The Dubliner does politics

We’ve surveyed the media here before – as well as the ubiquitous Irish Times and The Guardian, my Cedar Lounge colleagues have done Magill and Hot Press. No doubt one of these publications will return the favour in due course. One magazine we’ve never bothered with in the past is The Dubliner, probably because it rarely bothers with the exciting stuff we deal with here (you know: the usual diet of leftism, Hawkwind, HP Lovecraft, Cradle of Filth), usually confining itself to eating and drinking, music, consumerism, and other fun stuff to do in Dublin. It’s also terribly middle-class, affluent Ireland, Celtic Tiger and all that, so we’d probably want to pretend that we’d never find anything to read in it. It seems the magazine has been branching out recently though, into a little bit of philosophy, literature, and other worthy pursuits. The most recent edition is a politics special, which, if you ask me, is a rather transparent attempt by the editors to get it featured on Ireland’s premier political web log.

They’re a modest bunch at The Dubliner – its web site refers to the magazine as “the best city magazine in Ireland today”, which is a curiously qualified claim. If you’re going to big yourself up, why not call yourself the best magazine in Ireland – it’s not as if The Phoenix or Irish Tatler are in a very strong position to dispute such a claim. Maybe through fear of offending such august organs they have restricted themselves to claiming supremacy in the field of the “city magazine” – this at least shows they’re confident they have the edge on the current throwaway version of In Dublin, if not its former incarnations. I’m not aware of any magazines devoted to life in any of our other cities, so it’s possible that one of them hosts the paragon of the Irish city magazine.

The centrepiece of the special edition is a feature on 29 first-time candidates running in Dublin constituencies. A spot of brunch in ely wine bar and the chance of a little publicity was enough to draw this fairly wide-ranging cohort of candidates together for a photocall and a few superficial questions. It’s a neat way of tying the politics theme into the sort of editorial The Dubliner’s readers will expect: up-and-coming politicians instead of the up-and-coming designers, actors, or street drinkers of previous editions. It also sidesteps the politicians whose faces we see every day in our newspapers and on television.

Having gathered this bunch together, The Dubliner chose to limit the inquisition to a written survey of rather superficial questions, e.g.

Have you ever smoked cannabis?

Have you had sex with more than 10 people?

Are you in favour of gay marriage?

How many drinks does it take to get you drunk?

Do you believe in God?

Who is the best looking Irish politician?

Reynard’s or Lillie’s?

Some of these are not trivial issues (see my forthcoming piece on cultural hegemony, negotiated spaces, and the VIP areas of Dublin nightclubs), but the survey format ensures that nothing interesting is revealed, apart from the fact that five pints is the average volume of alcohol required to inebriate a first-time candidate. The candidates featured range from left-wing independents to Fine Gael and Progressive Democrat candidates, but the format chosen couldn’t help but give the impression that all candidates were essentially the same – well-meaning people just looking for a chance to improve the lot of their constituents. No doubt this is largely true, but the real political differences between the candidates and their parties were obviously not considered a matter of material interest to The Dubliner’s readers.

This is all very well, and I certainly don’t expect The Dubliner to alienate its readers by eliciting turgid ideological rants from the interviewees, but perhaps they could have chosen to probe a little deeper on issues of likely interest to this young, middle-class, probably broadly liberal readership – a more indepth enquiry on on gay marriage or legalisation of drugs could have replaced the questions on alcohol capacity and number of sexual conquests. They might even have asked about the candidate’s – gasp – overall world view. Still, I don’t blame the magazine for sticking to its editorial line, and the level of accuracy and political analysis was still superior to that of Magill.

Elsewhere, Helen Lucy Burke reviews Town Bar and Grill in company with Tony Gregory, four prominent “anti-war mongers” (John Gormley, Roger Cole, Richard Boyd-Barrett and Aengus Ó Snodaigh) are asked how they would deal with Zimbabwe, Burma or North Korea, and editor Trevor White describes his experience at the Marxism 2007 conference, where he reckons he and David McWilliams were the only two “good southside boys” (some mistake surely?). This last piece contains the nearest thing to a straightforward statement of political views in the whole issue:

That conference was a credit to democracy, which has always been tolerant of dissent. Here, people are encouraged to express contrary views, and the media demand new perspectives all the time. In a Marxist society, such debate would, of course, be verboten.

This may be rather tendentious (note the “of course”), but at least it represents a viewpoint, however poorly thought-out. The issue as a whole could have done with a few more gasbags like Trevor White shooting their mouths off on the big picture of politics, democracy, life, the universe and everything.

On the other hand, you may want to buy it to read the many different reasons why more than half of the people in the monthly vox pop section answered “Michael McDowell” to the question, “If you could crucify one politician this Good Friday, who would it be?”