The Sunday Times

In Walter Benjamin's celebrated formulation, the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics. In Ireland this began not with the choreographed but futile appearances of Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts in the 1930s, or the clumsy propagandising practised by the Stickies, but with the manipulation of Garret FitzGerald's image that made him electable in the 1980s. Not that FitzGerald or his handlers were fascist, but by giving marketing and image manipulation privilege over policy making they began the aestheticisation of Irish politics. More than ever, politics became a dramatic narrative, and with a pliable media resourcing rolling news at the expense of investigative reporting, image and perception became everything. Ian Ritchie's Spire of Light is another artefact of that process, appropriately reaching completion in a week in which Ireland's hospital service suffered unprecedented crisis.