A last some decent Journalism

on todays Independent.ie a bit long but well worth a read!

What have we become?
"I see great things ahead for you young O'Gara," says the stranger. "You will play for Ireland and the Lions. You will win three Triple Crowns with Ireland and a European Cup, a competition which has not yet been invented, with Munster. You will become one of the most popular sportsmen in the country and make a number of cheesy but lucrative advertisements. And, while we're at it, your friend Peter Stringer can be scrum half for all those triumphs."

"Cool," says O'Gara, "But I know this story. Where's the catch? Don't I have to sign over my soul or something?" The Devil shakes his head. "That is soooo last century, dude. We do these things differently now. All you have to do is let your private life become public property. Where's the harm in that?" Where indeed? Maybe young O'Gara would have signed up under those conditions, confident that nothing he would ever do off the pitch would interest the general public.

Unfortunately, as is usual in morality tales of this ilk, the Devil would have had the last laugh. Wonderful and all as the Irish out half's career has been, at this moment he must be wondering if it's all been worth it. A man who has given huge pleasure to the sports fans of this country has been shamefully hounded to the point where he has been become an object of pity rather than admiration. And, to some extent, we are all guilty.

Let's dispense with the hypocrisy. We can not blame the French media for this one. Months ago I heard that tabloid newspapers based in this country were sniffing around O'Gara's private life. In fact I planned to write a column about this kind of intrusion back then. But I didn't, for fear of being accused of doing the very kind of thing the Irish media have been at over the past week, airing the allegations under the guise of concern.

Because, unless there are a lot of undeclared L'Equipe readers out there, the precise nature of O'Gara's alleged difficulties would have remained mysterious in this country had the Irish papers not repeated them. The relief was palpable. Your newspapers could give you the gossip by pretending they were merely repeating the outrageous calumnies perpetrated by the cheese-eating slander monkeys. It was the kind of subterfuge a five-year-old could see through.

I've met Ronan O'Gara a couple of times. I've also met his father, a man from Collooney and a Sligo Rovers fan who has bequeathed to his son a Sligo accent unshakeable by Cork birth and education. For these parochial reasons I've always taken a special interest in O'Gara Junior (Look, Sligo is a small and largely unsuccessful county, we'll take our heroes where we can get them).

His emergence onto the Irish team coincided almost exactly with our journey out of the doldrums in which we had languished from the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s. He seemed, in many ways, emblematic of the way in which Munster became the country's first mass appeal rugby team. His very appearance suggested the kind of innocence which lay at the heart of the province's foreign adventures.

That innocence is no more. Ronan O'Gara has become yet another victim of the contemporary notion that everyone's business is everyone else's business. A society which seems to think that soap operas are in some way real has now developed the notion that real people can be treated as though they were soap opera characters.

I'm not even going to speculate about whether the O'Gara rumours are true or not. Because it's none of my ****ing business. And it's none of your's either. And neither are any of the other rumours which have been floating around about well-known Irish sportsmen. I don't care if A is gay, if B went berserk and smashed up his local pub, if C switched counties because he was having an affair, if D was banging his clubmate's wife, if E's loss of form is due to a drink problem. Honestly I don't.

I am interested in A, B, C, D and E because of what they do on the pitch. Their lives don't interest me because I have one of my own. Which is more than you can say for the anonymous hit-and-run internet merchants who post rumours and allegations on their miserable blogs and websites as though the players involved were figures in just one more reality television show.

At some stage we seem to have lost sight of the fact that sportsmen are human beings. Look at the way professional soccer players are treated. Every two-bit columnist and pub bore feels free to berate David and Victoria Beckham for their "showbiz marriage" and suggest that the couple have stayed together for the sake of their public image. I'm always intrigued as to where these great investigators get their information. Perhaps they're just employing their profound knowledge of human psychology, the kind gleaned from slumping on the couch watching Big Brother for several hours on the end.

It is a media commonplace too that many soccer WAGs are just in it for the money and prestige. Again, how do the journalists who write this prurient rubbish come by their knowledge? Who knows the real story of anyone else's marriage? Who knows what the footballer and the WAG are like when they get home, close the door and sigh with relief at the absence of the cameras? Ronan O'Gara's plight has attracted a lot of sympathy because he is one of our own. But Wayne Rooney and Coleen McLoughlin, a woman who can't buy a handbag without attracting some derogatory comment, are no less entitled to their privacy.

Back in the 18th century the keepers of mental asylums used to charge a few bob to members of the public who wanted to gawp at the unfortunate lunatics. We're beyond that these days. The tabloids, and increasingly the broadsheets, charge us a few bob and let us gawp at the celebrities. This is the modern-day freak show and unfortunately sportsmen, and sportswomen -- though not nearly as often -- have been caught up in it.

Some people would have you believe that this obsession with the intimate minutiae of other people's lives is merely the expression of a natural and healthy human hunger for gossip. But, in a week when some posh bimbo appeared on ITV to offer the opinion that there's no difference between call girls and footballers' wives, it might be time to consider the more sinister implications of the way we treat our public figures.

I have a confession to make. When I was 20 I emigrated to England and worked with a news agency which supplied stories to the British tabloid press. I worked there for a week. Why such a short time? Well, the first six days were your normal round of car crashes, political resignations and court cases. But on the seventh day I was dispatched to Islington with a photographer, our mission to wait outside the home of a popular soap star of the time (OK then, Nick Berry, Wicksy from Eastenders and later Constable something or other in Heartbeat) in an effort to catch him bringing a woman home. We hung around in the shadows for half an hour at which point something snapped and I told the photographer I was going for a pint. Thus ended a promising career in the gutter press.

The reason I'm telling you this story is that even a week in that environment led me to draw a surprising conclusion. The various hacks and snappers chasing down the London celebs weren't just doing it because it was a job. In many cases they harboured a genuine animus against the pop stars, soap actors and footballers who were their quarry. It makes sense really. You couldn't do a job like that unless you were personally driven. And the driving force is jealousy, the kind of jealousy which fuels hatred.

There is nothing harmless about treating people the way Ronan O'Gara and his wife have been treated in the past week. There is a real hatred there and a desire to see the man cut down to size.

But it's not just the papers, if you've bought one of those papers or gossiped about the rumours in the pub then you're

part of the problem too. Because the media doesn't cover things for pure pig iron's sake. The excuse of every sleazy tabloid is that they're giving the public what they want. And maybe that's true.

It's sad. I can't help thinking that today there are talented 16-year-olds kicking around on the nation's pitches, teenagers who will one day become national heroes by making the most of their God-given gifts, who don't realise the danger they will be putting themselves in. Just by scoring that vital goal, try or point, they may be giving away any right to a private life. That is an unacceptable position to put anyone in.

I wish Ronan O'Gara and his family well. And it would be nice to think that this kind of thing won't happen again. Nice but foolish. I'm writing this column from Longford where the local paper, the Longford Leader, has an editorial bemoaning the behaviour of newspapers -- Irish newspapers, not French ones -- which have hounded the family of a woman recently murdered in the town. Even at the funeral the family could not be left in peace.

What have we become?