Not so. We seem to prefer a scandal, a well-timed GOTCHA!

And once we’ve shared our outrage at the seedy, shabby nature of a backroom deal, we roll over, ignoring injustices playing out on a national scale, and occurring on a daily basis, and go back to sleep.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I woke up last Saturday to Ryan Tubridy’s face plastered on every single newspaper in the country. Could you?

That’s what I’d like to know this week. I’d like to know if anyone else felt as misrepresented as I did.

Ryan’s voice had been silenced the day before, on the Friday following the revelations, and I for one, missed it. I like him on the radio; I enjoy his chat, humour, and intelligence. He is also just a single person, an individual with thoughts and feelings, strengths and foibles.

No one person deserves to be hung out to dry as he has been unless they have done something truly, deeply, incomprehensibly heinous.

But last Saturday, having missed the timbre of his voice the day before, I couldn’t quite miss him because it seemed like every radio show was devoted to the man.

Listening to the panel on the Brendan O’Connor show you’d be forgiven for thinking we were a nation absolutely obsessed with one topic: the hidden payments made by RTÉ to our once-beloved golden boy.

But are we really that obsessed? Or, is the media telling us we were?

I find the RTÉ story compelling, sure. Certainly, I feel sorry for low-paid researchers and journalists, knowing how hard they work.

I feel annoyed that a few stupid decisions led to the public being misled. I wonder about Tubs. Could he maybe not have known? He admitted to not asking questions but maybe he assumed the discrepancy was above board and a matter for his accountant or agent? Or maybe he’s an egotist who has let us all down? At this point, I simply don’t know. Nor do I care, in the grand scheme of things.

I certainly don’t need the front page coverage, the back-to back radio shows, or words like ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘devastating’ being bandied about all weekend and continuing into the week.

Do you?

Yes, it’s disappointing if our national broadcaster isn’t doing what it should be doing. At most, it is unethical and unjust and should be remedied. If Tubridy knew what was happening, his persona is shattered. Grand, let’s move on. If he didn’t know, well then, he can carry on as before and pay more attention to his finances.

An investigation is underway. That should be the end of it.

I like to imagine a world in which a story catching our national attention is deserving of that attention.

To give one example, a Saturday morning where every paper leads with the regular announcement that our privileged little country chooses to spend the least money on education in the OECD, resulting in our most vulnerable children being ignored in the system.

I would then like the public-backed media to demand a full investigation into our State finances. How is it that a rich country with high taxes can’t afford to build the schools we need? How is it that children are being let down so badly, especially children with intellectual and additional needs?

And why is it that as a country we react so viciously to corruption, generally speaking, and yet have the reaction of a corpse to gross and ongoing ineptitude, deeply felt social injustices, and neglect?

Why do we never have the sustained interest, the investigations, and the coordinated follow-up that GOTCHA moments receive?

When we uncover a real injustice that affects ordinary people, what do we do? We have a Prime Time episode, follow it up with a respectful but brief flurry of concern. We encourage embattled parents to come on and beg for basic dignity in their lives. Livelive is red hot with outrage for an hour or so. And then we forget about it.

 We don’t come to a standstill like we are now over Ryan Tubridy’s misrepresented pay cheque. Why is that? Is it because we are warped by the media or is the media just giving us what we want: a juicy story; a Shakespearean-type fall from grace; a melodramatic soap opera ending.

What makes one story spark our interest and another fade immediately to embers? Is it all about the flavour of the story? 

We feel we know Ryan Tubridy and so, we feel slighted, duped. But we know our ministers too and let them get away with under-spending and mis-spending in far more damaging and unchecked ways.

Is it something to do with the science of empathy? They say that one person dying is a tragedy and a million people dying is a statistic. That might have relevance here but how depressing when you consider how self-destructive it is.

I mean, RTÉ may have misspent a few hundred thousand of taxpayer money on Tubs and lied about it. Yes, that is unacceptable. But how much is the State misspending or not spending on our transport system, our health system, and our education system? How many ordinary people are affected by these decisions every single day?

Where is the perspective?

Why was my 73-year-old mum left for days on end on a trolley in CUH? Why is it that I have to send my children to a school without a yard or a hall or adequate educational resources?

Why is it that so many people, including small children, don’t have homes?

Our State seems to steal from us every day in so many painful ways but we’d rather focus on a single scandal relating to an already overpaid celebrity. The governance of RTÉ is important, yes. But we should be far more interested in sorting out the governance of our more significant, truly life-altering public services.

As I see it, the hullabaloo over Tubridy is a national embarrassment. The measure of any nation is in how it treats its most vulnerable. We have very serious life-altering work to do before we should feel entitled to focus on a single, comparably trivial topic like Ryan Tubridy’s bank balance.