Connell Fanning and Marija Laugalyte
Ryan Tubridy has become the lightning rod for the flashes of anger that swirl around any prominent personality today. That makes it difficult to have a reasonable debate, to see through what Virginia Woolf called “the red light of emotions” to “the white light of truth”.
The more we submerge ourselves in anger rather than reason, the less we can observe how we think and how we relate to others. As always, such episodes provide opportunities for taking stock of the concepts through which we are viewing a situation. We need to not waste such opportunities since, ultimately, we need to attend to how we ourselves are making sense of the world because it has consequences for the world we make for ourselves.
The situation in which Ryan Tubridy now finds himself is one where the RTÉ decision makers seem reluctant to risk the adverse public reaction to returning him to the airways. This is despite an early (1 July 2023) Sunday World poll showing that 73% of respondents blamed ‘the RTE executive as a whole’ as against 12% blaming the former director general and 7% blaming Ryan Tubridy.
Whatever about his personal failings in this matter, there is no case for making Ryan Tubridy responsible for the extensive governance failure at RTE and for the long-term organisational culture underlying it, both of which are ultimately the responsibility of the board of directors and the relevant government ministers and department.
In the world of social media today, where people have come to feel that they can exercise some personal power by the so called ‘cancelling’ of others, it is all too easy to miss the point of the role of forgiveness in human affairs. Hannah Arendt is one thinker who is good on this matter.
What Arendt has to say on the role of forgiveness is a useful way of thinking about the current situation facing Ryan Tubridy and the question of whether he should be allowed to return to the airwaves, that is, whether he should be forgiven his perceived transgressions, none of which seem to involve any criminality. Further, we might add that Ryan Tubridy is certainly not the only person who could be considered to be overpaid in Ireland today.
Arendt observed that the “the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth” and pointed out that the “fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense”. The implication of what she says is that we should bring the concept of ‘forgiveness’ into our daily living as a tool for working with.
The current puritanism, however, seems less interested in forgiveness than in sending someone to hell for all time, with the result that we all may be the poorer for it. As Arendt argues, “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences for what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magical formula to break the spell.” Unforgiveness is not good for society.
It is noteworthy that Ryan Tubridy has acknowledged a failure of judgement on his part. That is something many find hard to do or lack the self-awareness for it. As La Rochefoucauld observed: “Everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement.” Tubridy is to be acknowledged for this awareness, which bodes well for the possibility of his learning from this experience, which in turn may benefit others. As Arendt observed, all genuine thinking is based on personal experience. It is crucial, therefore, to allow for this possibility in a world where people have the capacity for new beginnings, which is desirable although the outcome is not predictable or foreseeable.
Arendt elaborated on the role of forgiveness in relating to others in the realm of human affairs when she said that “…trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing [people] from what they have done unknowingly.”
This release through forgiveness points to the central role of forgiveness for human activity. Otherwise, as Arendt notes, “The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that the attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly”.
The question, therefore, in relation to Ryan Tubridy – one individual in a situation where there is plenty of responsibilities for everyone involved over many years to carry – is how to put an end to this element of the RTE debacle and allow for a new beginning, that is, to resolve the matter of his returning to air in a fair and satisfactory way.
Arendt made the point that forgiveness instead of vengeance is as important for the forgivers as for the transgressors: “Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and acts unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it, and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven”. There is, in other words, a mutual benefit as Arendt says: “The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.”
The image of ‘relentless automatism’ is enough to prompt us to think, rather than react, and look for a way beyond stuckness. Forgiveness would allow Tubridy the possibility of doing something new and good as opposed to having him locked in the prison of cancellation forever.
The question now arising is: can somebody find a way beyond the heat of the moment for Ryan Tubridy to make amends appropriate for his transgression — such as his promise to return the ‘additional monies’ paid by RTÉ — so that he can return to work and not be unforgiven and banished forever?
