Speaking Out, Finally

By Richard Delevan

FOR a country infamous for its silver-tongued, Blarney Stone-enhanced artists, public speaking is long dead and buried in Ireland. For 50 years there hasn’t been a public space dedicated to the practice.

Dublin’s modern heirs to Cicero, Aiahokatubbee the Choctaw, Patrick Henry, Lincoln, O’Connell, Connolly, King and JFK descended on Temple Bar this past Sunday in an attempt to revive the lost art.

The idea is modeled on Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, one of the world’s great symbols of the rough-and-tumble of democracy. Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and George Orwell all spoke there in their day, though now it’s more of a tourist trap attracting curious foreigners and curiouser speakers so close to the fringe of politics they may fall off.

Rossa O Snodaigh, trad musician with the band Kila and brother of Sinn Fein Dail (Parliament) member for Dublin South Central Aengus, had been campaigning for almost 10 years to bring back a sort of speaker’s corner to Dublin. It had been missing, he said, since the last place for public oratory, Elvery’s Corner near the GPO, went by the wayside back in the 1950s.

“I tried to get one set up in St. Stephen’s Green, and then outside the Central Bank,” he told The Irish Times. “Finally, Temple Bar Properties succumbed to my advances and gave us this space.”

So now, from noon till 4 p.m. each Sunday, O Snodaigh has got his spot.

Amid the early drinkers, the pools of sick from the night before, the hen nights (two-or-three-day parties of a dozen or so women from Essex in England wearing matching T-shirts, sex toys or costumes to usher a blushing bride into married life), the toneless symphony of democracy will be heard. Or at least, that’s the plan.

But if the debut performances were anything to go by, Demosthenes can rest easy in his championship status.

O Snodaigh was hopeful for his project. “There are voices out there that aren’t being listened to. People might have a different opinion if they heard the other side. Now they have the chance,” he said.

Sadly, it was hardly a sort of raucous debate, unless you count “the other side” as being fellow comrades who think you’re missing the finer points of Marxist-Leninist thinking on nationalization of industries, or fellow ever-students who think you’re not radical enough in demanding bigger student grants.

Artist Robert Ballagh was on hand to speak at length in favor of – wait for it – more rights for artists. A number of antiwar veterans were out in force, led by Richard Boyd Barrett, spouting the usual venomous anti-American bile to nods from the dozens assembled.

Another of his ilk, Sorcha Fox, after protesting the U.S. use of Shannon Airport in song with a verse called the “Shannon Colleens,” told the Irish Independent, “People largely have no voice and this gives them the opportunity to just get up and say something, even if only for two minutes.”

It will be interesting to see if the quality is much improved in coming weeks, because it’s a shame that public speaking has been allowed to decline so far so fast.

Ireland has for a long time been notable for an absence of anything exciting in public discourse, treading the long road to the blow-dried, over-consulted, content-free nonsense you can find most days on C-SPAN.

In the Dail, while last week’s debate on the citizenship referendum prompted some of the more impassioned speeches in recent memory, they were still, for the most part, forgettable.

Anyone who has seen that past master of doublespeak gobbledygook Bertie Ahern holding forth knows that President George W. is more likely to come up with a modern Gettysburg Address – and that’s saying something.

The only people in Irish public life, sadly, who seem able to manage a compelling and coherent speech are on the fringe, like the rabidly anti-American Michael D. Higgins or Senator David Norris.

There’s more at stake, sadly, than a quaint regard for history here. Anyone who has ever spent time doing public speaking, especially in front of a mixed or hostile crowd, will tell you it’s one of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences you can have in a lifetime.

It’s the training ground of health democracy. You’ve got your ideas, they’ve got their ideas, but instead of chanting at each other with placards held high festooned with meaningless slogans like “Bush = Hitler” speakers get their time. And while heckling is not only tolerated, but positively encouraged, it’s meant to test and tease the speaker – not deprive them of their chance.

That kind of rough-and-tumble can’t be replicated in cyberspace, and it can’t be distilled into 30-second campaign adverts. 

Back in Temple Bar, the difficulty is that the unchallenged lunatic fringe come through this experience thinking that disagreeing on the finer points is fine, but on the larger issues there can be no real debate. 

George Bush is Satan. Israel should be driven into the sea. All Arabs are victims. Terrorism is the fault of the west.

And ultimately, it leads to a kind of sham free speech. When Bush met with Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair near Belfast while “major combat operations” were underway last spring, anti-war protestors gathered for their march as close as they could get to the meeting site.

When someone had the audacity to hold up an American flag not to burn it but to shout in favor of liberating Iraq, he had to be protected by police from a crowd that instantly turned ugly. 

Whatever you think about the war, the spectacle of a crowd demanding that its democratic rights to speak in protest be respected instantly rounding on someone with an opposed view was startling.

So it would be a healthy thing, I think, if the Temple Bar Speaker’s Corner took off, so long as some people with opposing views and not of the socialist workers’ Amen corner were persuaded to take part.

Actually having to prune your speech into something like an argument to persuade other people is a skill that isn’t taught these days, but a vital skill for people to have in a healthy democracy. If you’ve ever caught the British House of Commons, especially Prime Minister’s Questions, you’ll know what I’m talking about. These people are sharp, but they’re going out of style.

It would be nice to see the government do its part as well, not with any sort of grant, but by giving the speakers a break from the draconian defamation laws that hang over any kind of public discussion in Ireland like a shroud.

It’s a far cry from the Hyde Park version of Speaker’s Corner, where the great unwashed can hold forth on any topic they like, so long as they don’t defame or slander the Queen. Everything else is fair game.

The idea of even a small bubble where fear of a lawsuit isn’t present is unlikely to come to pass, however. One of the obstacles that Rossa O Snodaigh faced when he looked into having it in Stephen’s Green is some archaic legislation that actually makes it illegal to talk about religion or politics in the park.

Fortunately for Dublin, he didn’t let that stop him from trying. It may take a generation to get people back into the habit, but if O Snodaigh has his way the long line of great orators that mark a healthy democracy has life in it yet.