for mental health treatment and was told – despite literally being married to a Royal who had founded a mental health charity! – that it would be better for business if she didn’t get it.
It’s a funny distinction but it would remind you of just how weird some of our social constructs are. Ireland mightn’t have a monarchy but we have a not dissimilar setup, where there’s the people - the ones who get upset about damning news stories, the ones who swoon over Paul Mescal, the ones who find the Windsors oddly fascinating while still believing their forebears were correct to run guns against their Empire - and then there’s The State, some sort of abstract entity which seems to exist independently of anyone and yet, is actually all of us acting in societal concert.
These sorts of duelling identities exist everywhere in the public realm too. You have Governments of people - of ministers who get public approval to go and do a job, who roll up their sleeves on Day 1 and who desperately want to hit the ground running - and then you have the machinery of Government, the civil service cultures, the institutions of State and the bureaucracy of management that conspire to self-preserve, even if it means foiling the expressed will of the people. And so you have ministers expressing sympathy with CervicalCheck victims, for example, while their own State takes those people to court.
Perhaps the biggest ever-present danger in public management is that the structures run away and start to serve themselves, rather than the people who created and require them. In its own unexpected way, Meghan’s troubled times are a reminder of that.
Gavan Reilly is the Political Correspondent for Virgin Media News and the Political Columnist for the Meath Chronicle - Read his full column in the paper every Tuesday.