KFOP/ED

From the pages of the Christmas edition of the Irish Echo comes one of the few op/ed pieces I get to do (below the fold), and it’s a critical look at the what the coverage of Katy French’s death means for Ireland. Far from being immune to the whole media mania that has surrounded it in Ireland, the Irish in Australia have been busy talking about it, about her, and have been busy asking the same question as everyone back home: Who is (was) Katy French?

If you were returning to Ireland after a lengthy absence, you’d have been baffled by the outpouring of grief seen in the national papers. And if you’ve been watching it from afar, as I have, you might be forced to think deeply about your country.

And if said news emerges at the same time as does the film version of PS: I Love You, forcing you, as a journalist, to read PS: I Love You and make arrangements to go to a preview screening to compare the two (I never made it to the screening, as it happens), and considering that those two wrongs most certainly don’t make a right, you might consider Ireland in a darker light than ever before.

BY THE WAY: For an article in this issue, I jumped out of a perfectly good aeroplane. At the end of the op/ed there’s a login for the paper that lasts until the end of December. Check out page 15 to see my graceful groundward glide.

If you’ve been out of Ireland for more than, say, a year, the name Katy French won’t mean much to you.
Even if you were in Ireland, it might not mean much. In fact, for a large portion of the population, it meant nothing at all until her name was suddenly plastered all over the nation’s papers last week as she hovered near death in a Meath hospital.
In baldest terms, French was one of three young people to die in Ireland last week in cocaine-related deaths, sparking exposees of a cocaine epidemic among Ireland’s young, affluent middle class.
The other two, both young men in their early twenties, received comparatively scant media attention.
Kevin Doyle was celebrating getting the all-clear from testicular cancer when cocaine left him in a sudden coma, making his death a true tragedy.
But he was, in terms of callous newsworthiness, a nobody.
Katy French, however, who collapsed in a coma at a friend’s party and died days later in a Navan hospital, was a media darling.
Aged just 24, French’s Wicklow funeral was standing-room only, attended by members of Ireland’s rugby team, Dublin’s social ‘elite’, and even, controversially, the Taoiseach’s aide-de-camp.
A tribute website set up by an admirer (unknown to the deceased) has been viewed by more than 90,000 people, and her death made international headlines and graced the front page of every Irish newspaper.
The Irish Independent devoted 11 pages to Katy French-related news, elevating her to the status of “Ireland’s Diana”; attacking her detractors, and wringing hands over the shock of Ireland’s widespread coke habit.
The media whirlwind caused by her death was exceptional, given that as the storm blew itself out last weekend, plenty of people in Ireland were still asking themselves: “Who is Katy French?”.
The appropriate counter-questions are: Don’t you read Image magazine? What about VIP? Because Katy was, to newspaper picture editors and those who patrol the velvet rope, a VERY important person.
An in-demand model, a self-styled socialite, and someone willing to go public on everything from her sexual preferences to her drug habits, Katy French was the go-to girl for product launches.
She was the pretty rent-a-celebrity who delivered the most bang for your buck if you needed to glam up an event or product launch but couldn’t find a genuine famous person.
Confident to the point of self-parody, she knew well that to make a living from Ireland’s teeny model scene, she had to promote herself to the nth degree, refuse no offer of publicity and do it all with a smile.
She admitted that her 24th birthday party (just a week before her death) was as much an exercise in PR as anything, labelling it a ‘media event’
In the space of a year, she leapfrogged the likes of former Miss World Rosanna Davison and Glenda Gilson (best known as Brian O’Driscoll’s ex) to become Ireland’s most-photographed person.
Rising from obscurity to ubiquity in the blink of an eye, to the naysayers she exemplified the new shallowness of Irish society.
Ms French was famous for being famous, all of a sudden, and became an instant idol.
That is the reason for both the blanket media coverage she received and the questions from many people over whether or not it was justified.
While the news pages stuck to the facts, the opinion pages got stuck into her juicy past, and each other. She was vilified and beatified on facing pages.
As she lay dying, her media-facilitated break-up with a well-known restaurateur got an airing.
Her denial of cocaine use was perfect column fodder, with the subsequent apology, clarification and claim that it was all behind her. Then, when Katy’s antics weren’t enough to fill space, the papers turned on each other, criticising one another’s coverage of Ireland’s ‘candle in the wind’.
Some, sensibly, used the opportunity to highlight the extent of Ireland’s cocaine habit and call for action. But after her funeral, an eerie silence, leaving people wondering what all the fuss had been about.
The well of stories had run dry.
The tale of Katy French should be a cautionary one, a modern moral parable along the lines of Icarus, who flew too close to the bright light and got burned.
She lived the high life, and died young from excess.
But by putting her on a pedestal, by brushing the fact that she was a flag-bearer for hedonism and unfettered commercialism, and most of all, by sending a government representative to the funeral of a high-profile drug user, Ireland may have written a different epitaph.
“Here lies our old value system”, it might say. “The one where we praised the good deeds of worthy people with fibre and purpose and a sense of the common good.
“We have a new one now. We got it in Brown Thomas. It’s, like, way cooler.”

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